"Well, if you hadn't decided to go blonde, we wouldn't be so noticeable," my husband, Andrew, said.

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Heading down a street through the Arab quarter in Haifa this morning, I'm nearly knocked off my feet by a man sprinting through the cloistered alleys. He's well over six foot, in a soldier's uniform, and so insanely lanky that he almost disappears altogether every time he runs behind a lamppost. I hardly regain my balance before a squat man in a soiled apron appears, waddling as quickly as his doddling gait will take him. He stops and wipes his sweat-drenched brow with a grease-stained sleeve. The soldier halts too, hardly phased by this high speed chase, a manic grin pulled across his face. They stand off, barely twenty meters apart...

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For a land so deeply steeped in religious lore and history, Israel's been a bit of a fizzle for me in the theological department so far. Sure, while traipsing from Tel Aviv to Haifa over the past six weeks, I'm not exactly getting my fair share of temples, yarmulkes, and insane facial hair. The only mosques I've seen so far have been converted into nightclubs.

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So I had been building up to my last post for a little while, but my famous luck would have it that I spoke a day too soon.

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This blog post was always going to happen. Drink an ice cold brew under that scalding Mediterranean sun and you might as well be sipping manna from Yahweh's own teat. It's the easiest pairing since Sonny and Cher. Sure, you're going to find your good old go-to Carlsberg, bog-standard Heinekens, and particularly prevalent Tuborgs here, but this ain't the only non-Islamic country in the Middle East for no reason... okay, beer is probably not that reason, but it's safe to say Israel does deliver with domestic suds. I've been biding my time, waiting for the right time to do this blog. Having diligently scoured every shiny bar and dingy watering hole across the most boozed-up patch of land in the Middle East--I know, I know, I live a tough life, but I gotta keep those babymamas fed--the results are finally in. So, I present to you Let's Go's Guide to Israeli beer:

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It's a fact of travel writing (let alone posting on the internet) that things may get exaggerated. Then again, you really couldn't make this up...

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It may seem obvious, but it only struck me recently that irony often requires a sense of retrospect: most notably, the hilarity of anachronism. In the good ol' US of A, we laugh at hair metal and watch interminable numbers of movies about hippies because, after 60 years of Hollywood, primetime TV and billboard charts, there's a 60-year culture to play off of.

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