EGAD

Yummy

I'm going to go ahead and add ice cream to the list of things that Israel should really be known better for.

Apparently it's a big sign that Spring has arrived when ice cream shops start popping up, I guess trying to position themselves for the hot season. Over the past month, two ice cream parlors have opened on the same block as an established one, and they all seem to be busy. Very dangerous, as I have to walk by all three in quick succession to get to the grocery store, market, or bank.

Not that ice cream wasn't already widely available. Every street in every town in Israel has several sidewalk snack shops, which mainly subsist by selling bags of nuts a handful at a time off of warming trays. They often have some magazines and drinks, too, and the bigger ones double as liquor stores. But they all have at least one ice cream case, too.

The new shops are different. They make the ice cream in the back, in dozens of flavors, in batches large enough to last two or three days, tops. You can't take three steps into one without being issued samples of the latest five or six flavors. Which are, I might add, absolutely delightful. I wonder, though, about the rather shocking density of these shops. Really, can any single block hope to support three of them?

This isn't the first time I've noticed Israeli businesses seeming to adopt some odd theory of safety in numbers. The block next to my dorm is dominated by two car rental lots. A couple of blocks down you'll find all five bars within easy walking distance of the dorm, lined up side by side. A couple of lights past that is the corner dominated by shoe stores. The Israelis I've pointed this out to all acted like it was the first time they'd noticed anything of the sort.

As an aside, while it's no secret that I am a bit of a geek, sometimes I even shock myself. Walking back from a groceries-and-ice-cream run tonight, I caught myself using calculus to estimate the dollar value of my cone. Being too lazy to divide by 4.3 in my head, I divided by four and then started doing expansions to work out the error. This may be a side effect of the high school-flashback-inducing problem that's been occupying me in the lab this week. It involves lots of analytic geometry and simple algebra, in annoying quantities. Yay, optics.