Say It in Hebrew

“Mah ha-mehr-KHAK?”
“What is the distance?”

Sunday morning, we set out for Caesarea. We had gone as far as the Rehovot train station when we encountered the first obstacle.

“Two for Caesarea, please,” J. told the ticket teller. She gave him a blank look.

“Eifo?” she mouthed through the glass, without turning on the microphone.

J. leaned in toward the microphone. “Caesarea. Kay-zar-eeyah? See-sir-eyah?”

She glared at him. “En!” (“Doesn’t exist!”)

“Try it in Russian,” I urged him. She glared at me, and slid a timetable under the window.

We hunted for Caesarea in Hebrew about as effectively as tourists trying to find “Kung Pao Chicken” on a takeout menu written in Mandarin. I grabbed a pen and triumphantly spelled out, “CAESAREA” (not in Hebrew) on top of the timetable, and slid it back. Then I realized how ridiculous this was.

The ticket teller shrugged, looked away, and twirled a strand of hair in studied nonchalance. Our train was leaving in five minutes (evidently, to fall off the map), and she could not have cared less. We stood there, frustrated, without a guidebook or Hebrew dictionary.

Finally, she looked back at us with a glimmer of recognition. “Pardes-Hanna?”

“Yes,” I said, suddenly remembering that this was the other half of all the train-station announcements for Caesarea.

“Two, and return,” J. added.

The ticket teller sighed and punched at her keyboard, then flipped the tickets toward us, under the window.

We ran for the train.

The route north to Caesarea-Pardes Hanna winds through Tel Aviv, Netanya (home of Israel’s IKEA), and farther up the coastline, for about an hour. At the Netanya stop, the soldiers sitting across the aisle from us snickered at some remarkably young soldiers struggling from the train with their gear. One kid was so loaded with Honda-sized backpacks that he threatened to fall over backwards.

“Hamesh kilo?” one of the soldiers guessed. “Five kilos?”

“Yalla, sheva,” another replied. “C’mon, more like seven.”

When the girls got out with their own stuff with us at Caesarea–Pardes Hanna, they looked less amused. They joined the other soldiers camped out, waiting, and collapsed with cigarettes and cell phones, while we looked around for ruins in vain.

“There’s no old city,” I told my husband.
“Hmm,” he replied.

J. asked the security guard at the entrance when the next bus to Caesaria was. The guard looked thoughtful, and posed the question to other passengers who’d gotten off with us. The consensus was twenty minutes.

In twenty minutes, Bus #9 came.
“To the old city of Caesarea?” J. asked the driver, who nodded. “To the tourist area?”
We got on.
Another tourist, a Hebrew-speaking girl, boarded after us. As the bus lurched off toward unknown points, the driver called the girl over and spoke to her. She pushed down the aisle toward us.

“You have to change buses in Or Akiva,” she said. “Bus #76 goes to Caesarea. I’m going there, too.”

It took about ten minutes on a highway to get to Or Akiva; or, more specifically, a roundabout behind what appeared to be the main business area in Or Akiva. We and the tourist, who was carrying a bag with diving boots and a massive waist pack, got off and stood at the bus stop for Bus #76. Buses #9, #74, and #76 all merrily circled the roundabout a dozen times, but Bus #76 did not appear. J. and I stood in the shade of a palm tree, hopping around every now and then to avoid the red ants underfoot. After twenty minutes, the other tourist snapped open her cell phone and called someone to inquire about Bus #76.

“Ten minutes,” she told us.
“If it’s not here by noon,” I confided to my husband, “I may have to head over there.” I pointed to a “Tel Burger” sign across the roundabout. We had now spent an hour and a half trying to get to the old city, and breakfast seemed a dim, oatmealy memory. When it occurred to me to pack snacks for the trip, five minutes before leaving the house, the only thing in our cupboards that was suitable for taking was a package of pine nuts…which I had eaten while standing at the train station. J. declined, saying he preferred them toasted. I considered telling him that, in a short time, we would be toasted, so the difference in taste would be beside the point, but restrained myself.

Twenty minutes later, Bus #76 appeared. We, the other tourist, and a rotund seasoned and sun-weathered gentleman wearing Mario-Batali-style plastic orange clogs, were the only ones to get on. Nevertheless, the bus driver sat there, staring out the window, for another minute after we all boarded. We wondered if we had stumbled into a Beckett play, as the bus sat and idled…for no one.

