another new year's holiday bites the dust

It's been 4 days in a row -- pretty rare in this country -- of pure holiday time.

But I have to admit, it ain't like the old days. Not so long ago, a holiday was "sacred" -- I mean there was NOWHERE to buy milk. If you forgot to get something before the stores closed, you were outta luck. Especially in Raanana. SuperPharm drugstores (like Shoppers Drugs) have been open on Saturday for years (and many's the time that shopping there was our only form of Saturday entertainment, lazy non-hikers that we are) but there's a limit to the groceries you can buy in a drugstore. And there were no restaurants open in our little burb.

Today, however, we did the Saturday lunch with the in-laws at a Raanana restaurant for the first time, the classic Israeli humus-pita-meat-on-a-skewer sort of fare. It's in our mammoth mall, on the outskirts of the town, and other than this restaurant, the SuperPharm is still the only other establishment open. Not surprisingly, in our semi-religious municipality, the restaurant was not terribly busy. Serious eaters head to other towns where being a pagan is the norm.

Yesterday was a red-letter day for us: We finally took a trip up north a piece, to the Druze village of Daliyat-al-Carmel, up Mount Carmel, near Haifa. It's in a beautifully scenic area Israelis call "Little Switzerland" because of its height and surrounding views and greenery. This only happened because my husband's best friend initiated the outing; left to our own devices, we get as far as the SuperPharm at the top of the street. Or maybe the beach, 15 minutes further west, on a day when I have the energy for a battle with my sand-hating husband.

Surprisingly, it was a marvelously simple outing and wonderful to smell the air outside of the city. After about 40 minutes of driving, we stopped in a wooded area where Druze women were making fresh pita -- the huge, thin kind they call "laffa" -- and selling it with labane (yogurt meets cream cheese) and zaatar (an aromatic spice called hyssop in English, I believe -- smells a lot like oregano, but powdery and more pungent). Yummy. The old toothless crone working the dough and tossing it like a pizza pie was a great photo op too.

Then we drove on to the town which was crawling with other tourists like ourselves looking for local colour and maybe some bargains. I got a huge decorative pillow for my couch for C$14 and our companions bought a framed picture very cheap. After trudging through the hot, crowded streets for an hour, we collapsed at a local restaurant for the typical humus-pita yada yada yada (see above) -- delicious as always. And then home by 5 pm. It was a relaxing day and an easy trip -- great to get out of town to the country.