Israeli winters may be mild, but the houses here aren’t built for any weather other than summer – tons of windows, tile flooring and lack of proper heating makes winters here colder than in Zagreb, where temperatures can drop 20 degrees below zero during winter. That said, forcing myself to get up in the morning from under the warm blanket and step into the cold bathroom is a struggle every morning.

That’s where the little things come in. Seeing Mr. Incredible holding my shower sponge makes me smile every morning, no matter how grumpy I am. That and switching on the bathroom heater 10 minutes before actually going in for the shower.

So to mark the new 2012, I’m opening yet another chapter for Newchapter-TLV and giving it a new look!

To mark the beginning of new year, today I have (in company of two friends) tried eating in a place I haven’t been to before – Mizlala by Meir Adoni.

It’s located in Nachlat Binyamin, a short walk from Rotschild Boulevard and has very clean, minimalist design, with lots of white and large glass surfaces giving it an airy and expensive look. However, the business menu ranging from 95 – 115 ILS was really good value for money – it included a soup with a bread of choice, a starter, a main, cold and hot drink.

The soup of the day was lentils and it was delicious. I followed it with a starter of cauliflower florets, grilled onion, green broad beans in curry yogurt and organic lentils which was amazing and I combined it with white leaven bread served with paprika & garlic aioli.

After this amazing starter, the main was a bit of a disappointment. I ordered steak & egg served on white beans, spinach, onion and bacon in chicken broth & cream sauce.

The steak was good and the sauce was OK but it wasn’t as special as the soup and starter were. The espresso I finished the meal with was good, the service was great and I would definitely go there again.

Check out the restaurant’s website and if you’re in Tel Aviv, it’s definitely worth trying it out!

I have since lost the ability to fall asleep anywhere and under any conditions, though TV still awakens the deeply embedded Pavlov’s reflex - switch it on in the evening and I’m out like a light, sometimes as early as movie’s opening credits… :)

All my weird sleeping habits and experiences aside, my closest encounter with narcolepsy was watching Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho”. Until we got Seven, that is. I swear to god, that cat can fall asleep anywhere and anytime in mere seconds, in the weirdest and most uncomfortable looking positions.

As you can witness from a few photos below…

This is how I sleep most of the time actually :)

How this pose was comfortable enough to fall asleep in remains a mystery…

One-Two, One-Two, One-Zzzzzzz….

Sun salutation you say? Of course I can do it!

How does she do it? Seriously?

Even then I felt the need to re-decorate the whole place to be exactly as I wanted it to be, but I never had enough money to do any serious changes, there were always more important things in the way, like a trip abroad or a few new pairs of shoes…

Ireland did nothing to quench my nesting urges as both apartments I’ve lived in there were fully furnished (for the first one I had to buy book shelves, but that was about it) but the second one was quite perfect as it was. As I mentioned in my previous post, Israeli rented apartments usually come unfurnished – the first one entirely lacked living room furniture but had almost everything else, so a year ago we bought a beautiful L-shaped sofa and coffee table. Though the apartment was really nice, it somehow never really felt like home and I didn’t feel the need to add any more personal touches to it.

Then, 3 weeks ago we moved to our current apartment, which had a fully equipped kitchen and a big-ass closet in the bedroom. And that was it. Commence nesting phase: stage one. First item on the to-do list was obviously a bed. We shopped around for a mattress + bed for a bit and were completely baffled by the sheer amount of available choices (not to mention the wild price range) – even I, who am impulse shopping personified, couldn’t decide! Eventually, after lot of discussions, price comparisons and help of the master negotiator (i.e. Amit’s mum), we settled on a bed and mattress but had to wait full 2 weeks after moving in for it to be delivered. Have I ever mentioned before that I’m not a very patient person? Sleeping on the living room floor for 2 weeks hasn’t done much for my “sunny disposition”, especially in the mornings. However, earlier this week the bed finally arrived and the joys of a full night’s sleep were rediscovered.

With that out of the way, we could refocus on completing the furnishing of the rest of the apartment. Commence nesting phase: stage two. We spent a whole morning on Hertsel st. in south Tel Aviv looking for various items but coming home with only bar stools that were the last items needed to complete our kitchen. It was a bit disappointing but we knew there was one final place to turn to for the remaining items we needed.

