Say It in Hebrew

“Ha-tsoh-FAHR.”
“The horn.”

More so than the brakes, the accellerator, and quite possibly the steering wheel, the horn is the primary instrument of navigation on Israeli roads. Car rental agencies do not announce this, but it becomes immediately apparent to anyone who has ventured to cross the road anywhere in the country, much less drive on one.

On Friday morning, we walked to the end of Hanasi Harishon and rented a car for the weekend. Since the only cars left were automatic, I became the de facto designated driver…after handing over nearly every piece of documentation that I could produce. The Eldan rental agent examined my driver’s license with great skepticism (asking his colleague, “Is this real?”), but finally handed over the keys.

Another Eldan guy in the parking lot admonished us that if anything happened to the car, it would be a $400 minimum charge.

What about a broken taillight?

No, that would only be…eighty shekels.

A flat?

No, that would probably be about two hundred shekels.

Satisfied that the Eldan universe was less absolute than it seemed, we took off.

First stop on our list was Yochananof, an Israeli version of Super Target, to shop (for once) without having to schlep it all back home by foot. (As we discovered, Hyundais achieve remarkable mileage by eliminating parts of the car that are less necessary than others, which they deem to be the space between the front seat and the rear bumper.)

There are two branches of Yochananof in Rehovot. I headed toward the only one I knew of.

“Where are you going?” my friends asked as we headed toward the train station. “It’s back this way!”

So we veered away from the Yochananof ktsat and toward the unknown Yochananof gadol. As I turned left at an intersection where a car with a bashed-in front end sat on the median strip, it occurred to me, with a shiver, that I had left all our maps at home.

One of our friends, blessed with a better-than-average sense of direction, remembered how to get to the store and navigated through one highway, a back-roads maze of shops, and finally into the vast parking lot of Yochananof gadol. Meod gadol. Really big.

Other than having to deposit five shekels into the cart in order to detach it from its brethren and actually use it, and having to walk through the security line, it’s your average giant grocery store experience. This branch of Yochananof is huge–but on Friday morning, it feels as cramped as the first ten rows of a Stones concert.

Yochananof is evidently Hebrew for “Every man for himself”. When I tried to dive into the dairy section to retrieve cream, two people ran into my legs and then started to shout at me for being in the way.

I yelped back in English, “What am I supposed to do, call Triple A?” The cart drivers looked shocked to have run over a tourist and potentially wounded the Israeli economy. I shimmied out of the wreck and found my friends stuck in a bottleneck near the bakery section.

One of the few redeeming qualities about a store this size is that it conceals items that are almost impossible find in the smaller stores in town, such as candied ginger, lemongrass, and candied kumquats. (No kidding!) It’s also much cheaper than anywhere else except the shuk, the outdoor market.

An hour later, we emerged from the store and found the car still there–remarkably, without someone blocking our way. We made it back to Rehovot without incident–but with plenty of honking.

But this was only the trial run. Later that afternoon, we managed to drive from Rehovot to Yafo, and then from Yafo to a restaurant on the coast that our navigationally-gifted friend recalled…and guided us to.

By the time we reached the restaurant, The Old Man and the Sea, we were starving. The friend who had been there previously warned us, though, “Watch out–they bring a mezze of twenty dishes to the table. You’ll be so full you can’t think about eating, after that.”

They brought out twenty-four dishes: little salads and dips of all imaginable varieties. Babaganoush, hummus, falafel, salsa, guacamole (but with avocados only), eggplant (in what I would swear was chipotle sauce), mint tabouleh, egg salad, pickled tomatoes (purple), pickled beets (red), pickled cabbage (yellow), marinated olives, tomatoes and dill sauce, tehina, fried cauliflower and more–spread out in diamond-shaped dishes, alongside a basket of pita bread.

It was the snack-fest to end all snack-fests. The waiter reappeared when we slumped in our seats, after finishing the last of the pita.

“Would you like to order now?” He sounded hopeful. “Fish? Kebab?” We groaned a Lo, toda in response, and he looked crestfallen. “That’s it?”

“Amateurs,” he probably thought.

“Maf-TAY-akh ha-pa-khee-YOT.”
“The can opener.”

Rehovot has nothing on Filene’s: the bargain basement exists here in hidden, delightfully-tacky splendor. And it’s all 20% off!

I don’t know how, but friends who have been here for only a few weeks discovered not one, but two underground stores with wall-to-wall home accoutrements ranging from potholders to stacking capuccino mugs. One store has an entire section devoted to Tupperware knockoffs; the other, a wall of the world’s most garish coaster sets.

Combined, these two places form Rehovot’s “Mita, Ambat, ve Hala’a” — Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Or, as I like to think of it, WAY Beyond. No Bed, Bath, and Beyond I can think of has four different kinds of falafel-cutters.

I was shocked. How did I miss these places? Was I really that unobservant? Why didn’t I pay more attention to what people were carting out of the shops near the sherut-departure stand? Alas, the only time I went into the homage-to- reinforced-concrete indoor mall where one store is located, I headed the wrong way: upstairs, where a mostly-abandoned shoe store and its unhappy salespeople tried to sell me sandals that would have been only fashionable in, and practical for, the era known as B.C.

Our first foray into Bargain Martef (aka basement) #1, located in the concrete behemoth on Herzl, produced a seven-shekel glass teapot and a seven-minute reverie in the coffee-mug aisle.

This is virtually the only place in the country, as far as I can tell, where things are cheaper here than in the U.S.

Today’s find, Bargain Martef #2, next door to the great deli on south Ya’acov Street, revealed cheap pillows, glasses, more falafel cutters, and pasta makers.

