Those glorious film colors (#teamEktar) are now burned in my brain as what Tel Aviv looks like. If we could add smell-o-vision of fresh frying falafel and pita and herbs, then it would be perfect. And I need to get breakfast ASAP before I start gnawing on the computer thinking about the food. With Dan on a work trip to Tel Aviv, I naturally invited myself to pop over for a few days.
I spent pretty much the entire flight over flipping between envisioning how quickly I could get my first pomegranate juice and slipping in and out of consciousness while watching Zoolander 2. I never did finish it, but I DID get my paws on some pom juice the first night. And while the juice was even better than I imagined, so were the parts of the city I couldn't have even expected. It was just so clean, and friendly. Like I said to one of Dan's co-workers, I don't mind if someone immediately makes fun of me in a different language, but if they're pretending to be nice to me to my face in English, that's all I can ask for! Come to think of it she did slip into Hebrew right after I said that, but that's neither here nor there!
It's a city I probably never would have picked out to visit on my own, for no reason whatsoever besides I had no idea how great it was. Let's take a look at too many bauhaus buildings, shall we?
Whenever I go to a new place, I always get a little frustrated at myself that I'm not going to be able to show people what it actually looked like there. The problem here was a kind of fascination overdrive, where my little head was just swiveling dangerously close to exorcism levels. I didn't have quite enough time to hit the fatigue level - i.e. beauty fatigue on the road to Hana in Maui, where one can't possibly be bothered to stop at a red sand beach because you saw the black one.
No bauhaus fatigue here (clearly)!
This city is packed to the gills with dogs and cats. I live in a neighborhood with a dedicated dog bakery and the level of dog friendliness here is just in a whole other stratosphere. Dogs eating at restaurants ("excuse me, I'll have the shawarma hold the bread"), drinking out of fountains, dog apparel and accessory stores on every block, dogs on the beach. Paradise! The kitty situation, while adorable, seems a little more tenuous because they seem to get treated like pets on one hand (fed, watered) and then not at all (left outside, no collar). When I took the picture below, a woman actually turned around and walked over to see what I could possibly have been looking at, then looked at me like "how sad, they must not have stray cats where you're from".
Here's hoping Dan gets sent back soon, so I get an excuse for another visit.
