What's been going down in Florentin

Gees Louise I have a lot to catch up on. I've been back in Israel for 2 weeks. During these 2 weeks I've done a surprising lot, all whilst managing to work pretty much every day. First of all, some photos are beginning to trickle in of my brother's wedding. Here's one nice one (thanks Michael) and I'll be posting up more to come in my album very soon.
By the way, as I write this now, Eli is baking his famous hamentashen. He made them for Purim and it seems that even by Israeli standards, his hamentashen are... "ma-shehoo ma-shehoo" ('something something'- which means: something special. Indeed, Hebrew is a language remarkably short in vocab). So even though the festival of Purim's over, Eli's still soldiering on and keeping the Purim spirit alive (and boy, was that holiday taken seriously here! It's the equivalent of what I would imagine Halloween to be like in the States- literally everyone got dressed up and went out to parties and went crazy. My bus driver that day was dressed as a school girl -which was a little disturbing to say the least. I went to work dressed as a punk.)
So anyway, as I mentioned in my last blog, our street (or at least the part of street directly outside our house) is now finally finished with all the constuction which was going on there for the past 3 months. We have what may possibly be the nicest street in all of Tel Aviv now! It's so new and nice! With fresh tarmac, newly paved sidewalks, painted road markings which aren't faded, new trees, benches, lights...
This picture was taken one day before the street re-opened. It took precisely one day for the oil stains to come back and two days for someone to knock over one of the trees. All the double parking and the tooting and the road rage which follows suit, were almost instantaneous with the opening. Gotta love Israeli drivers. Look, you really have to try understand my excitement here. Those that visited me will know what I'm talking about. We basically had a huge mud/sand/dirt swamp/ditch thing happening from our door step to the other side of the street. It was crazy. As Eli said, although it may or may not have been a little politically incorrect, our home was the next closest thing we would get to living in the Gaza.

Anyway, down our street, as some of you may recall, live our beloved friends Tzvika and Pini- more commonly referred to as the guys who own(ed) Churchhill and famously managed to lose him and then have him miraculously returned safe and sound and just as crazy and hyperactive a puppy as ever again. So, Eli and I were hanging out with Pini at an open garage studio party
(basically, near our place, there are a whole string of garages or what look more like old shacks, where some have been converted into warehouses or craftsmens' workshops or funky bars or music studios, etc..- so a few of them got together one night and decided to hold an open air party where lots of musicians collaborated together to put on a hodge-podge night of all kinds of entertainment, with all sorts of cool and random items for sale such as furniture and artworks and jewellery, and there were firecrackers, and cheap beer and free food... have I mentioned that I love my neighbourhood?) Well anyway, Pini happens to mention that Churchhill was driving him crazy so one day, when I was in Australia in fact, they just got rid of him once and for all (poor dog) and passed him onto their friends (who were always like his co-owners anyway). Instead, their neighbour was moving houses and offerred them his cat. So they adopted "Dolly", a very cool and beautiful black cat. I really like black cats. Has something to do with Snuggle Puss and Chester, 2 black (or almost black) cats very dear to my heart from my childhood. So anyway, Pini then says that one day he came home and discovered 5 tiny furry things making high-pitched squeeking noises from inside his cupboard. Can you believe it? Both these doofuses hadn't even realised Dolly was preggas! So they basically traded in one mad puppy for 6 cats! I went over to see the new arrivals and, needless to say, fell in love immediately. 5 kittens of age 2 weeks is hands down just about the cutest thing I've ever seen in my entire life! Especially when they all suckled from Dolly at the same time and she was laying all stretched out and trying to lick their little heads at the same time. Wow. At the moment, they're all as one happy family inside a box in Pini's bedroom. And he seems content to keep them all. But that's bound to change soon. I'm dying to have one of my own, but Eli won't allow it. :( Look, one of them fits inside just one of my hands! AAAAAWWWWWWW....

In other news, Ian, my friend from school who has been living & studying in Jerusalem for a couple of years, came to visit us in Florentin. That was cool. We went out to our favourite hummus bar in town- literally a basic kind of restaurant which sells only hummus, salad and pita. (Here, Eli gives Ian a lesson on how to best scrape the hummus onto the Pita- 'Israeli style', by showing him how it's done.) Ian stayed over the night, and the next day we hung out in toy shops, going nuts, and also looking for a suit, and checking out the arts markets. Twas excellent!

In other news yet again, there was a 12m whale shark which got stuck in fishermens' nets off Haifa! It unfortunately died. But 12 metres!!! An Haifa??! What the hell was it doing here in the middle east? And on the same day mysteriously, a whale calf got washed up on the shore in Haifa as well. What the hell was it thinking? As my cousin Michael so aptly commented, everyone wants a piece of Israel.

Anyway, I'm waking up early to go for a jog tomorrow. I'm back into it again, yay! At long last. I jog past the Carmel markets to the beach and run along the promenade and back again in about 45 mins. Yay! I do have more to write, but I think I've packed a suffiecient amount of stories and pics into one blog. I'll update the rest asap. Promise. :-) Layla Tov xxx