The tourist, with short cropped hair and no-nonsense cargo pants, was no shrinking violet. She stood up and spoke angrily to the driver. One did not need to be fluent in Hebrew in order to understand what she was telling him. I was thinking more or less the same thing: “Are you nuts?! Do you know how long we’ve been waiting here, frying? We are clearly the only people insane and unfortunate enough to attempt to travel to Caesarea by bus today, my friend, so you had better sit up and STEP ON IT while the sun is still shining.”

“You go, sister,” I thought.

The driver gaped at her, squeezed the door shut with a rubbery squeak, and the bus shot off down the dusty road. Ninety seconds later, we emerged in Caesarea.

“That’s all?” I asked, watching the bus turn a corner and disappear. “All this time, we were just down the road?”

We purchased tickets and walked through an ancient arch toward the old city. At last! Phoenician ruins, Roman aqueducts, and Byzantine mosaics awaited us. We unfurled the map and searched feverishly for the shwarma stand.

In fact, the old city of Caesaria was a well-polished, quiet spot, like a pre-Christian Mediterranean Sea Ranch. Two beach clubs looked out on turquoise water, and, above one beach, a cafe hummed with Israeli elevator music. Over lunch, we looked at the National Park brochure for the site, part of which reads:

“Recommended Tours: Within the park one may choose walking tours varying from one hour to a whole day. Our suggestions are:
A. The short route (1-2 hours), which includes the sites numbered 1, 3, 4, 7, 8.
B. A 2-3 hour route, which includes sites 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 16.
C. The comprehensive route (4-6 hours), which includes sites 1-17.”

“Let’s do C,” my husband suggested.
I forked a pile of salad and tried to think serene thoughts while gazing at the sea. Apparently, the word “comprehensive” has huge appeal for mathematicians; why, precisely, escapes me. To humanities students, it means a week-long exam, unabridged and heavily-annotated copies of Paradise Lost, and thirty-page papers.

Moreover, the bird’s-eye map view of Caesarea bears a striking resemblance the entire southern U.S. border. “Are you suggesting we walk from Galveston to Miami?” I asked.
“What?” J. said.

The brochure noted, “The park extends from the Roman theatre in the south to the Crusader city in the north. It includes the Byzantine square, the Herodian amphitheatre, promontory palace, bathhouse, a network of streets, and more.”

The “more” part worried me.

We first walked past the Temple Platform, a podium built during Herod’s time, dedicated to Roma and Augustus. A few lonely columns dotted the temple, and remains of a fountain hung to one wall, partly buried behind grass and reeds. Past the Temple Platform, a sign pointed to the “Artists’ Quarter”, a semicircle of shops offering artisan wine, jewelry, woven art, and lithographs. “Wine and cheese tastings!” read a sign nearby in English.

“Really? Herod had wine and cheese tastings?” I asked. “What kind of revisionist history is this?” In this part of Caesarea, historical accuracy seemed to have taken a backseat to marketing.

Elsewhere, however (not including the gift shop), historical accuracy thrived. The Herodian Amphitheatre, a 250-meter long, 50-meter wide track stretched out in stark red dirt along the shore, unadorned by anything but a modern-day sculpture of a horse-drawn chariot and a few signs. It could originally seat 10,000 spectators; however, it wasn’t the spectators who evoked my sympathy, but those who would have been serving as the entertainment on the hot sand. Above and behind the Amphitheatre lies the Bathhouse Complex, full of square mosaic-tiled rooms. Parts of it are covered by an iron canopy, where archaeologists are still excavating.

The National Park brochure describes how the Phoenicians created Caesarea during Persian rule of the area, from 586-332 B.C., on the shoreline of a bay. Herod governed the village of Caesarea beginning in 30 B.C., naming it for his patron…Octavian Augustus Caesar. Caesarea took ten years to build as a planned city, complete with a sophisticated road system, religious sites, areas for entertainment, and neighborhoods. In 10 or 9 B.C., the city held a festival to mark its completion. (Or perhaps, if they were really jazzed, they just partied from 10 to 9 B.C.) By 6 B.C., it was the thriving headquarters of the Roman government in Palestine. Caesarea flourished in part because of its high-level aqueduct and high groundwater level; during the third and fourth centuries A.D., its residents included Pagans and Samaritans, as well as Jews and Christians. The Apostle Paul was put on trial in Caesarea and subsequently exiled to Rome, where he was executed. (Any religion majors reading this? Maybe you can add some insight…)

