Fili’s world

Most Israelis I know who visit Thailand plan their trip around the Thailand full-moon festival. You’ve been there, right? the free-style trance dance, huge alcohol buckets with the awful Thai whiskey, there’s pot and X all over the place with a sexy atmosphere. Koh Phangan is a place where you come to chill out, and once folks’ have seen all the fake Bangkok Hollywood blockbusters and got tired of cocktails and shakes, they usually start looking into Fire-dancing.

A few weeks ago, I was in TelAviv and they were hosting a fire-dancing festival on Drum beach. I think that every Friday there’s a group drumming session going on, with a few people playing around with some fire, but this time it seemed to be an international professional fireplaying festival. The only thing I could compare it to was my Koh Phangan experience.

Here’s a little from what was going on:

The faded singing in the background, in case you haven’t noticed, is Shalom Alechiem, from Kabalat Shabat. The Koreans I saw there, BTW, said they’ve never seen anything like that before and that it’s the last thing they expected to find in Israel. Holy indeed, one of Tel-Aviv’s small surprises.