Commence nesting phase: stage three, also known as The Ikea Invasion. I’ve raided Ikea before, mostly commonly the one in Graz, but I’ve also been in the one in Budapest and the one in Belfast. I usually bought small storage solutions, bed linen, small kitchen items, candleholders and similar things. This time, we bought several bookshelves, nightstands, side table, TV stand, shoe storage, work desk and a whole bunch of other, smaller items. Since most of the big stuff was too big to fit in the car and neither of us saw the appeal of carrying all of it up the stairs in 30+ degrees anyway, we ordered delivery for them. They are scheduled to arrive next week when the final nesting phase will commence and our apartment will finally feel 100% like home! :)

There's no place like home

I remember everyone bitching about how expensive it is to live in Dublin. It really is and it was especially pricey in 2008 when rents were even higher than in London. They have gone down somewhat since, but Dublin still remains an expensive city to live in.

Tel Aviv is a whole different story and not necessarily in a good way. The rents here are roughly on the level of Dublin prices. However, I think I can safely say that I am not in Kansas anymore…

In short, some of the key differences are the following:

In Dublin renting is regulated. In Tel Aviv the renting market resembles, if anything, the wild west. Dublin apartments, or at least those I was considering, were reasonably sized. In Tel Aviv, you’re never sure what to expect from the apartment you’re going to see, i.e. you can’t be sure if the owner kept the apartment at it’s original size or got greedy and decided to split a perfectly normal-sized apartment into 2-3 shoe boxes that he just calls apartments, with potentially some really weird layouts. In Dublin, most apartments are renovated (before anyone objects, I didn’t say tastefully, just renovated). In Tel Aviv, most people renting out apartments seem to think “renovation” is a dirty word. In Dublin most apartments come fully furnished. In Tel Aviv they range from partially furnished (if you’re lucky), completely bare, to you-wish-they-were-completely-bare (if you’re unlucky).

In the 2-month hunt, we’ve seen quite a few places but a couple of them really stood out:

Exhibit 1

An apartment that literally hasn’t been touched since the 60s. It was so disgusting I was afraid to even brush against anything there. Some of my favorite features of this “jewel” were:

• Small guest room with no windows but with a sink. WTF???
• Bathroom so tiny that it fit half a bathtub, one of those small top-loading washing machines and a sink, leaving enough room for one person to stand in there.
• Huge 60s kitchen with tons of storage but surprisingly no oven or stove or room to put it in.
• One of the biggest cockroaches I’ve seen in my life.

Charming, no? The best thing was that the owner was asking the price that we’d consider paying for a newly renovated place in the same location.

Exhibit 2

Another “favorite” was the apartment that was advertised as 60 m2 with 2 bedrooms and a spacious living room. There was nothing spacious about the living room, and the apartment was 50 m2 at most, but it did have some interesting features, such as:

• Old and rusty bars on all the windows in true prison-style (yes, it was 1^st floor, but still).
• Two tiny bedrooms with even tinier windows that I’m not sure how someone would even fit the smallest double bed in there let alone a closet.
• Kitchen that on first glance doesn’t have a window, but on the second one you realize it does but that it opens to a service room/pantry which has a window that actually opens to outside. Again, WTF???

After seeing these two gems in just two days, I vetoed seeing any more apartments that had no pictures in ads because these “Exhibits” just proved my old theory that if pictures aren’t there, it’s for a reason.

Any way, after getting more and more frustrated and extending our current lease for an extra month, we finally managed to find our new place which (so far) had no nasty surprises, was fully renovated 5 years ago (and will be freshly painted before we move in), is in the same neighborhood, comes partially furnished and most importantly with a normal-sized kitchen :).

My kitchen

It still managed to have one feature I’ve never seen before: the air conditioner unit in the bedroom is in the closet! However, as it doesn’t even come into the top 10 of weird things I’ve seen, I’m sure we’ll manage…

I have written about creating Treasuries on Etsy before, and I still do it from time to time, whenever I feel like I need to jog the creative part of my brain a little.

Two days ago, I was feeling a bit restless so I ended up browsing on Etsy and came up with so many beautiful and interesting items that were just calling out to be combined together in a collection. Well, actually they were calling out to me to buy them, but since I am still in a financially-challenged period that wasn’t an option. But the alternative option is still loads of fun – combine them in a Treasury list on Etsy so other people can discover them as well, love them too and maybe even buy them. :) I saved the treasury and forgot all about it, until this afternoon when I started getting notifications about some people adding me to their circles (Yes, Etsy had circles before there was Google+) and I couldn’t understand what was happening until i went to the website and saw that my treasury from two days ago – Bold Statements – was on the Front Page!

