Monday, April 10, 2006

Tell Aviv that I'm going to Tel Aviv and NEW CHANCELLOR

New Chancellor of the Seminary named. Dark horse, perhaps? I've never heard of Arnold M. Eisen before I read the news today (a few days after it happened... I had to find it out from a Ramah Poconos e-mail). He's not a rabbi; other than that and everything else in the wikipedia article, I know nothing about him, including his policies. This should be interesting.

Ok, for today's thing. We went to Tel Aviv for the day and got lost a number of times. We had lunch/dinner (a meal at 4:30 PM... It's really up in the air what meal it actually was, but it replaced both) at a Kosher Argentinian Steakhouse (!) called El Gaucho, where I had Sirloin steak. The wonder of this is that anywhere outside of Israel, Sirloin is never kosher. Why? because of the Sciatic Nerve:

"Sephardi Jews permit the rear portions of an animal after proper Halakhic removal of the sciatic nerve, while many Ashkenazi Jews do not. This is not because of different interpretations of the law; rather, slaughterhouses could not find adequate skills for correct removal of the sciatic nerve and found it more economical to separate the hindquarters and sell them as non-kosher meat." -Wikipedia.

Only in Israel would they make the difficult attempt to remove the sciatic nerve (I saw the guy chopping it off the raw meat in front of us (I assume that this is what he was doing, but he might have been removing the fat)). Therefore this is the first time I had sirloin. I really enjoyed it, along with the Chorizo (also something usually not kosher, and usually from a pig), and the empendas (same situation). Note that the latter two were shared among us three.

We went to Yafo (Jaffa), which was our first destination when we arrived in Israel for birthright last year, to the place where the prophet Jonah made passage to Tarshish (Tarsus) and was later spit out by the Big Fish. Also saw a whole bunch of Napoleon statues directing us to an Archeology exhibit. I don't know how the two are even connected, nor if Napoleon ever set foot in Yafo. I also heard two Muezzins doing the Adhan about 30 seconds apart, the second began while the first was still doing it. Why two mosques were next to each other, I don't know, but I didn't notice if one of the Adhans included the line about Ali being Viceregent or something like that (which is part of Shia but not Sunni Adhans, but are otherwise identical, or so is my understanding).

For some reason I don't have so much to say. Bye.

No comments: