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Yes, the girls are beautiful and the men all seem to have just emerged from a hush-hush combat training course, but the high rolling life of Tel Aviv touted in all the travel brochures and hotel-lobby tourist mags is not where the old guide books are sending you to.
The "real action" in Tel Aviv takes place in little bars, restaurants, discos and small stage venues in out of the way places, tucked away in the southern part of Tel Aviv or an ailing industrial area.
In any case these are the highly-overrated places that you don't want to be seen in.First and foremost Sheinkin street. It is a small run-down street that twenty years ago, when Tel Aviv was smaller and everybody knew each other, was the place to hang out. It had, and still has, two or three coffee shops, a few rundown fast-food joints, a shushi take-away bar, some esoteric clothes stores, a few grocery stores and a very small park. Except for some ancient Tel Avivis, hordes of school children and people who actually live there - there is nobody to be seen and nothing to do.
Another overrated site is the Tel Aviv harbor. Fancy restaurants, a few expensive clothes outlets, one decent jazz bar and a yoga club. If you need a tourist trap, or want to meet the out of town Israelis, this is the place.
Old Jaffa is another myth. The artists of the 1960s who received cheap old Arab houses overlooking the sea, so that they would form an artists' village are now in their late 70s. They don't want tourists clattering down their clean stepped alleys, neither do they want late-night clubs and bars. If you are looking for a sterile fake Med-town above an abandoned harbor, Old Jaffa is the place for you.
So where do you hang out in Tel Aviv? Try the alleys of Neve Zedek, the bars in the Florentin neighborhood, the eateries and clubs around Hasmonaim and Lincoln street. This will give you the "in" on where do the Tel Avivians go to do their hopping.
2009-11-19
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Tel Aviv Nightlife:
Abraxas: The city's most popular meat-market pick-up bar. 40 Lilienblum Street.
Penguin: A retro 1980s Tel Aviv hot spot. 43 Yehuda Halevi Street.
The Block: Old storehouse turned into a hot nightclub and venue for alternative parties. 35 David Hacmi Street.
Barzilai: Rundown and unpresumptuous, but the site of Tel Aviv's wildest parties. 13 HaRehev Street.
Rothschild 12: The latest and trendiest current bar. 12 Rothschild Blvd.
La Champa: The parties start late and end early. 52 Nachalat Binyamin Street.
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Olives have been around in this part of the world for thousands of years. They have been a staple food as olives, and an important ingredient in cooking and in the anointing kings and messiahs. The secret of the olive is that once it is planted it just grows and gives fruit. The tree needs to be attended to every summer - so that the undergrowth is cleared, and the shoots cut off so that the tree will grow with one trunk and in one direction. If that is tended to then in autumn, every second year, the tree will give fruit - a lot of olives that need a lot of picking.
For over a decade now attempts have been made to create a machine that will automate the olive harvest. The current machine is called a shaker. Once in place the machine takes hold of the tree and shakes it so hard that the olives will fall off. In order to make this process more effective new species of olive trees have been developed where the olives hold on the tree is not so sturdy. But, still, most growers in Israel, the majority of them Israeli Arabs and Druze prefer to mobilize the family and take to the trees in order to bring the harvest home.
As olives began to come into vogue (Mediterranean diet et. al.) the various tourism bodies of the Galilee have tried to turn them into a tourism attraction. And so the Olive Days in Galilee were born. The festival - as it is termed - is basically built around a bunch of tours to olive orchards and ancient olive presses (most of them just broken down mid-1960s contraptions) that once were used for making olive oil. In the last three years musical performances have been added, a fancy brochure produced and a lot of marketing hype created. And, of course before we forget, you can also buy olive oil straight from the presses at prices that are higher even than the prices in the grocery store that you have long given up going to because of its outrageous prices.
2009-10-30
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