Hello Tel Aviv

Lehitra’ot, Jeruslam! This week we said goodbye to Jerusalem, our home for the last three weeks, and arrived in the magical beach-side city of Tel Aviv. This city offers a stark contrast to the experiences we’ve had the past few weeks in the holy city of Jerusalem—where the city sleeps on Friday night, and everything you eat is kosher.
Here in Tel Aviv the nightlife is the best on Fridays, and you can find a whole array of non-kosher food. Not to say that kosher food is bad, but I do miss my cheeseburgers after a while… Speaking of food, I have an Israeli friend who is a cook and a huge foodie, so I’ve been trying out some of Tel Aviv’s best food joints. My favorite so far has been this little whole-in-the-wall sausage and burger joint called Vetrina. Vetrina has easily one of the best cheeseburgers in all of Tel Aviv, and their fries are amazing—a perfectly crispy mix of regular and sweet potatoes sprinkled with lemon zest instead of salt!
In my experience, the best way to meet local people is to just go out and be friendly. It’s easier for me, having been here before, because I meet locals through my local Israeli friends. However, just hanging at a bar or at the beach is a good way to meet people. Our Tel Aviv hostel offers some cool opportunities as well, including an organized Pub Crawl and a Language Exchange with local Israeli college students. In addition, getting to know the staff at hostels is a really good idea—generally they are really familiar with the city and can give you great tips, plus they’re really friendly!
One of the hardest things about this DoC, aside from the educational content, has been managing money. Before I left for this trip, I told myself that I would buy groceries and cook in order to save money. This sounded like a great plan, but the reality of it was that there were just never enough hours in the day to cook in between class, tours, and programming. Though my food budget had to be a little higher than I’d have liked, it wasn’t actually an issue because in the three weeks I’ve been here I’ve really spent my money on food and snacks—I didn’t use it for souvenirs. This is probably partly due to the fact that I’ve been here before, but mostly because I packed really light and didn’t really want to schlep around a bunch of nick-knacks for a month.
Actually, I need to clarify, the no souvenir gig ended this week. We stopped at a mall for food and I saw a bookstore—I was in need of a new journal, so I decided to take a look around. I started browsing the books in Hebrew just for fun, and to my surprise I came across a copy of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett—in Hebrew! Neil Gaiman is my favorite author so I knew I had to get that book. While my Hebrew is in no way good enough to get through that novel right now, this will be a good goal to set—get my Hebrew to the level where I can read this book! Aside from some delicious cheese burgers, this has to have been my coolest purchase so far. So cool, in fact, that in my excitement over my find, I completely forgot to buy a journal.