The brochure notes that Caesarea was surrounded by a perimeter wall, toward the end of the sixth century A.D.; the wall is still massive, and its exactly-cut stones visible. When the Arabs conquered the city in 640 A.D., its citizens fled and with them went Caesarea’s political and economic significance. During the ninth century, when sea trade recovered, the city reemerged. In the twelfth century, the Crusaders and Louis IX respectively conquered Caesarea. Shortly after the French conquest, the Mamelukes claimed the city, destroyed it, and deserted it. In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman government resettled Bosnian refugees here.

Past the Amphitheatre, built during the Roman and Byzantine eras, the Promontory Palace features dark rock and a pool that overhangs the sea. French tourists clustered near a wall, taking photographs of each other, scarves flapping.

The very last item at this end of Caesaria is the theatre, a giant structure, with more than a dozen rows. According to the brochure, it is the most ancient of all theatres in Israel, and was built during Herod’s time. At the end of the Byzantine era, the theatre was converted into a castle. How exactly does one do this? All evidence of the castle seems to have vanished. The theatre was setting up for a show, and stagehands were running around, rigging lights and amplifiers.

We walked back to the more touristy parts, across the top of the bathhouse, late in the afternoon. Near the theatre, we had stopped for more water and ice cream, but even that did not do much to encourage my feet, when I looked at how far we still had to walk to return to the main area. My husband cited something from the brochure about the High-Level Aqueduct.

“Wow, it had a gradient of 20 centimeters for each kilometer, and reached Caesarea at about eight meters above sea level,” he noted, gazing at the arches.

I was occupied with trying to figure out how Caesarea’s residents navigated their city’s dust-slippery stone streets and stairways, as we plodded back, ’cause they sure as heck didn’t do it in my Naot equivalent of Birkenstocks. My feet looked like they belonged to someone who had spent the entire summer outdoors, and they were moving at a very slow rate.

“Coffee,” J. promised, and we eventually neared the harbor, where we’d seen another cafe, outdoors, under the gift shop (where the strangest gift was erasers shaped like Israel, stamped with a map of the country; we wondered if there was a black market for these things in, say, Syria).

In the cafe, the tourist from the bus showed up and looked as exhausted as we were. Earlier, we had seen her struggling to put on diving fins in the water, while trying not to grab on to her instructor for help. We nodded at her from behind menus, and she back at us, but, like strangers who have been through trauma together, preferred not to speak to one another.

We decided that we had seen enough of Caesarea for one day, and went out through the main gate, where the ticket teller informed us that the last bus leaving the city had departed at 3:30. (It was 4:30.)

“It’s only three kilometers back to the bus stop,” J. said hesitantly. I think that’s when I threw my shoe at a column (away from the preserved, historical part). Then we took off at seething, breakneck speed for the bus stop. In my head, I composed a vituperative letter to the Caesarea bus lines.

“Wow, you can walk really quickly when you want to!” my husband marvelled, trying to keep up.

We arrived back at the bus stop, and waited for another year, while buses of all sorts except ours zoomed past. Finally, a taxi appeared, and we sank into it. The driver listened to where we wanted to go (back to Caesarea-Pardes Hanna) and advised an alternative, tapping his watch.

“You will wait for another hour, at Pardes Hanna, for the train. Instead, you should go to Hadera; there will be a train in about thirty-five minutes; no problem,” he recommended.

“Same price?” J. asked.

“Same price!” the taxi driver waved his hand dismissively.

Someone, please put this man on the city council and give him the public and private transportation portfolio. He seems to be the only one who knows how to get around town.

Caesarea National Park brochure, Israel Nature and Parks Authority

“A-TIK.”
“Ancient.”

Rule No. 1 of Traveling: Even though the train station may be named “Caesaria”, this should in no way be taken to mean that the main tourist destination of Caesaria (the old city) is anywhere nearby.

Rule No. 2 of Traveling: Most tourists to Caesaria do not take the train.

Rule No. 3 of Traveling: Access from the Caesaria train station to the old city of Caesaria via public transportation is negligible, with the exception of the Bus #9 – Bus #76 link.

Rule No. 4 of Traveling: Bus #9 leaves from the Caesaria train station for the nearby town of Or Akiva once every hour. You will arrive five minutes after it leaves.