Now, I know that this is not supposed to be a big deal, but somehow it made my day :) As this is the second time it happened, I guess I’ll just keep going and aim for some more Front Pages, just to see if I can do it…

Etsy Front Page – Bold Statements

I’ve had managers who bragged about needing only 3 hours of sleep per night and I have some friends who frequently say “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” when I ask them how they can work 12 hours a day and then go out and party only to do the same thing the next day? I might have been able to pull that kind of thing of in the late 90s, but I find that I do need more sleep these days and that my levels of crankiness if I don’t get enough have been steadily going up over the years…

If you asked Amit, I’m sure he’d tell you that there is a wide range of things that can make me cranky, but I really think that for me sleep deprivation is definitely the worst kind of crankiness there is. When sleep deprived, I am moody, impatient more cynical than usual (and that says a lot right there) and generally simply not a joy to be around. So how come I’m sleep deprived, you’re asking? The reason for this is a cute, cuddly, furry little thing called Seven. She is only cute and cuddly when she wants to be.

The Queen of the House

When she doesn’t want to be cute and cuddly, she’s a menace on four legs and there is nothing and no one that can stop her from getting her way. And as good old Mr. Murphy would have it, this “charming” quality shines through at its brightest around 5 AM.
It will all start out sweetly and rather discreetly: she’ll be kissing me on the nose or nudging me on the chin with her head, while purring like an old Wartburg. If this doesn’t result in the desired scenario (I’m awake and petting her until she gets bored and goes away), she’ll move on to step two. Sitting on the pillow above my head, touching my face with her paws. If this is still ineffective, then next step for Seven is rubbing her side against my back and my legs and trying to tickle me into waking up. If none of these slightly less-intrusive methods have resulted in the attention she wanted, she’ll try something better. Running and jumping on top of me.

At this point I want to clarify that because I’m a relatively light sleeper (unless I’m dead tired), I’m usually awake after the nudge on the chin but try to pretend to still be asleep to see how far she’ll take it and to avoid giving her ideas that she rules me. Well, she does, but she doesn’t need to have that knowledge reconfirmed all the time, right?

Anyway, after the running and jumping commences the final stage – biting. This is the point when she gets no more mercy and gets thrown out of bed. She can be “evicted” by a reflex kick (for which I always apologize, because no matter the rude awakening I still feel bad about it), or by me sitting up and putting her down on the floor. Usually, several times before she gives up only to go to the other side of the bed and start the whole process again with Amit.

These things happened to me with my previous cat as well and most of my friends who have cats have been able to give similar examples (aside from the lucky ones that have doors on their bedrooms and are able to keep their cats out – ah, the joys of living in an open-plan apartment…) of sleep deprivation once a kitten joins the household. So why did we consciously decide to subject ourselves to this (almost) nightly torture ritual? Errrrrr… Well… Hmmmmm… There is no real argument I can give there, except for one completely irrational and emotional response: Could you resist this cuteness?

Monster in disguise

When she looks at me like this and purrs and cuddles and plays nice, all is forgiven. Until the next sleepless night. And then the cycle continues…

1. Start learning a new language, preferably one that involves learning a new script too.
2. Complete the 1st level course.
3. Get all excited because you can carry a simple conversation and decipher menus in restaurants.
4. Elated from the successes listed under no.3, buy a women’s magazine to practice the language some more.
5. Start reading the said magazine.
6. Stop reading the damn thing after you’ve realized that it took you more than half an hour to read a couple of sentences. Which you know are written in the simple language. And which have just enriched your life with invaluable information such Kim Kardashian’s beauty tips.

Congratulations! You’ve now officially succeeded in making yourself feel stupid(er) in 6 easy steps!

Israeli edition of Cosmo

This 6-step, easy-to-follow program can but need not be followed by one or all of the below listed steps, in no particular order:

• Give the magazine to your cat/dog to chew so you can at least get some value for your money and prevent the cat/dog from chewing something that might be important to you.
• Make paper planes/paper balls and toss them to your cat/dog to play with, for the same reason as given above.
• Buy the same magazine in a different language (not your mother tongue – no cheating!) you actually know in order to verify whether your amazing, newly discovered slow-reading abilities span over several languages or are limited just to the new one.
• Use magazine to light a fire. Not the forest kind. The kind for a barbecue. Or in your fireplace, if applicable. Just want to make it clear that I’m not advocating pyromania. Is it clear, I wonder?
• Try reading kid’s books instead of women’s magazines in the language you’re learning. They still might be too advanced for you (Slightly depressing thought, unless of course you’re a kid. Not mentally, literally.), but on the other hand you can keep them and they might come in useful at some point.

