Back to the beach!

When you don't really know what to do with your day in a town with a beach, you don't have to make any decisions: You have the beach.

I started off my day with my typical boost of morale via the Ulpan. The other students were expected to turn in the first 10 chapters of their hebrew autobiographies. I learned the names for articles of clothes. The teacher handed out pictures of transvestites for us to describe the clothing to each other. We derailed when the American students had to explain what a mullet was to the teacher. An imprecise translation of "business in front, party in back" was attempted and failed. Finally we got the image across, which caused the teacher to nearly die laughing. When she tried to pronoune "mullet" she had some difficulty, so I suggested "Kentucky Waterfall", which the other two Americans loved.

There are about 10 beaches down the coast of the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv. We started at the top one, which was Yoni the Great's favorite spot. Naomi thought we should attack this corn-cob-style and just go down the row, so we ended up at the gay beach for the afternoon. I must admit I am quite under-chisled for this beach as well as under-tanned and also over-dressed in my swimsuit. Naomi seemed to enjoy the experience, though. Unfortunately, it also wasn't a very good beach because the sea floor was covered with what could only be twisted metal fragments.

We went out with big plans in mind in the evening. We found these walking Bauhaus tours online where you can walk down a street and the paper explains the history of various buildings. We stopped by a shop that was hastily closing at an unseemly early time for Tel Aviv and we were quite confused. It turns out that an obscure Jewish holiday was about to occur - I use the term obscure only in the sense that Naomi didn't know it was going on - and the whole town was closing down for the night. The WHOLE TOWN. Within moments of this illumination the town went from a boiling caldron of entertainment to Ames, Iowa at 9:15 pm. For a bit Naomi and I were at a loss but then Naomi suggested we head to the beach again. Thanks to an active tourist trade there are certain areas of town that would be virtually commiting suicide if they closed down, so we managed to find refuge for the evening.