Post Table of Contents :)
1) HAIFA and some Racial Tensions
2) TEL AVIV
3) MOROCCAN HENNA CEREMONY and KIBBUTZ
4) PETACH TIKVAH SHABBAT
5) JOURNEY TO EILAT
PART 1: HAIFA and some Racial Tensions
Right after Tikvah ended, I stashed my things in Ayala’s apartment in Jerusalem and set out with a big backpack and a little backpack to Haifa. It was a really pretty bus ride, and I felt kind of emotional seeing Jerusalem from the road. I wonder if I will always feel emotional when I enter or leave Jerusalem.
Matat is a sweetheart and called me often to check up… that I was on the bus, that I was off the bus, that I was at the train station, that I was on the train, that I arrived at the Haifa train station, that I was walking to the café to meet her, that I was at the café… once maybe 10 mins went back uneventfully and she called me just to say “You didn’t call me for too long and I worry.” I adore her. Adore.
Matat’s friend works at a café on Ben Gurion Avenue, one of the central streets of Haifa, so we hung out there for a bit and soaked up the Air Conditioning and caught up. Mostly we talked about boys, but also life, jobs, our studies, taglit, and everything. I can’t believe it’s been a year since I saw her last, we picked right up where we left off.
Haifa is SO HOT. It’s the hottest I’ve been in Israel so far. It was just so incredibly humid. It really effected our moods and I’m sorry for that. I think if Matat and I had been hanging out in Haifa in January it would have been different. But we had to be really careful not to be murderous because the weather was just so stifling. We had our best conversations when eating in air conditioned restaurants or drinking iced coffee J.
We packed a lot into a few days. Haifa is a very interesting city. It’s been compared to San Francisco, and it’s actually the sister city of Boston. It’s home to Technion, which is Israel’s version of MIT, as well as other schools I’m blanking on the names of. Matat studies architecture there. It was really cool to see her apartment and all her things… so Matat.
Anyway, Haifa feels like a city stuck in a bunch of really different eras. We went to Hadar, which means “glory” and it’s kind of in the middle of the city. It’s where the city hall and the old court house is, and this place called “Memory Park” which overlooks the harbor. Matat said of the park, in a perfect tour guide voice, “And this is where you can find drugs after dark, and lots of homelesses!” Basically this area was the posh, or “poshy” or “Bougie” as Matat likes to say, area of Haifa back in the day. All the houses are made from beautiful Jerusalem stone. But these days they’re mostly in disrepair. Now it’s mostly “arsim” and “cousins.”
Let’s detour to talk about these two terms. “Arsim” is a slang term used to describe a particular class of people in Israel. It’s not exactly racial (although most Arsim are Middle Eastern looking) and it’s not exactly financial (although most Arsim aren’t really financially stable), and it’s not religious… Geva told me Arsim are Jewish, though I think there are Muslim and Christian Arsim as well. Yonatan told me when he was little he thought he was one of them, hung out with Arsim and dressed and behaved like an Arsim until he wanted to go into a club that was really only for Arsim and he couldn’t go in with his friends, and his mom had to explain to him that he was super Ashkenazi. (Although maybe he was making up this story and I couldn’t tell.) I think the real indicator of arsim is tacky clothing and jewelry and a tendancy to play loud Mizrachi music. To be honest I really like Mizrachi music! I think I’ve got some Arsim in me. People usualy describe Arsim using the American term “Guido” as in, Italian Americans. But Arsim remind me more of the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who hung out at Silver Lake when I worked there.
This term makes me uncomfortable a lot because usually it’s said disdainfully by Israelis. “Don’t go to that beach because there are too many Arsim…” “New immigrants need to be careful or they’ll end up dating an Arsim and not know it until their friend tells them…” “This is a nice neighborhood, you won’t find Arsim here…” etc. I’m not sure it’s really worse than similar resentment in the US though. If I wanted to advise someone not to go to the beaches on the North Shore of Boston, I wouldn’t say because of guidos or because of any other group, I’d said “Because they’re tacky” or “because they’re trashy.” or sketchy. But what do I mean by that?
“Cousins” is a term that should probably also offend me, but the sounds of it makes me laugh every time. Matat and I were talking down the street, and this guy speeds up in his car, then slooooooows down as he’s passing us, then starts to back up. I’m a little disturbed and Matat says, “Pffft, he’s fine. He’s just bored out of his mind because he’s a cousin.”
“A cousin?” I ask.
“Yeah, you know. In the Tolah.”
“The Tolah?” (I had a hard time understanding her accent, she sometimes puts on a fancy fake Israeli accent when the mood strikes her, even though her English accent is great.)
“Yeah, you know. The Bible and shit.”
This made me laugh because I’d just spend four weeks studying the Torah. “Uh huh.”
“It comes from the descendents of the first Arab…”
“Ishmael.”
“Uh huh. They’re our cousins.”
I laugh a little even as I write it. Cousins. It reminds me of all the different people you can play as in Katamari. I asked later why they’d be bored out of their minds just because they’re “cousins.” And Matat’s friend, Vered (who is awesome and sweet), said “They have nothing to do. They have no money to go to the mall with. Sometimes they have no mall.”
