Sukkot! A forgotten holiday at home! I remember when we used to build our Sukkah every year, order chinese food, and eat outside every night. What an awesome time that was when we were little. Things seem to have gotten busy in the last few years, because its been a while since we put it up. This year, the holiday really came back to me. We don't even have Ulpan this week, that is how prominent the holiday is here. Welcome back into my life Sukkot!
My first encounter regarding Sukkot was ont he way home from work. Crossing through Rabin Square to catch my bus, I found myself in the middle of a Sukkot Market. Stand after stand, selling nothing but lulovs, etrogs, and sukkah decorations. Awesome. I wish I had an excuse to buy everything. There was an etrog inspector, who checked and smelled and approved of everyone's purchase before getting it boxed up. In my excited picture taking of the market, I hear my name and look up to see 2 other WUJS friends, Sarah and Harold also exploring. We looked around together a bit more and even went into the kids section. Harold avidly watched the puppet show and Sarah and I made crafts at the kids table. We made little foil etchings of a smiley lulav and etrog pair. See pictures. The best part about this chance encounter, was when we heard our name called out again. Jaks had been riding the bus home from work, seen us out the bus window, and darted off to join us. Our happy little family wandered around a bit more, then we headed home.
We went out that night with one of Jaks' friends Meytal and a few people from our program, Sarah, Jacob, and Chelsea. We decided to explore a new neighborhood and found some cute bars not too far from us. I have to say though, I really miss the smoking ban...
Friday, many of the people on our program had gone to be with family for the holiday or gotten a host family, but I decided to stay back and just take it easy. Chelsea and I decided to cook a Sukkot meal for ourselves, and went to work menu planning. We decided, since it was Sukkot, we had to base our meal about fruits and vegetables. We settled on quinoa salad with mango. Chelsea had bought quinoa a while back, and my mind kept drifting back to this dish I used to get in the dining hall at Emerson. I never thought I would be making recipes inspired by a cafeteria, but I had this memory of quinoa salad with green onion, mango, etc. We googled around, and found a recipe that sounded good. Scallions, mangos, cilantro, lime, paprika, what could be bad? We went to the shuk, bought the necessary ingredients, and came back to start the cooking process. While cooking, we watched the Olympic votes. Sad to see Chicago get eliminated first, but ohhh well. We decided we needed a makeshift sukkah of some sort, so we strung up some ribbon on our porch and hung necklaces and jewelry and sparkly things. Its no plastic fruit, but it served its purpose. Leehe, our sukkah guest, came over and we feasted on our themed meal, the quinoa salad, lime marinated chicken, and mango juice in our pretend sukkah. Sooo good. In fact, I am eating leftover salad right now, soo glad we doubled the recipe. Since is was Shabbat we lit candles, said the kiddush over our mango juice (its fruit, it counts) and had challah. I am really enjoying our shabbat traditions.
After dinner, we sat down for a game of Texas Hold 'Em. Leehe had never played before, so we taught her. The challenge, though, was playing a poker game without chips. We searched around the apartment for something we had a lot of, and concluded on agorot (Shekel cents), razor blade refills (multiple brands), and credit cards/giftcards. It was pretty funny actually. We played a nice long game, and when Chelsea got out I gave her a nice loan, considering I was rolling is razor blades. She made an amazing comeback actually, wiped Leehe out, and we went head to head. After a long time of going back and forth with the lead, we called it a day and ended the game. Technically, I won because she should have been out a while ago, but we got bored and stopped before finding a real winner. She's gonna laugh if she sees I typed that.
After poker, we watched some episodes of Glee. Stupid show, but I have to admit I enjoy it. Somehow it became 1 am, and we headed to bed for our weekly sleep as late as you can on Shabbat. Now, just taking a nice relaxing day, and may even leave the apartment eventually. We should adopt this Shabbat resting day at home, its quite nice. That's all for now. Check out pix of our Sukkot adventures on the picture site. Later!
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