If you want to see the throbbing heart of multicultural Tel Aviv - and you do not suffer from crowd-induced anxiety - go to the Carmel Market on a Friday afternoon. That's when the foreign workers - the Chinese, Fillipinos, Ghanians, Romanians, Poles, Hungarians and Thais who work as cleaners, caregivers to the elderly, construction workers and agricultural workers - do their weekend shopping at the end of the relatively short Friday workday.

The Israeli shopowners quickly figured out that there was a lot of money to be made in supplying these workers with their native foods. There are shops with names like Far Eastern Grocery and Little Manilla, where you can buy everything from oyster sauce to fufu flakes. Near the cash register there are long-distance calling cards for a variety of countries; there are also stacks of a local English-language weekly called the Manilla Times, which reports on issues relevant to foreign workers in Israel - whether their children who were born and raised in Israel will be eligible for basic citizens' rights, where the free health clinics are located, the latest scandalous stories about brutal tactics employed by the immigration police against illegal foreign workers, and so on.

There are many Russian groceries all over the market - and throughout Israel - that sell foods from the old country to the more than 1 million Russians who immigrated to Israel over the last decade or so. (There's even an Israeli supermarket chain, called Tiv Taam, that specializes in imported foods). That's where I go to buy loaves of heavy, 100% rye bread made with natural sour instead of yeast, Earl Grey tea (leaves, not bags) for a fraction of what it costs in the supermarket, bags of buckwheat, homemade cherry preserves and excellent cheese buns.

The first thing you notice in all these Russian stores is the heavy, spicy and pleasing odour of charcuterie. Basically, you've entered pork heaven. The array of sausages, smoked ham, pork belly, salt pork, pork shoulder and salami in the display cases seems to be endless. They're all stacked on top of each other in a bewildering variety, mixed up with the smoked and grilled turkey breasts and huge wheels of cheese. Russian women with frosted blue eyeshadow and bright yellow hair, wearing old-fashioned white shop assistants' coats, slice the meats and wrap them for the customers. Sometimes they know Hebrew, but often they don't. For some reason they always assume that I'm Russian and inevitably address me in that language. When I respond in Hebrew they look at me disapprovingly, as if I've gone native and denied my true heritage or something. My Hungarian great-grandmother notwithstanding, I guess I am pretty much Russian - although my forebears left when Nicholas II was still czar. Who knew that my ethnicity was written all over my face?

The most amusing thing, though, is watching and listening as the clientele carry out their transactions with the shop assistants in Russian, choosing the bacon and ham they want to purchase for the weekend meals and then, as they reach across the counter to pay and receive their very unkosher packages, they say, in Hebrew, "shabbat shalom" (good sabbath). Without a trace of irony.

And the saddest thing is seeing the Chinese workers. They are invariably men, ruddy-faced peasants with bad teeth from impoverished rural areas in China. They wear clothes stained with plaster dust and paint splotches from their work on construction sites, their hair looks as if they chopped it off themselves, using dull scissors, and they always look exhausted, bewildered and lonely. They walk in groups of two and three, wheeling their bicycles through the pushing crowds of people; bags of bok choy, tofu and sliced pork hang from the handlebars. They speak barely a few words of Hebrew, and live very hard lives here - working 14 hour days on building sites, sleeping several to a room in crumbling old apartments, saving every hard-earned shekel so they can go back to their villages and upgrade their homes and farms.

The only time I ever saw a Chinese man in Tel Aviv smile was when I happened to be in the market around 7 o'clock one winter night, after most of the shops and stalls had closed. I picked my way through the heaps of rotting unsold food that had been dumped on the ground for garbage collection and tried not to look at the impoverished old people who were sorting through the refuse, looking for salavageable edibles, as I made my way to my favourite vegetable stand. I was surprised to see that, instead of the Israeli proprietors, a short, stocky Chinese man stood there, humming to himself as he expertly trimmed the bad bits off heads of lettuce and bunches of greens with a long-bladed knife. He held those vegetables with real tenderness, looking at them as only a farmer would. I stopped and asked him how much a bunch of coriander cost; in response he smiled widely, exposing a mouthful of silver-capped teeth, swept his arm to indicate everything on the stand, and said, in broken Hebrew, "Shekel. All shekel." Twenty-five cents.

The next time I saw the proprietors of that vegetable stand I asked them about the Chinese man. They told me that he worked all day on construction sites, and then came each night to clean up their stand. The deal was, they paid him 100 shekels (about $20) to do all the cleaning, and he could keep the money from any of the leftover produce that he managed to sell. It didn't make a difference to them - if the Chinese man didn't sell them, the vegetables would simply be thrown away.