Must be out of my gourd

I find that even now, after having lived here in Israel for so long, some basic things still take me by surprise and make me laugh. I don't mean important things, like the multitudes of political parties, or working Sundays. It's the dumb little things that get to me. For example, we often mistakenly assume that we're familiar with the produce section here in our supermarkets. You know, after you learn the name of an item, you figure that it probably translates over to whatever had that name back in the old country. But that's not necessarily so.

This was brought clear to me this past month, when I walked into our local grocery store. I'm pretty familiar with d'laat, which we've bought as needed over the years. Pretty much any dictionary translates d'laat as pumpkin. So it's a pumpkin, right? The thing is, you can't usually buy a whole pumpkin here - it comes cut up, and has a lighter, less orange color to it. That's okay, it didn't ever bother me. Generally I use it for soup, and you certainly don't need a whole pumpkin as an ingredient for vegetable soup. Anyway, I walked in, and found two pumpkins that hadn't yet had the chance to be cut up:


Those don't really look like good old Halloween pumpkins, do they? Oh, well.

By the way, this week's edition of Haveil Havalim is up, and you can see it here. Haveil Havalim defines itself as: a carnival of Jewish blogs -- a weekly collection of Jewish & Israeli blog highlights, tidbits and points of interest collected from blogs all around the world. Enjoy!