Rule No. 6 of Traveling: Bus #9 stops running at 3:30 pm.

Rule No. 7 of Traveling: Bus #76 does not really exist.

Rule No. 8 of Traveling: Parties committed to traveling to and from Caesaria may wish to absolve themselves of momentary fits of rage at the lack of public and private transportation options. Other parties may wish to look away patiently when the aforesaid party hurls her sandal at an ancient Byzantine column disguised as a bus stop.

“Thank you, it was a great evening.”
“To-DA, ha-YA er-REV YO-fi.”

Last night, we went to an apartment-warming party at Arieh and Amy’s. They live near the small arthouse cinema in town, on a leafy side street, in a comfortable apartment with a mirpeset, or enclosed balcony, as many Israeli apartments built in the last thirty years seem to have. (In apartments constructed in the last five years, the balconies are real balconies, square and kidney shapes that jut out from the building.)

Amy looked sadly at the dry plants collected under the mirpeset’s vertical rows of shutters.

“We sprayed for cockroaches last week, and the plants didn’t take it so well,” she said. “When we first moved in, one of the owners loved plants, and this whole area was covered in dirt…and real live plants.”

The walls were covered in framed photographs: a panorama of the Manhattan skyline, one of the Alps and Mont Blanc, and two or three from Regent’s Park in London. Since every nail (or piece of tape) we attach to our walls costs us NIS 300, I tend to lust after other people’s decorated walls.

Arieh and Amy gave us the grand tour, and it occurred to me that our apartment is probably fairly large, by both Israeli and American standards. On one of the inside walls, there was a shuttered rectangular window at about chest level, next to the tv, in what seemed to me to be an odd location for a window.

“Where does that open into?” I asked.
“It’s for air circulation, but it looks out on the Latvians in the apartment across the way,” Amy said. “I can’t keep track of how many people live in the apartment; there’s a mother, a father, two kids, a grandmother, grandfather, and then some other man who shows up, occasionally.”

“Probably a lover,” Arieh said, emerging from the kitchen with chocolate cake.

Other guests, friends of Arieh’s, showed up and joined us on the sofas for snacks and drinks.

“The most important questions in Israel, when you meet someone,” Zvi, Arieh’s friend, said, “are ‘Where did you do your army service?’–though this is not really that important anymore–and ‘What are your origins?’”

After that, everyone had to reveal his or her origins. Arieh’s mother moved to Israel from Germany; his father is Russian, and other ancestors are Canadian.

“Yes, but they’re not really Canadians,” Amy corrected him. “Even the Canadians immigrated from Russia.”

“Well, yes, and six hundred years back, the family comes from somewhere in Spain,” Arieh added. “Who can keep track?”

Zvi’s girlfriend, a tall, willowy girl with skin the color of cherry wood and an engaging smile, was part Polish and part Yemenite. She was working as a CPA in Tel Aviv.

Zvi was part Slovakian, part Russian, and part Romanian.

“Hide your valuables,” advised Arieh, and laughed with Zvi. Only Amy and I, the Americans, looked horrified. “I’m just kidding!” Arieh reassured us. “In Israel, everyone comes from so many backgrounds that you’re bound to offend someone with any ethnic joke, so people just don’t take them as seriously as you do in the U.S.”

“Well, we have Jewish jokes of this kind, I guess, in the U.S.,” Amy said.

“We have these, too,” Arieh replied, “but since everyone is Jewish, we call them Israeli jokes.”

“Right, but then there’s a whole other kind of Israeli jokes directed at the groups Israel doesn’t get along with,” Amy said. “These are the worst.”

The conversation shifted to talk of travel; Zvi and his girlfriend had been to Amsterdam, once, for a birthday celebration, and to Thailand, and Jordan, in the past few years. I mentioned that we were thinking of going to Jordan.

Zvi, who works in some capacity for the government, shook his head slightly. “Now is not a good time to go,” he said sotto voce. “Lots of frustrations toward Israel and America.”

So much for visiting Jordan.

“The Jordanians used to broadcast propaganda in Hebrew, before the peace,” Zvi remembered.
Arieh added, “So did the Egyptians. If you lived on the top floor of an apartment building and had a strong enough antenna, you could pick up their broadcasts.”