When you walk in through the narrow glass doors–with hours posted in Hebrew and Russian–an old man whisks away any shopping bags and stashes them in tiny lockers. Then he waves you down a one-person-wide hallway lined with cheap paper goods, toward the staircase leading to the basement. The vista from the top of the stairs is of the Grand Canyon of Stuff, aisles and aisles of it.

My friend headed for the sofa pillows section, while I headed for the stacking capuccino mugs.

For a socialist country, they do the capitalist thing quite well.

Since we have, too, for the past year and a half, I think we’ll have to partake, before leaving, in that most favorite post-capitalist tradition…the yard sale.

“A-va-KAYSH et ha-taf-REET.”
“Please bring me the menu.”

You can pretend you speak a tourist version of the language; you can read the local English-language version of the newspaper every day; you can read (albeit moving your lips) the language. Nevertheless, you can still be completely oblivious.

So it was that we headed off to Tel Aviv on Thursday afternoon at four o’clock, roughly at the same time the latest suicide bombing occurred there.

Presumably, if one of us spoke Hebrew, we might have heard part of a cell phone conversation on the train that alluded to the attack, but we were more interested in looking for the baby camels in the fields, which you can usually see on the milk-train route from Rehovot to Tel Aviv.

Everything in Tel Aviv seemed normal: streams of people heading to Hashalom Station, jostling each other on the narrow sidewalk past the military complex; one or two people hunched in Senior Sandwich on Ibn Gvirol; a crazy cluster of sea-swimming fanatics prancing around in Speedos in front of the lifeguard hut on the beach. The beach was otherwise deserted.

At one of the beach cafes, the waiter seemed delighted to see us, as we were the only customers in sight. He bent down to pass out menus, as we huddled in the plastic seats on the sand. When he came back, he lingered, passing out the hot drinks, and recounted a story.

Last week, he said, a man sat down and ordered espresso. When the waiter returned and set down the drink, the man popped open his briefcase, extracted a notepad, tape recorder, microphone, and pen, and said, “I’m an investigative journalist. Let me ask you about prostitution.”

“I’m sorry,” the waiter said, after a moment, “but it’s not on the menu.”

“Muh-la-fuh-FON.”
“Cucumber.”

After eight days of nonstop rain, the most obscure things begin to look fascinating. Case in point: a jar of Polish pickles. Pardon me, more precisely: pickled cucumbers from Warsaw, purchased in Karl Berg, the Russian market.

People living in Central Europe and eastward have a soft spot, it would seem, for all sorts of pickled vegetables–mushrooms, above all. One brand of pickled shrooms on the shelves at Karl Berg sports a label with two jaunty-looking mushrooms wearing their caps like berets, wide-eyed and grinning, little suspecting that they are perhaps a week or a day away from becoming Tortellini al Funghi a la MOCKBA.

After sloshing home from Karl Berg in the rain, I set the jar of Polish pickles on the counter. Inside, among the cucumbers, swirled a whole pickled underseas world of sliced garlic, allspice or peppercorns, bay leaves, herbs, and thin sprays of a flowery plant.

The jar bears a brand name with all the thunder of Valhalla, “VORTUMNUS”, in black-edged green letters. Below a drawing of a veritable cornucopia of pickled goods is written, “Ogurki Konserwowe Cale”, or “whole conserved cucumbers”.

Surprise! If you speak limited Czech, you may also speak extremely limited Polish. “Pickles,” in Czech, are “okurky”.

One more day of rain and we will no doubt resemble the specimens in the jar…

Trolling the Russian market for odd (to me) foodstuffs is now a great deal more fun, since I have a friend who reads and speaks Russian. I followed K. around Karl Berg as she pointed out Ukrainian bread, Moscow bread, and tvaroch, a cheese about which Czechs and Austrians speak in breathless, mythical terms; they are quick to assert that its equivalent just does not exist in the U.S., presumably since Americans wouldn’t know good cheese if it bit us on the nose.

Well, four pounds of Kroger’s best sharp cheddar in my fridge beg to differ.

However, cultural relativism has its advantages, foodwise. This weekend, K. produced fantastic tiny pancakes made with tvaroch. It’s no cheddar, but it’s very good.

“SHTAH-yeem ba-BO-ker.”
“Two o’clock A.M.”

Jet lag offers people like me, who would otherwise prefer to greet the morning after 10 a.m. via a mug of coffee and the mere hum of a BBC broadcast, a valuable glimpse into another world…if only for the two or three hours between naps.

Rehovot at eight o’clock on a Friday morning is exciting: people walk around upright, unread papers tucked under their arms; trays of pastries cool in the winter air; on the corner of Herzl Street and Geula Street, a trio of musicians plays accordion and violin music and sings Yiddish songs. The sun isn’t yet over the buildings, and last night’s rain still glitters on the street.

You can grab the best seat in the cafe, hot baguettes in the store, finish any errands that need to be done before Shabbat closes everything, and sit back with the paper while the rest of the world staggers out and slowly begins to crowd downtown. You can gloat over a cappuccino at having outwitted all of those drowsy, sleep-wrinkled Rehovot residents just beginning to start their weekend grocery shopping.

However, by ten a.m., you’ll feel like lunch, and by two p.m., you’ll be popping chocolate-covered espresso beans by the handful, in the fervent hopes of fighting off yet another nap. By midafternoon, jet lag can turn quite reasonable adults into whiny, irascible toddlers.

At this point, my body clock resembles nothing so much as a disco ball. Am I on Denver time? Frankfurt time? Should I just give up and embrace the morning-person lifestyle, and write off any mental activity after four in the afternoon?

Four days and counting, now, in temporal limbo.