Ah, it’s the little things…

Tuesday, the 8^th of Feb.

Today marked a pretty significant accomplishment for me.  I’ve been to three countries in the last week, and four continents in the last month, but I’m pretty sure today marked the most significant travel accomplishment of all of it: I bought toilet paper.

I don’t think you understand how difficult this is over here.  I have spent three days wondering the streets of Tel Aviv, been in countless stores and markets and not found one that sold that vital tree pulp.  Not the little store where I bought my shampoo, which coincidentally didn’t sell hand soap (see below), nor the PM/AM “super”market.  Neither did any of the other stores where I wondered, but I finally found some today in one of the markets I discovered during my daily jogs.  I think my finding it was because this morning I finally reached the critical stage of “do NOT come home without it.”  (Read: no TP anywhere in the place.)  Of course now that I’ve found a place that sells TP, it will be ridiculously easy to buy it again.

The rest of the day was pretty mundane.  I slept in, went on a 6 mile run and worked in a couple of workouts at the free gyms on the beach. 

Observations

(1)    Shopping.  It is completely unlike the United States.  There is no Wal-Market and no equivalent that I've found.  Everything is sold in small specialty stores.  This means that the store where I bought my shampoo and shower gel did not sell hand soap or a mirror to shave.  That’s a bit of a hassle, but it’s completely offset by the fact that there are probably dozens of grocery stores within a few blocks of my apartment.  Two blocks over there is a huge market with everything you need from a spice vender to a butcher to tons of fresh produce to a vender who sells knock-off watches.  The market is truly huge.  I jogged it today and it runs almost half a mile long.

(2)    Pricing.  The prices here are different.  Today I bought six rolls of toilet paper, six rolls of paper towels and four bars of hand soap and it was around $13 or $14 which I thought was kind of high.  I also purchased a couple of nice oranges, some big apples and a bunch of plump bananas and it was less than $4, which is affordable to say the least.  Much to the delight of my mother, it looks like I will be living off fresh fruit and vegetables.

(3)    Clothing.  And by clothing I really mean modesty.  I could write an entire post on the fashion here.  People here wear stuff that women of the night would blush at wearing but that goes with Israel’s proximity to Europe.  However, because Israel is still a relatively religious country and because it is in the Middle East, there are some interesting twists to modesty.  For example, people here LOVE their spandex.  Love it.  I have yet to see a dude wearing a swim suit other than a speedo.  Additionally, male joggers rock the spandex shorts hardcore. 

Yesterday at the market a girl about my age was wearing see-through pants.  Not “oh bad lighting” or “wow it just rained really hard” but straight up see-through pants.  As in I was about 15 feet away and knew exactly what kind and color of underwear she was wearing.  However, today when I went running and wore normal length running shorts (not the Paulie Bleaker style) I got dirty looks from men and quite a few leers from women.  Not to brag, but about 15 years of running and a couple years of triathlons have given me some darn good leg muscles.  In fact, I think I have pretty hot legs.  If you like ‘em pale and hairy.  Haha.  All that to say that I think the spandex for the jogging crowd is because it is more acceptable here to wear really tight stuff than really short stuff.  Just a theory.  Like I said, I’ve only been here three days.

P.S. I think I ‘m sunburned, but I can’t tell for sure because after three straight days of shopping I still can’t find a mirror.

[Update:  Since I wrote this post I've learned a that the AM/PM that I originally found was more of an "express AM/PM" there's another one that's close that does have a bigger selection of food as well as a very limited selection of cleaning supplies.]