Yoga by the Sea

There are quite a few yoga studios here in Tel Aviv and my friend Katie found a pretty good one last year.  We had both just arrived so it was a fun thing for us to do together.  But...yoga lessons get pretty expensive, especially in Tel Aviv!  Well, that studio went under (ha! that is funny because it was located in a basement!).  So Katie and I haven't really gone to yoga together since last summer.

Last week I heard about yoga lessons in the park...by the Sea...at sunset.  :)  The announcement was in one of a hand-full of English language listserves that I'm on but, like most everything on the that list, when you follow the link for more details it is only in Hebrew.  Still, Katie and I decided to give it a try.

The park is about 200 or 300 yards long, so we showed up at 630pm and started looking for someone else with a yoga mat.  When we couldn't find them we decided to try the phone number listed on the all Hebrew page.  A really nice girl answered and told us they'd moved the class back to 7pm (no surprise), and exactly where to meet.

The class was only 5 students and the instructor.  The sun set during the class and it surprisingly wasn't so hot, but it was humid.  At about the time we were doing warrior 2 (kind of squatting down with your arms out like you have a bow and arrow), a bridge (hands and feet on the ground, stomach to the sky, bent backwards like a bridge), and some other pose were you balance on your shoulders with your feet in the air...when we were doing those, small groups decided they'd stop and watch.  This was the intimidating part of this class, especially for someone who hasn't done yoga in a year.  We may have been the evening entertainment for some of the groups on the beach, but I think it was worth it.

She stuck in her thumb and pulled out a cherry!

It is cherry season again in Israel.  This is one of the things we like about it here – we always and only eat what is in season.  I think we’ve bought one bag of frozen veggies, and it is still in the freezer.  Otherwise, the market is full of the freshest produce when it is in season.
We really should have tracked the seasons so that we can tell people who are coming when to expect what (and when to be ready to not be able to find something).  Strawberry season, for example, is March/April and avocado season ends just before 5 de Mayo.  But anyway – now it is cherry season which means most of the fruit stands in the market have huge piles of cherries! 

There were wild fires on the way up there.

Last year I made my grandma Schuett’s cherry soup!  I don’t think I ever ate it when she made it, but I inherited her recipe and it was delicious!  I bought a kilo of fresh cherries (I don’t know how much that is in pounds…I’ve been out of the States for long enough to not know how much a pound of cherries or chicken is.  But I know how much 200 grams of cheese is and how much 1 kilo of cherries is.  They will take you about 45 minutes to an hour to pit with a hairpin – another cherry secret passed down from Grandma.).

This year I thought I’d take it a step further.  It wasn’t enough to make my own cherry pie from scratch, or pit my own fresh cherries…no…this year – I wanted to pick my own cherries!

My friend Claudia and I drove to the northern most Northern tip of Israel (we were literally only kilometers from Jordan and kilometers from Syria – no, I don’t know how far in miles).  There was a fruit orchard with tons of cherry trees and…ready for it…RASPBERRY BUSHES!  These were the only bushes I’ve seen in all of Israel…and there were fewer bushes for the whole country than there were in my backyard growing up.  Nonetheless, after crawling on my hands and knees for 30 minutes, I found 12 raspberries!  The 20 seconds that those little berries dripped down my fingers and melted in my mouth were magical!

Anyway – back to those cherries.  At first we were like kids in Willie Wanka’s factory, eating cherries off of every tree.  Then we started to get full, so we got pickier and only ate the darkest berries that were warmed with sunlight.  Then we would only eat one from a tree – unless that one tasted good, then we’d try another from that tree.  Eventually my stomach started to hurt, so we moved to the raspberries and eventually decided to fill my bucket with the cherries (instead of my mouth).

I think I succeeded in eating my fill!  And then, with the kilo of cherries I hand-picked myself, I made a delicious cherry pie!  Mmmm.

We always see Israelis jumping into flower beds or behind bushes to take pictures.  This is our ode to the Isreali cherry pickers.