The class strata are really visible in Haifa. They’re literally strata. Let me explain…
We took the subway. The subway is adorable, it’s so retro. It has only 6 stops. It functions like an underground, diagonal elevator up and down the mountain. It works on pulleys. The platforms are sloped and kind of terraced, and so are the cars:
Matat’s neighborhood is called Massada and it’s halfway up the mountain, about. It’s super cute, like the 60s, lots of little shops and cafes and vegans and hipsters, and it’s a mix of “cousins” and well… non-cousins. We took the “subway” from Massada to the top of Mt. Carmel, which is super fancy. It has fancy hotels and shops and restaurants, and amazing views. Here are some views:
At the top is also the entrance to the Bahai Gardens. We couldn’t go very far in the gardens because you need to go with a tour and the timing didn’t work out. But here are some pictures:
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| Main Gate |
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| We had to dress modestly. I am so done with modesty. |
What is Bahai, you ask? I don’t really know. The Gardens were lovely and reminded me a lot of Peterhof in Russia, though.
Matat did some yoga, and I strolled a bit and got some iced coffee (I have no idea how many I’ve consumed this trip but I’m sure it’s a hilariously high number. I know there was one day I had 5, just that day.) and then we walked down the famous Haifa Steps.
I wish I had photos, but it was really too dark. These are steps that go all the way down the mountain, and we went all the way from the top on Mt. Carmel to the bottom back to Ben Gurion ave. The steps basically go by the back door of all of these houses, and because of the slop, they all have little bridges and walk ways from their back doors to the steps, and lots of them had interesting lanterns. And there are trees all around the steps. It was very Lothlorien.
Anyway, as you descend the mountain, you can see the houses go from extremely nice to less nice to even less nice. The social and economic status of the homes decreases with height. It’s zany. It was really fun to be with Matat, the future architect, who told me about the different types of buildings and the considerations of building on a slope like that.
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| The gardens from below, and lit up at night. |
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| Mata made a fancy breakfast on her balcony for me and her two friends, Vered and Asher. They were so nice and the food was amazing! |
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| "Achot" / Sisters |
The next day, Gabby was in Haifa and we met up and went back to Tel Aviv together. Because there was construction on the rail tracks the trains were not running so we got a sheirut to Tel Aviv. A Sheirut is like… a 10 person van that costs about the same as a bus. I think most of my friends (except maybe Kelsey) would find this very sketchy, but you kind of get used to it in Israel. People sit in the back and pass their money to the front and then the driver passes their change back, and no one takes anything. It’s strange. But cool, I guess.
Gabby and I got a hostel on Montefiore street, of Allenby. We were gross from travel but a group of guys (who seemed potentially good looking from afar but weren’t so much up close) lured us out to the courtyard where they were pregaming for a pub crawl. They were crazy Germans and already very drunk. They sang this song and we took a picture:
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| 70 years ago they'd have reacted differently to me and Gabby |
This was the first time I’d ever had to put my makeup on drunk, which was an adventure. Gabby helped. We met some friends from ROI at a brasserie in Rabin Square, which we found out after was supposed to be one of the best restaurants in Tel Aviv. It was tasty, but it didn’t blow my mind. I had chicken cordon bleu, and the waitress asked me if I knew what that was… chicken… AND cheese… and HAM?!? I said yes. Bwahahaha. We went looking for a bar after but it was already nearly 2 am, which is insane. I don’t know where the time goes sometimes.
We spent the next day eating and in cafes and kind of shopping and traversing town, then I got a train to Ashkelon, which is a port city about an hour south of Tel Aviv. I’m not going to lie, I get really excited whenever I successfully navigate public transportation on my own, especially in Hebrew. I’m pretty sure I was beaming the entire train ride.
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| Bread Story, my favorite Tel Aviv cafe |
Geva picked me up and we met Rivka at her friend’s Moshav where they were having a Jewish Moroccan Henna ceremony. I looked this up in advance online, and I read that it was festive but also kind of sad. It celebrates the woman leaving her parents’ home the day/week before the wedding. They tattoo her with henna and protection charms and the name of her husband and stuff. And then the married women give her bedroom advice. But it was really different from what I read!
Rivka pointed out this was an interesting group because the bride is Sephardi from the moshav, and the groom is Ashkenazi from the kibbutz, so it was a clash of cultures. It was fun seeing all the kibbutzniks awkwardly going along with the ceremony, although they were all smiles and tried their best and it was fun. There was tons and tons and tons of food.
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| So much food! |
After dinner, they dressed us all up in “traditional” garb. It was so fun!
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| Cute! |
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| This is my favorite... Geva's face, hahaha! |
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| Love! |
We danced in a circle for a long time, the music was really fun Mizrachi music. People waved dishes of sweets and cookies over their heads and threw sweets and people and the bride’s grandmother (I think) waved the steaming henna pot around for a bit.
Then the bride and groom sat on these thrones (so funny),
and the matriarch put a big glob of henna on their hands and covered it with a little corsage type thing. Then we all got one!
I was afraid people would think it looked like my hand was just dirty, but so far every Israeli who has seen my hand since (I think it lasts for about 2 weeks) has no said, “Did you press your hand into a pile of shit?” but instead said “Ah! A Henna Ceremony!! How did you go to a Henna Ceremony?” I like looking at it because it makes me think of such a fun night.
I got to try lots of traditional deserts and I even got to try some sabra. Here’s me eating one.
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| A wanna-be sabra eating a sabra. |
It had a nice flavor but it was full of a million seeds so it was hard to eat. The other people at it were super nice and friendly. Most of the Israelis I’ve met have been really well traveled, since it’s tradition for them to take a big trip after their army service is done and that kind of gives them the travel bug, so I always have something to talk about with them. And many of them have seen much more of America than I have.
Bride and Groom Dancing!
Lifting the Groom up on a chair!
(NOTE it's 12:30 and I gotta get up at 6 to go to Petra I'll post this for now, come back in a day or two for me to post the rest!)
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