It’s thick and unruly and I’ve never been very patient, even as a little girl. I used to hate hair pins and any other stuff my mum and grandma used to put in my hair to try to hold it in place. Which is why, for the majority of my early childhood, I ended up having short hair so that my habit of pulling out all hairpins within minutes of them being placed on my head was not a problem.

"The original" hair :)

The hair thing eased up a bit throughout elementary school, when I mostly had shoulder-length hair and left it alone.

Then came high school with all the awkward stages that go with it, such as an attempt at the goth look, hiding behind baggy clothes, a hippie phase (which demanded much rummaging through mum’s and grandma’s closets for things like grandma’s 70s-style jewelry, bell bottoms, flower peasant tops and such) and a grunge phase (much simpler and less maintenance – jeans, plaid shirts or dad’s sweaters and that was it). And, of course, my first attempts at dying my hair. I’ve been watching my mum do it and some of my friends had drastically changed their hair and I was dying to do the same (no pun intended). My mum vetoed anything other than natural dyes and so my henna-period commenced. I still remember the awful stench of the henna+water, henna+coffee or henna+chamomile tea (I wanted to see if adding Turkish coffee to the usual henna mixture would make it darker or chamomile would make it lighter. I’d love to be able to say I remember if it did. I don’t). All I remember is that I used to spread that stinky mass on my hair, wrap it in a towel and a plastic bag (futile attempts to protect the pillowcases) and go to sleep.

At university I began trying out color shampoos, but because they had no hydrogen peroxide in them at all, my hair color never varied much from the base color – I was just succeeding in changing the hue of it.

When I started working, I finally had all the money I needed to experiment with actual hair dyes. Yey! And so it started. Red was the first choice and it looked good. Until I saw Madonna’s Frozen video and decided black is the way to go. It wasn’t. And it took ages until I was rid of the color. Ugh.

But it wasn’t until I met Andreja that my hair experiments really began. For one thing, before I met her no-one would cut my hair short, no matter how many times I asked or how many times I repeated it really was what I wanted. They’d always say things like “You’re gonna regret it but there won’t be going back once it’s chopped off” or “But your hair’s so beautiful”. When I met her, Andreja had short and multicolored hair so I figured she might actually do what I wanted and asked to have my hair boy short. She said OK, dyed my hair a light, bronzy-red and cut it boy short, just like I wanted. I LOVED it! That haircut/hair dye marked the beginning of an 8-year experimental phase where Andreja kept my hair short and experimented with different cuts and lengths without letting it grow too long. She also played with all hair colors or color combinations either of us could think of. We even made a deal at one point. As I was coming to see her once a month, one month I’d be able to say what I wanted and the other month she’d do whatever she wanted. I had a Beckham-cut, a Mohawk, long in the front and short in the back, long on one side and short on other side, military-style short… And the colors, oh the colors… I was all shades of red, I had black and red stripes, I had black hair with a bright pink streak, black with a bright blue streak, pink hair, purple hair, orange hair, multicolored blonde-orange-pink hair, white-blonde (triple bleached to get out all of the red pigment out of my hair – ouch!)… I think green was the only color we didn’t try.

Moving to Ireland meant I had to put an end to the experiments, sadly… I wasn’t coming to Croatia every month and there’s nothing uglier than a neglected short haircut. So I grew my hair out a bit and kept the colors pretty neutral for the first year. Then I decided I wanted to go lighter and bleached it myself, burning half of my hair in the process, so I had to have more than half of it chopped off and went back to red after a long cooling-off-of-red period. It ended up being really fun.

By the time I moved from Ireland to Israel, my hair had grown a bit, to mid-ear level. However, I still felt my hair was screaming “foreigner” because in Israel women wear their hair long. And by long, I do mean long, like halfway down their back. And they wear it down, even in the August heat. I couldn’t and still can’t understand it – I was dying of heat even with this, by local standards short cut. Since last August I’ve decided to do the “boring” thing, ditch the “foreigner” look and grow out my hair, not to fit in but so I can pull my hair up once the summer heat comes back. Right now it’s at a length when I usually used to give up and chop it off very short, but I have no such plans as I can pull it up and suffer less when leaving the house in the middle of the day. It’s still not long enough to braid during the night so it doesn’t stick to my neck and face, but if I’m patient enough, maybe that will come too… Did I already say I’m not a very patient person? :)

I’m sure at some point I’ll get bored of the same, or at least similar, hair styles/color for months and months, but for now I’m hanging in there. Maybe I should just open a hair salon and get it over with? I know I don’t have professional training, but shouldn’t all the experience count for something? I could be the hair dyer, of course after getting some instructions on the use of hydrogen peroxide, and also do the marketing for it… Andreja, what do you say about opening a business together ;)?

