Pretty soon after our little family returned to Israel towards the end of last month, Daniel attempted to re-start the Talk.
I'm so sick of the Talk. The Talk of Where to Go after Next Year. My life plans have been in flux ever since college graduation. According to my five-year life plan at that point (in that distant year of antiquity: 2004), I would be currently married to a traditional Cantonese boy I'd been dating for three years by that point, living somewhere in the U.S., and teaching English/literature at an inner city public school. I did not foresee meeting a half-Jewish/half-Irish red-headed boy, getting married to him, moving as if on the run from Pittsburgh to China to Seattle to Taiwan to Israel in less than two years' timespan, and not working professionally but rather squeezing out human beings from my body twice and guarding the home and hearth while trying to keep said human beings alive and--on my more ambitious days--shaping them to be future productive members of society.
The biggest lesson I took from this near-decade of living is to not bother making plans. Is that a healthy attitude? I don't know, and by this point, I don't really care. Still, I guess it's necessary to make some kind of vague gesture towards some sense of direction. And that direction seems to be out of Israel after the next year or so.
Which got me thinking about the things that I would miss here, and one of the biggest things would be this particular ice cream brand that Declan helped me discovered. I used to go nuts for Magnums, at 12 shekels a bar, after my first encounter with this ultra-rich ice cream brand in Paris during the summer of 2005. On one afternoon, however, Declan caught sight of a purple-wrapped ice cream bar and was quite insistent about getting that over a Magnum. It turned out to be two shekels less, and what's more, was freaking delicious. It has a hard chocolate shell, vanilla ice cream of a more watery kind (which I prefer...more thirst-quenching), and a hard milk chocolate core. My instantaneous switching of brand loyalty from that moment on is proof that product quality is more compelling than any marketing tactic.
However. When I returned from Europe this time, and caved to a craving for this specific ice cream, I went to my source as usual--the park across the street from our apartment. And could not find it anywhere. Not at that park. Not at the convenience store one block away from that park. Not at four other ice cream stands in Merkaz HaCarmel, one of the most happening shopping areas in Haifa.
What. Is. Going. On. The sad thing is I don't even know what this ice cream is called. So I can't even request it by name. I could only describe it by how it looks and tastes like the illiterate I am, and met every time with "No, we don't carry that anymore." Anymore! Which means it did exist!
I tried googling it to find an image of this longed-for ice cream, with admittedly vague terms such as "Israeli ice cream" and "purple wrapper" and got a bunch of pictures of gelato and goat-milk yogurt. I tried "Unilever" and "Strauss", which are popular ice cream brands here. And got nothing. Nothing!!
Well, I did find a box of the same brand and similar-style-bars at the supermarket the other day. But it doesn't have a milk chocolate core. It has a bunch of food-coloring-rich funfetti sprinkles. Disgusting.
One thing for me to start missing about Israel already, I guess. Why did the entire country suddenly stop carrying my favorite ice cream bar in all the world during my two-week absence? Israel, why do you like to tease me so?
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