“Before the war in Lebanon,” Zvi said, “the Egyptians started broadcasting things in Hebrew like, ‘There are troops advancing on all fronts around Israel,’ but their Hebrew was poor–” He stopped to explain. “In Hebrew, the word for ‘fronts’ is ‘hazeetim,’ and the word for ‘bras’ is ‘haziyot,’ and the Egyptians got the two confused, so their propaganda was ‘There are troops advancing in bras around Israel!’”

“Here, we only get four channels,” said Amy. “Channel 1, Israeli; the movie channel, subtitled in Israeli and Arabic; some other channel that I never watch; and Zee Tv, the Indian channel.” She grinned. “They run soap operas in English. But I learn more crazy vocab from ulpan [the intensive Hebrew-language class that immigrants take] than I do from tv.” She thought for a second, and tucked her feet under her on the couch. “The first word our ulpan teacher taught us was ‘hetkef’ or ’suicide attack’.” She shook her head in disbelief. “These ulpan teachers are hard-core. And you can never win an argument with them!”

“Why is it that Israelis seem straightforward to the point of bluntness?” I ventured.

My husband offered an answer for this one. “Israel was settled in large part by Russians who were tired of being told what to do and from whom to take orders, in Russia. When they got here, they didn’t let anyone tell them what to do–especially not the British [in pre-state Palestine].”

Arieh and Zvi nodded in confirmation. Soon after, the party broke up and we headed home…glad, for many reasons, that we don’t own a tv. It was not until this morning that we read online about the thirty rockets launched on southern Israeli towns, and the escalated tensions in the region.

If you don’t read the news, it’s a normal cool(ish) fall day, here, with more clouds than usual scudding west-to-east, across the sky; there’s a breeze in the sycamore tree out on the lawn, and the only thing we can hear are birds, the fan, and the occasional car.

Meanwhile, over Gaza, army planes are breaking the sound barrier.

“Zik-EET.”
“Chameleon.”

Yesterday afternoon, on the way back from coffee at the Weizmann’s Cafe Mada (that’s the less-than-creatively named “Science Cafe”), I spotted one of these, a Mediterranean chameleon, crouching warily off to the side of the path that leads back home via Pinsker Gate. On the other side of the chameleon, a black cat hunched, regarding the creature with perplexity. I chased the cat away, and came back to the chameleon.

I wasn’t expecting a thank-you, but he lowered his pelican jaw and uttered a hoarse eep of outrage in my direction.

It is extremely difficult to make friends here.

I crouched down about a foot away from him, and watched as the chameleon raised himself up from the grass on diagonally-opposing legs and wavered toward his destination, a giant tree that I could reach out and touch, from where I was sitting. But he didn’t take a step, for a few moments; he just swayed back and forth and side to side, on those two legs, casting a wide gaze around. He looked exactly like the color of the tree–a dusty, streaked gray and tan, with finely pebbled and patterned skin, and a row of spikes running down his head and spine.

People passed behind me and kept going on the path. I hoped one of them would stop and tell me what I was looking at; in my fifth-grade natural science textbook, chameleons were bright-eyed, green, webby things. The creature glaring at me looked like a very small desert dinosaur.

(One tree on Weizmann Street, early this summer, sprouted deep red bell-shaped flowers the size of thimbles, among shiny lime-colored leaves. Walking down the street one evening toward the Saturday Night Cafe, we found the tree shedding all its flowers at the rate of about five a second, with tiny pops. A woman and her two daughters stopped and looked up at the tree with us, watching and listening to its phenomena, but none of us had a name for what we were looking at. The woman continued down the street with her girls’ hands in hers, but they kept looking over their shoulders at the tree’s red flowers spilling into the street.)

In any case, no one paused to exclaim with me over the creature, who hesitantly began to make his way toward the tree, moving like a tai ch’i master over the wood chips covering the roots.

Once he made it to the tree, the chameleon pulled himself up, one side at a time, using two small rounded claws to grasp the lines of bark. I followed him around the tree, and stood at eye level. One eye maneuvered around in its articulated lid and swivelled toward me. (Well, I like to think it did, at least.)

When I went away, I had no name for this, either.

(Photo credit: http://www.jonnyturk.com/tubes/cavus_wildlife/index.htm)

“Ha-YAM.”
“Beach.”

On Saturday, we went with friends to Palmahim Beach, near Rishon LeZiyyon.

