Hikari Kitori's Journal

An Evening by the Sea
After writing what seems to be the first chapter of a very weird story, I decided I needed a break and that I should go to the sea.
I live in a city called Petach-Tikva, which is just twenty minutes away from Tel-Aviv, which is right on the Mediterranean Sea.

As always, when I go to this part of town I park behind the New Opera Tower. There's no opera there, but there is an artsy movie theater that sometimes has nice movies. And the parking isn't too expensive.

So off I went. First, though, I had to return a video to "Haozen-Hashlishit" (The Third Ear), an independent and very good video rental store. They also have a second hand records shop, which they call "The Second Hand of the Third Ear". The store with the blue awning is the Third Ear.

Now, this store os on a street called Shenkin, which is one of the most fashionable streets in Tel-Aviv. It's full of clothes shops, cafes, a candle&soap store, and bars. It's usually packed with people, mostly girls, wearing the more fashionable (and funny) clothes. Most of them are either Zfoniot (Northies, sort of like yuppies) or Frehot (tramps).

This is one of the more popular shops. A few years ago the owner decided he (or she, don't remember) was sick of brandnames, so he opened a shop called Noname, selling clothes withouht brandnames. Of course, Noname became a brandname by itself and now they've become a small chain. The girl painted on the window is their mascot, sort of the Israeli idyll of beauty - cute but wicked.

After leaving Shenkin, on the way to the seashore, I realized that one of the more distinguishing aspects of streets in Israel (besides their ugliness) is the Pizuzyot (literally Explosions). They're small kiosks, very cramped, that sell newspapers, smokes, drinks (usually not alcoholic) and seeds of different kinds (peanuts, cashiews, mainly sunflower and watermelon seeds). They're pretty inexpensive to operate, so during recessions (like the current one) you see a lot of them crop up all over the place (sometimes five or more on one street). Here's a typical example, with two girls sitting on a bike in front. This one's called "Piguzya: Kliyat Yossi", or "Bombshell: Yossi's Roasting":

And on to the sea. There are some old buildings still left in the small streets leading to the shore. Tel-Aviv was added recently to the UN's list of historical citys, because it was built as an example of Modern architecture, and parts of it are called the White City, since most of those buildings were white. This in example, not of Modern architecture, but of the architecture that came before it, a more muslim architecture.

When I finally got to the seashore the sun had already set, and the light was starting to fade. Now, since I'm really not very good with camera, the pictures from now on will grow darker and blurrier (I have to clean the lense, I guess).

There were a lot of wind-surfers yesterday, it looked like very colorful huge birds flying over the sea. Birds the like of which little kids draw. Nice.

And last one for today. On the way back up the beach, I saw these strange lights. There are a few cafe-bars on the beach itself, with plastic chairs leading up to the water. And this one, called the Zfoni Cafe (again, Northies) had these lamps set between the chairs.

After that I went and checked out Molly Blooms, the Irish pub. A very nice place, small, homey, they even had ginger ale (but only Schwepps, not many places import Canada Dry). I talked to the manager, and he was very nice, but said that poetry slams weren't their kind of thing, they want to keep a purely Irish feel. But he did send me to some other places. Then I went over to Mike's Place, a nice bar next to the American Embassy. No pictures of the Embassy, they're very sensitive of that kind of thing. It's a grey fortress right on the beach's edge, I love that place. Mike's Place was actually bombed last year, or two years ago, by a British Muslim suicide bomber. That was weird, that now we had tourist terrorists. But they rebuilt, and they're back to being a nice bar and a gathering place for Americans and other foreigners who work in the area.

That's it for now. Next week the semester starts and it's back to physics. Alright!

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