I’m still scratching my head as to how the hell this happened.

An old high school friend contacted me a few weeks ago telling me he’d be in Israel for a week. I met up with him today with my family and his at the Tel Aviv port to hang out and catch up, let our kids play in the parks there and go out to eat. He was staying at his cousin’s house and wanted to get his cousin a gift for hosting him for the week, so we went around the port mall to find a place that sells kitcheny sort of stuff.

We were walking around outside and Fry, my 5 month old son, is clearly hungry and needs to nurse, so we duck into this strange looking but nice post-modernish store so she can sit and nurse him. The style is nice but clearly weird, with all kinds of artsy kind of stuff hanging like a modern art museum. There is actually a small stand with glitzy kitchen-looking stuff, ceramic vegetable bakers or some such thing. So we go near those to see while the wife sits down to nurse. I start to notice that the staff are all women with short hair who are looking at us like we don’t belong here.

Here’s a picture of the place I found on Google Maps.

Then I look on one of the walls and see a sketch of four women with enormous breasts hanging down to the floor. I naturally pointed it out to my friend and we proceeded to crack up, reverting back to being in high school, and chalking the painting up to some post-modern taste or something like that.

Then we see a gift shop sort of thing at the end of the building, and walk in, trying to kill time while Fry is nursing. I didn’t spend more than 3 seconds in there, but I noticed a whole wall covered with very large purple and neon green dildos and other colors I didn’t care to remember, but they were all vivid and I’m color blind. At this point my friend and I were cracking up noticeably, thanking God that our kids are all too young to know what any of this stuff is. The staff of short-haired women begins to get annoyed at us, because we are clearly religious with very young children and in the wrong place for any time.

As I duck out of the gift shop, one of the staff asks me if I need help. I say, stifling laughter, “Sure, they’re looking for kitchen stuff, a house-warming gift or something,” pointing to my friend and his wife, who is by now feeling very awkward as well. The staff woman starts showing them the ceramic stuff, which we already saw, and I’m on the other side of the wall, across from where my wife is nursing the baby, the image of 20 dildos still stuck in my head.

Then I turn around and see two television screens on a loop of about 3-5 seconds, one showing someone’s butt shaking right against the screen in furious motion. The other is in a loop focusing on what looked like a covered male genital area. I still haven’t figured out how that fits into the whole lesbian thing. Maybe it’s a bisexual thing or they don’t discriminate, or they want to make the straights feel more comfortable.

I make eye contact with my wife, and she looks at the monitors, which were in front of her the whole time as she’s nursing the baby but she didn’t notice. Then she gets a really disturbed look on her face and we all decide to get the hell out of there, mid nurse. Fry is not happy.

When we get out, we notice that the name of the place is “Sisters Rule the World” or something to that effect. If you want to check it out, it’s at the north end of the Tel Aviv port, around number 26 I believe.

Strange, wacky place, Tel Aviv. But hey, I’m all for free markets, lesbian sex shops included.