“Do you want an authentic Israeli beach, with locals, or do you want a beach with bars and cafes?” Arieh asked us, when he and his girlfriend, Amy, (a Hollins alumna!) picked us up after lunch.

Authentic!

Palmahim is about twenty minutes northeast of Rehovot; when we turned off the main road, and drove in toward the beach, Arieh pointed out a military installation that ran parallel to the beach road, south of Palmahim. “Can you see the Patriot missiles?”

I don’t recall ever being asked this before on any sort of tour…

The missiles sat up on sand dunes, pointing northeast. If you look at a map of the Middle East, you can see why.

Arieh grumbled as we rolled to a stop in front of a small booth at the end of the beach road, right before the parking lot. “The beach parking mafia,” he complained. “You have to pay them, but they have no right to charge fees whatsoever.”

We unloaded all sorts of beach gear from the back of Arieh’s car. With a giant sheet for sitting on, an inflatable chaise longue, bottled water to spare, and a tupperware container full of chilled grapes, Arieh and Amy had elevated beach gear to an art form. You can do this, with a car. We felt happy to have remembered enough towels and a bag for the suits.

Palmahim is much calmer than any of the beaches in Tel Aviv. Arieh said he liked it because it’s relatively free of the pock-pock sounds of people playing beach paddleball. We colonized half of the sand under one of the beach’s wooden shade-huts, and made for the water.

South of Palmahim is an archaeological excavation of Early Bronze Age (1800-1500 B.C.) artifacts; from the water, you can see part of the cliff at the south end of the beach, where digs take place.

Except for families chattering to each other in Russian and Hebrew, except for the lifeguards shouting through a bullhorn at unruly jetski riders, except for the teenagers in the shade-hut next to us smoking a nargile water pipe, it seemed like your average beach…minus the surfers. (The waves break at about three feet.)

We spent most of the afternoon and early evening at the beach, trekking over to the small concession stand / cafe for snacks, at one point. The cafe sits at roughly the same elevation as the lifeguard house; sitting under the palm-frond roof, in the breeze, looking out at the Mediterranean at sunset, it’s easy to forget the missiles down the road.

After retrieving all our gear and shooting a parting curse in the direction of the parking-lot mafia, we headed back to Rehovot. Amy turned around in her seat.

“Have you eaten malabi yet?” she asked. “It’s this cornstarch pudding made with rosewater syrup and topped with coconut and toasted nuts. Classic Israeli coming-back-from-the-beach food.”

Since our beach excursions have been limited to Tel Aviv, this was news to us.

“There’s a stand,” Amy pointed, and Arieh pulled into a tiny lot packed with cars and people sitting around, eating what looked like yogurt with tiny spoons. “I can’t stand the stuff,” she confided to us. “It’s way too sweet, for me.”

Arieh got out and negotiated malabi for us, but he declined to taste it, although he did equip the car with four spoons. “Try it,” he urged, after the woman pulled a clear container of white pudding from a cooler, squirted pink syrup on it, shook a handful of crushed coconut over it, and added two spoonfuls of toasted pistachios to the top.

My husband tried one spoonful and politely refused any more. His verdict? “Interesting.”

I tried it and loved it. The pudding tasted sort of like flan, and the layers of coconut, rosewater, and nuts were a strange and delicious combination.

“There’s also this bread called janoun,” Amy went on. “It’s Yemenite…fried bread; that’s the best way to describe it that I can think of.”

“A woman on this road back to Rehovot makes the absolute best janoun,” Arieh added. “Maybe there’s some left.” The Israeli Road Food tour halted next to a small stand at the side of the road. Once again, Arieh got out and ordered the fascinating snack. 16 NIS got us a foil-wrapped cylinder of deep-bronze-colored dough with hundreds of layers, a plastic cup of harissa (sweet Yemenite tomato sauce), and a thimble-sized cup that contained about a teaspoon of speckled green sauce. “Unbelievably spicy,” Arieh cautioned.

We somehow managed to avoid spilling any of this on Arieh’s car seats, and arrived at home with most of the janoun intact. The bread was chewy, slightly sweet, and filling after about two bites. My husband confirmed that the green sauce was indeed Yemenite wasabi that would make the uninitiated shriek and run for water. I tried some, and ran instead for salt, the old Tortilla Flats trick.

Now, that was a day at the beach.

(Photo credit: http://naturism.naturist.co.il/beachinisrael.htm)