A Slice of "Suburban" Tel Aviv Life

It has been a pretty packed week and a half! We will discuss only my most recent Tel Aviv trip in this post and leave the rest of my shenanigans for tomorrow :)

Last weekend I jetted off to Tel Aviv just for a change of scenery; the previous weekend I visited Jerusalem.

I stayed not in Tel Aviv but instead in nearby Giv'at Shmuel. (Side note: If Israel had "suburbs," Giv'at Shmuel would be its prime example.) Envision frolicking children, plenty of parks and people walking their dogs every 10 feet. A friend of my cousin set me up with her former college roommate, Paula.

Sometimes it pays to put a wire out on Facebook ;-)

Paula moved to Israel about 20-or-so years ago and now has four Israeli kids of her own and an Israeli husband and cat to match! I felt so grateful to them for welcoming me into their home <3 Thank you Paula and Avi!!!

Paula even prepared for me some special vegan food!

In Tel Aviv I met up with a few friends- a friend from college who moved to Israel within the last couple of years, a friend I made at the Masa Israel Leadership Summit I attended a couple months ago, and also with my Birthright tour guide. It was good to see some familiar faces in a not-so-familiar place :)

The highlight of my trip, believe it or not, was the few hours I spent babysitting for the family I stayed with, and then my walk to the bus station to set me Eilat-bound.

Left to right: Lahav and his friends- twins Gabrielle and Dotan (hopefully I got everyone's name correct!).

I've realized the best way to get a slice of life in a foreign place is to interact with the children. Let me preface what I am about to say next by saying this: I have done A LOT of babysitting. A LOT. I've been babysitting for more than 10 years. Looking back though I'm not sure why parents trusted me to look after their kids back then when I, myself, was a kid at age 13...

Anyway, I've noticed that Israeli children aren't as shy and awkward as American children and, physically speaking, they're a heck of a lot more active. And don't you worry, I've come up with potential causes of these variations.

Theory number one: social disposition. Perhaps because people in Israel live in much smaller quarters than in the U.S., the children are forced to interact more with other people and hence they gain the social skills that most American children (including myself back in the day) lack. The individual family size in Israel is larger as well. More siblings = more social interaction.

Theory number two: activity level. Perhaps because Israel is a military country, (everyone [both men and women], with circumstantial exceptions, is conscripted at age 18) its population in general is more physically fit. After graduating from the army the practices of exercise stay with the former soldiers and when they go on to have children, they continue these practices. Since kids take after their parents- they see the exercise behavior and they then copy it. 

The three children I babysat--I think they were around age 8 (whoops I forgot the exact age!)--couldn't have been cuter. They played soccer, walked a neighbor's two dogs and ran around the playground like little monkeys :)

Monkey Lahav the bilingual bouncing boy! 

After our playdate at the park I began my voyage back to Eilat.

The day was a Saturday. Saturday in Israel is just called "Shabbat." In order to catch my plane (yep, that's right, I sprung for a flight) in time back to the Land of Sunshine, I had to take the earliest bus after the busses began operating again following the Shabbat day of rest. The bus I had to catch was in the ultra-orthodox neighborhood B'nei Barak bordering Ramat Gan. Paula drove me just to the periphery of the neighborhood since cars are not allowed inside of B'nei Barak during Shabbat. 

The streets were literally blocked off with gates.

No cars are gettin' in to here!

Or here!

Walking through B'nei Barak I discovered a whole different world that I never really realized existed. I've heard about these religious communities before, but I've never seen them with my own naked eyes. I was the only woman in sight waking around in pants. (In more religious sects of Judaism women are required to wear long skirts.) I felt like I was in a parallel universe.

It is needless to say that I felt a bit out of place. Though I was raised Jewish, my family's Jewish was a very different kind of Jewish, where the religious aspect of our lives did not govern everyday life. I must say though that I do respect those who choose to live their lives following such specific standards. It is difficult and requires a lot of discipline. 

Also, I just remembered as I was writing this and am unsure of where to add it in, I went to Shabbat dinner at the house of some cousins in Modiin, a "suburb" of Jerusalem. This was the real highlight of the trip! It was so nice to be with family, even though I only just met some of them that night. One of the daughters who is a few years younger than me made for me vegan challah (it normally has egg), vegan cookies, vegan chocolate cake and vegan sachlav, a milk-based traditional Arab dessert drink that usually is accompanied with coconut and cinnamon.

I wish I took pictures with the cousins and of the food but I was so in the moment that I neglected even to think of this blog.. eek.

On that note... not to end too abruptly or anything... here is a picture of some cool statues carved out of bushes in Giv'at Shmuel:

**Cue ending credits here.**