If the US has Black Friday and New Order has "Blue Monday", where does that leave the rest of us?

The weather here in Tel Aviv has been getting colder as of late. Well, really it got cold about a month ago. I, however, have been putting off buying a coat because...well, it's kind of a hassle. Unlike the US, there is no Target/Walmart/Old Navy/etc. for me to go to and know I'll find something. The shopping experience in Israel is a bit different.

While some American/Western businesses can be found in Israel, most stores here are Israeli. Of course, there is the ubiquitous McDonald's with blue signs for kosher restaurants and the traditional red ones for non-kosher. There is also a few Burger Kings, and one KFC down on the boardwalk. When I say that these restaurants are in Israel, though, I don't mean nearly to the extent that they exist in the US. For example: I can only think of four McDonald's in Tel Aviv, and two of them are in malls.

Even less do Western retail stores appear in Israel. Entering a mall, you will be greeted with a vast array of stores you've never heard of. There is no GAP, Old Navy, or Abercrombie & Fitch (thank you, God!). Even European-based stores, such as H&M or Benneton, are absent. There are, however, hidden Western stores. The popular office supply store Dionon/דיונון is really Office Depot; and the bookstore chain Steimatzky is, I'm pretty sure, Barnes & Noble-owned. Oh, and there's an American Apparel in the center of town which makes me laugh because I don't know that I've seen an American Apparel store in America.

What you're met with when entering a mall are the Israeli equivalents, but reversed. While there are some Israeli chains, such as FOX or Celio or Castro, a majority of the stores are individual boutiques. This means that you don't find the same clothes from mall to mall, or even from store to store. Don't get me wrong; there are still overall style trends. This season, for example, coats with removable fur-lined hoods are ALL THE RAGE*. But shopping for something can require going to multiple stores in multiple malls if you can't find what you're looking for. And then there's always the שוק/market...

So, after weeks of being warm-but-not-quite-warm-enough when going outside, I decided it was time to buy a proper jacket. That, and I knew that if my mother/Dr. Corbett/Barbara Kelley somehow found out I was improperly clothed for the cold weather, I'd be in big trouble. Since I don't like shopping and didn't know which stores were better than others, I enlisted my Israeli friend Roi to go with me as he also dislikes shopping but needed to buy new glasses. We decided to meet up downtown at Dizengoff Center, the main mall downtown.

Now, Dizengoff Center is, for me, like some parallel dimension where the laws of physics and reality no longer exist. First off, it's bloody huge. It's two five story buildings, the top three of which are connected by a multi-leveled skywalk across Rehov Dizengoff. It has two food courts, a grocery store, and about 14 million hallways. For me, shopping at Dizengoff goes something like this: walk in, wander around until I find the store I'm looking for, and then wander around again until I can find my way to an exit.

Though I'm getting better at navigating the black hole that is Dizengoff Center, now I was stuck with the dilemma of not knowing which were the "cool" stores or which stores were overpriced. The last thing I wanted to do was pay too much for a coat at a store frequented by Israeli high schoolers. Also in Israel, there are no refunds, only exchanges, so once you make a purchase you better like what you bought or like something else at the store because your money is now their money.

So Roi and I trek through Dizengoff Center, hitting the major stores as well as the random boutiques. The prices for a basic jacket vary in price depending on which store you're in, as would be expected. I'd recount the stores we went to, but I can't remember which was which. There was the A&F-type store, the H&M-meets-Banana-Republic, the department store, and the GAP-meets-Aeropostale store; the basic low/mid-range/high-range stores that you'd find anywhere. Most of the jackets that I would have even considered buying were in the 375₪/$80 range, though in the more fancy stores they were closer to 800₪/$200.

Random fact: Israeli coats zip opposite to American coats; the right bit goes into the left bit to zip up, as opposed to the American zippers in which the left slides into the right. Now, I know that women's shirts button differently than men's so maybe only American men's coats zip left-to-right, but I have to say that it confused me to no end trying things on. I guess because Israelis write right-to-left they like to zip right-to-left as well? Who knows?

Like a good shopper, though, I ended up finding a great coat at the Israeli equivalent of Marshall's for 130₪/$30. My mother would be proud, and pleased to know that I'm warm when the weather is not.

*No, I don't know why. And no, the jacket I bought does not have a hood, removable or otherwise.