Taste of the City Food Festival.
Monday 26th May. The Ta’am Ha’Ir (Taste of the City in Hebrew) festival is on. Only just having heard about this from Tal my thoughts are of small food stalls along the riverside and a few hundred people casually walking around sampling tasty treats from Tel Aviv’s wonderful restaurants, sipping on some nice wines and perhaps listening to some cool jazz. Maybe I’m thinking of Ambiwera or something more like a trip to the Yarra Valley and James Morrison blowing his trumpet in the vineyards.
What I see when I get to the HaYarkon Park is on scale to St Kilda Festival or the larger than large numbers that go to Splendour in the Grass at Byron Bay. There are thousands of people here, mostly young teens and well behaved young adults.
The park is huge and thankfully so as it accomodated the near hundreds of food stalls of well known restaurants, food chains, commercialised alcohol and softdrink companies as well as numerous stages with live music, dance, performance, competitions and much more. This festival runs 4 consecutive nights and again was a welcome eye and mouth opener. More from Isragirls site here.
Staff at this stall love my mother so much they got t-shirts made.
Me and Tal sample a chicken and beef wrap.
Thankfully nothing too garlicky has been eaten yet and we say hello to as Israeli hottie.
The Carlsberg spaceship becons us like moths to a bright light.
Nemiroff Vodka from the Ukraine. Not great, but not bad either. They only made this one very large bottle that everyone drinks from. Makes getting it anywhere else rather difficult.
One of the main stages where silly people dance like silly people in a competition for silly people.
Me and Tal get into second course or chicken skewers, beef on cinnimon stick and some barley rice. I have a large bottle of carlsberg beer under my arm.
I line up for a pizza in a cone. Those Italians! What will they think of next? Notice the guy to the right with Cookie Monster on his shirt! How silly. He looks at least 22 years old! Still wearing a Cookie Monster shirt?!?!?! Why? Grow up already!
Manta Ray seafood. I see food… I eat it! nyuk nyuk nyuk.
The Israeli Biggest Loser stand where you can get a healthy salad. Come on!!!! Come to a food festival and eat a salad???? Stay at home and nibble on a carrot I say! Come to a food festival and eat a nutella pancake with coconut and chopped nuts. mmmmm.
She puts the nuts on the pancake.
Me and Tal eat our nutella pancake in a cone cup (clever!) and drink it down with a nice cold beer.
Me and Tal think of another reason why we shouldn’t have eaten that pancake and should have got a nice salad.
A performance group similar to Stomp bang away with large drums, fire sticks…the usual who-ha.
Something Tal and I wish we were banging. Get it? Because of the drummers above? Referential comedy people.
Shots of the crappy Ukraine vodka. Mine was a honey pepper flavoured one with a twist of potato farmer plowing his field with ox.
We do our best to hitch a ride back to Tel Aviv but as people smell our breath they take off in a hurry. Not even some sexy leg from Tal is enough to secure a ride. We eventually find a taxi driver with no smellbuds and get a ride home. BURP!!!!!
funny. The description of your vodka shot is perfect.