Happy New Year - but nobody notices

"10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - Happy New Year!!" Imagine the New Year starts and nobody notices it.
Bars in the hip neighbourhood Florentin were full last night, but in our bar, only the 7 of us at one table were counting the last seconds of the old year and clinking glasses at midnight. Guests at the surrounding tables did not even pause in their conversations, they just went out on a normal Thursday evening (weekend is Fri+Sat). A few bars had some "2016" decorations in their windows, so apparently some people did celebrate New Year's Eve even in Tel Aviv, but is definitely not the standard. Well, this should not be too surprising, because the new year (rosh hashana) of the Jewish calendar starts in autumn. But somehow I had assumed that the lively metropolis of Tel Aviv would not want to omit such an opportunity to celebrate. The question if "New Year's Eve is someone else's party" is discussed in the following newspaper article: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.566236.

However, we enjoyed a very nice evening in Tel Aviv in a group of 2 Israelis and 5 foreigners. Before the drinks in Florentin, we had a delicious dinner in Jaffa in an authentic Arabic restaurant (Abu El Abed - I can highly recommend it) which was neither touristic nor crowded nor expensive. Even before we ordered food, they brought us lots of amazing appetizers like tabouleh, vegetables, spicy sauces, hummus... Later we had fried cauliflower in lemon-garlic sauce, stuffed vegetables and wine leaves, labane (yogurt-cheese with spices), mokka with cardamom or black tea with nana and baklava - I am sure I will come back.

Finally: Happy New Year to all readers of my blog!

Friday in Tel Aviv

We spent a fantastic day in Tel Aviv :-) At noon, we listened to an impressive chamber music concert of the Musethica Chamber Music Festival in the conservatory. (Just arrived in a new country, I knew about the festival thanks to my cousin who works for this association.)
With a colleague whom we met already at a summer school last year we walked through a park along the river to the former harbour of Tel Aviv, but now there are rather cafés and a market hall for specialities. Then we walked along the beautiful beach and through streets that were also mentioned in the dialogues of our Hebrew textbook from the course that we took in Germany :-)
In a café we ate delicious salads, for example tabouleh with bulgur, vegetables, pecan nuts, parsley, mint - and of course tchina (tahini), a sesame paste that is added to seemingly nearly every dish.
Sunset at the beach was beautiful.

First day at the Weizmann Institute

What a nice first day at the Weizmann Institute of Science! We walked 5min from our apartment to the main gate and then 10min over the campus that looks like a botanical garden :-) We were welcomed very nicely by the physicists and secretaries of the physics department. In the offices of the Feinberg Graduate School (where PhD students and postdocs are registered), the housing service and the bank, we signed many forms (in the bank at least 30(!) times) and received a lot of useful advice. At the Feinberg office we were even asked how we and our relatives feel in the currently tough political situation.

After the bureaucracy, we had lunch with our new colleagues in one of the university restaurants. The food was really tasty and it is great that lunch together is also common in this group.

Some new offices were installed in the library and we could start working there.

The first grocery shopping

Knowing that shops close on Friday afternoon, we made sure to get our grocery shopping done before. We walked through the heat to a shopping centre close to railway station of Rehovot. In the first supermarket, we did not find everything we were looking for, but the second one is much larger and sells a good variety of local and international product. We were most impressed by the two shelves full of different kinds of hummus (mashed chickpeas with tahini (a paste of sesame), olive oil, garlic and other ingredients), baskets full of spices like on a bazar and fruits: pomegranate, persimmon, cactus figs and bananas that looked as if they had been grown here.

However, the prices for basic food and household goods are 1.5-2 times more expensive than in Germany!

Bread is not only sold in supermarkets, but also in bakeries. Baguette, bagels, pita, some kind of whole-grain bread and much more can be found here. Bakeries also sell warm, filled pastry - very tasty :-)