The food shopping experience in Israel is much different from how we buy our groceries in America. We have very few American-style supermarkets, and none near our apartment. Televivians buy food from smaller supermarkets, about the size of a Trader Joe’s, when they are close enough, and from dozens of small grocery stores all over the city. In fact, about 100 yards (or about 100 meters) from our apartment we have two small markets side by side. They’re everywhere, and they are typically double the size of a 7/11. But the real shopping experience in Israel is in the street markets, called shuks (shooks) in Hebrew or suks (sooks) in Arabic. The most well-known shuk in Tel Aviv is the Carmel Market (Shuk H’Karmel). When we first arrived in Israel, we stayed for two months in an AirBnB practically adjacent to the shuk, and we bought most of our fresh food there, and quite a few of our canned foods, as well. The shuks are lined with vendors selling everything from t-shirts to vegetables, olives of all kinds, spices, and kitchen ware.

Note: In the video posted here, for some reason everything I said was doubled. That’s some kind of bug in the Meta Ray-Ban software for my smart glasses.