Gefilte Fish Out of Water

Saturday evening I went to an Israeli Blogger’s Evening outside of Tel Aviv in a town called Nes Tziona.  To me, it looked like a suburb.  Yeah, I think this was my first trip to the Israeli suburbs.  The homes were nice looking, but still made out of concrete with tile floors inside.  It appears these construction materials are not limited to apartments.  I think it’s because combined, they have a very cooling effect, which is appreciated in the summers.

I was late, but at least it’s because I was blogging.  I wanted to have a lot of new content up before the event, in case any of the other bloggers went to visit G-Fish.  I ended up stupidly fLYinG on my bicycle, in the street against traffic with no helmet, rushing to meet the bloggers of Cafe Liz and Apples & Honey at the central bus station , and kinda almost died once or twice.  Thankfully I didn’t, but I did miss my bus.  

When I walked in, the event’s speaker Jacob Share, who publishes two blogs including the popular job search blog Job Mob was already well into his presentation.  While I was stumbling around the neighborhood searching for the right home, I was pretty OK with how late I was and that I was missing the start of the presentation.  I didn’t have any particular expectations for what I might get out of the evening, and I was primarily going just to check it out – meet some nice writers and also to get out of Tel Aviv.

But my mood sort of fell a little when I got inside.  The conversation was about monetization and growing your personal brand.  These are interesting topics, but only marginally to me right now.  I wanted to be mixing it up and having conversations with new people.

But then there was a break, and the networking portion started.  Yay!  This was more of what I was hoping for.  I asked Jacob a question about self-hosting my own blog on WordPress, and talked with The Baroness Tapuzina, who had just gone through the same experience.  I talked with a few more bloggers including:

Tchochkes, Terror Finance (about how terrorism is financed – interesting!), Israel Restaurant Review, I’ll Call Baila, Blanche and Guy Designs, Israeli Kitchen, A Mother in Israel and NRK le-israelim baolam ha-asakim (in Hebrew; about Israeli business culture).  There were a lot of food bloggers there!

Some of the bloggers I missed were: Foodbridge, The View From Here, One Tired Ema, and Around the Island.

After the networking, we did a round robin, giving everyone a chance to talk a little about their blog.  I began to enjoy the evening more and more as it went on.  This continued into my sherut ride back to TLV with Jacob, Liz and Yael, and even my bike ride through TLV with Liz.

I’ve since given and received some link love, which has been very nice.  I would definitely participate in an evening like this again.  Thanks, Hannah, Miriam and Sarah!