Dark purple (2001)

Short light hair with one long bleached streak (2002)

Magenta (2002)

Black&red stripes (2003)

Black with magenta streak (2004)

Multicolored, pink-orange-blonde (2004)

Orange (2004)

Fuchsia hair with T-shirt and bag to match :) (2005?)

Purple (2006)

White blonde (2008)

Slightly longer hair after a long time (2009)

Could you resist this cuteness?

The love-at-first-sight photo

But let me go back a bit…

I used to have a cat years ago, a gorgeous Russian Blue called Vladimir who was adorable but a handful. And by a handful I don’t just mean meowing loudly when he wanted something or waking me up at 3 am because he wanted to play or refusing to drink water from his bowl but only straight from the tap. He was aggressive when he felt he was neglected. He actually managed to push the TV (granted, a small one) from the shelf to the floor and when I came home I found him proudly perched on top of it as if saying, “See? This is what you get for leaving me all alone all the time.”  That was the biggest problem – he couldn’t handle being on his own all day while I worked. So eventually I had to give him away to a family with a house where there was always someone home. I cried for a week and decided not to take another pet as long as I’m working insane hours.

On the other hand, Amit never had a cat before. Growing up, he had dogs and ever since I’ve known him has declared himself to be a dog person. When we moved to Israel, we started talking about getting a pet and decided it would be a cat and that we would adopt one from a shelter. At the time he was saying that he’s going to have more of an observatory role while he expects me to bond with the cat, as I’m the cat person of the house. Well, let’s just say that things didn’t work quite like that… :)

We took our kitten home on a Friday morning, straight from the vet’s where she had her legs re-bandaged. She was tiny and helpless but very brave. She didn’t move from my lap the whole weekend, just snoozed there and purred. There is seriously nothing like having this little ball of fur that just fits into your hand curl up on you and sleep away. It’s better than any anti-anxiety medication, seriously. :)

We were a bit worried at first because she had two legs in bandages and couldn’t fully use them, that she wouldn’t grow up to have a good quality of life. We needn’t have worried. After the second re-bandaging, I found her in a corner of the sofa lying next to one of the bandages she chewed off her front leg, grooming her leg. The leg had no hair on it and she was limping pretty badly, but already a couple of days later she started using it more and a week later, the hair grew back and she was using it almost as if nothing ever happened.

The only thing funnier than watching her grow, explore her surroundings and her abilities was watching her turn Amit into a real kitten-softie. She won him over so completely that you’d never be able to tell he was not really a cat person before. We are both totally smitten with her and so are most of our friends who have met her.

There's very few things more relaxing than having a kitten nap on you…

Today she’s a fully functioning little menace, climbing everywhere and jumping on everything and everyone.

She loves computers – walking on them, playing with things moving on the screen, napping on them… If she feels I should be giving attention to her instead of to my laptop, she’ll jump on the keyboard and just sit there until she gets petted. A new and alternative strategy is jumping on my lap and putting one of her paws on my face in a “Hey, I’m over here!” kind of way.

Hey, I'm napping here! Whatever it was you were doing can wait…

She loves shoes and if Amit leaves his shoes where she can get to them she’ll leave her favorite toys inside them.

She follows us around the apartment, hiding behind corners and jumping at us as we come around them.

She is very playful and has tons of energy to the point that even playing with her for 45 minutes before going to bed doesn’t guarantee that I won’t be woken up at 5 am with her biting my ankles. At that particular moment, I wonder why the hell did I agree to do this again. But then I come home from work and she comes to snuggle up to me, gives me a kiss and settles on my lap for a napping-purring session and I remember it’s all worth it…

Oh, and the name? Her name is Seven of Nine, or simply Seven. People who have watched Star Trek don’t really need explanations, and those who haven’t can find out who Seven of Nine is here.

Honestly, the responsibility partially lies with our friend Hakim who named his cat Jean-Luc (Picard) which we both thought was really cool and decided we want a Trekkie name for our kitten too, if we ever have one. Then we saw her with all the bandages and while they aren’t really equal to cybernetic implants, it somehow made sense to us…

Anyway, someone once said that dogs have owners, but cats have staff. We’ve definitely been hired!

Playing is hard work but someone's gotta do it