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Published: January 14th 2011
"Why are you here?" asks a small, young man with jet-black hair and goatee less than a minute after I step off the plane. It's 3:15am, and I've just arrived at Ben-Gurion International, having hardly slept at all and feeling queasy from the bad airplane food. The man stops me on the way to the passport check.
"Just travelling." I reply with a hint of surprise at the unexpected interception.
"Where you go? Which hotel you stay in? What is your profession?" he asks me subsequently, and I try to answer as good as I can, before I'm left off the hook.
The man who checks my passport is even more suspicious of me.
"Where you stay?"
- "With a friend in Yafo."
"What friend? German?"
- "No, Israeli."
"Where you know this friend from?"
- "Internet."
"What is name and address of this friend?"
I show him a piece of paper with the name, address and telephone number of my friend, and directions to her place.
"What is the last name?"
- "I don't know the last name, only the first one, Karen."
"How do you know this friend exists?"
- "I'm pretty sure she does, I talked
to her and she has good references."
"How long you stay in Israel?"
- "About three weeks."
"How much money you have?"
- "About 600 US$, and 100€."
"And that is all? How you're gonna survive with that?"
- " I think it should be enough. If not, I have a bank card and there are ATMs around."
"What Arab countries have you travelled to recently?"
I have to think about that one for a moment.
- "The last one was Morocco, three years ago. That's pretty much the only one."
"Where you wanna go in Israel?"
- "Tel Aviv, Haifa, Nazareth, Jerusalem, the Negev, and a few kibbutzim. Oh, before I forget, would it be possible to put the stamp on a separate piece of paper? I travel quite often."
"What is your profession?"
- "I'm a translator."
"What languages?"
- "English and Spanish. Um, with the stamp, would it be possible not to stamp my passport, you know..."
"Ya ya ya..."
He stamps a slip of paper and hands it to me with my passport.
- "Thank you very much."
He ignores me indignantly.
I wait around until 5:15am, when the first train to the city leaves.
The trip to HaHagana station takes less than 20 minutes, and I nod off briefly and miss the stop. I get off at the next one, and backtrack one stop. I make my way towards Karen's place, which is a bit of a hike away in central Jaffa. Along the way, I see mostly African men whom I take to be Ethiopians, having read that there was a big flood of immigrants from that country in the last few years; plus, they all look like distant cousins of Haile Gebrselassie.
Karen told me I should walk down Derech Salame, but I couldn't find it on Google Maps, so I decided to walk down Derech Shlomo. The problem is that the street is not where it should be, instead there's a Derech Shalma, which takes me to the right direction as well. Later I realize that it's the same street, and that it has various different meanings and spellings, but the Hebrew root is the same.
At the Jaffa clock tower, I pause a moment to marvel at the sunrise, which paints the clouds pink and illuminates the tower in a very gentle light. I become so entranced that
I almost step into dog shit.
At Karen's place, a German guy named Urs opens the door for me, as Karen is still fast asleep. When she wakes up, we say our hellos and shaloms and she proceeds to brew some coffee. I pass out on the couch after downing mine. When I wake up, it's 11am, and Urs informs me that we'll meet up with Karen for lunch. Despite his Swiss name, Urs is German, and has been living in Berlin for the last eleven or so years. I wipe away a tear upon him mentioning the capital. He looks so extremely low-key that he couldn't possibly be from the southern half of Germany, which makes him all the more personable.
We buy some delicious pomegranate juice at a stall on the way. The lady who operates it squeezes the humongous fruits in a very old-school type of juicer. She has to use blunt force to push down the handle and press out the juice.
Karen works for an advertising agency, and we meet in the neighbourhood of Florentin. She takes us to a small eatery, where we order hummus, pita bread, tomato-and-feta salad and Israeli
sandwiches with omelette inside. The food is very fresh and tasty, and we indulge with glee; or as Lonely Planet would say: salivating and smacking our lips (which we don't do literally, of course).
Karen goes back to work, and me and Urs keep roaming around. At a square in the Yemenite quarter, there are several tour groups around. One of them consists of stereotypical Americans; the women are mostly really overweight and misshapen, and the men are either fat or look roided up. Or they're just plain dull. On the other side there's an Israeli tour group composed of young people, who look rather fit in comparison. One blond girl carries an automatic rifle, and first I take it to be some kind of a joke, that she just bought a very realistic-looking weapon as a souvenir. It doesn't take me too long to realize that it's the real thing. She must be in charge of 'security', I reckon.
We walk through the Carmel Market, which is loaded with fresh fruit and vegetables, and all kinds of knick-knacks and trinkets. Via a back alley, we find our way to the beachfront, which is partly pretty and picturesque
and partly dirty and ramshackle, with ugly high-rises from the 60s dominating the skyline.
The promenade is dominated by fast cyclists and white-knuckle runners, who slalom aggressively around the crowds. There are some cafés and bars, which are so ridiculously expensive that I'm at a loss for words. 18 shekels (4€) for a scoop of ice cream? Even Oslo or Moscow don't do that.
Back in Jaffa, we catch some bagels at a great bakery around the corner. Apparently the bakery is very famous and has been there for more than 600 years. They certainly do know their shit. The bagel isn't the standard thing with a bit of cream cheese, you actually get a big bagel without a hole in the middle; they put in feta, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, egg, all kinds of sauces, and then toast it crispy. Again, cheap it is not, but worth the money.
The following day I wander around on my own. I buy some running shorts at the flea market. In a shop that sells backpacks, the owner starts talking to me. His name is Hirsch Rosenblum, and he's an Ashkenazi jew of Polish ancestry. He says when he went
to the army, he had to change his name into the Hebrew version, for at that time, the government really tried to make everybody learn and speak Hebrew as their first language, and they didn't want Israelis to have any 'foreign'-sounding names. Hirsch also works as a tour guide. He takes Israeli groups through Europe, and he laments his inability to speak German, French and Spanish, despite living in Austria, France and Spain for several months. He says learning languages is just not his strong side. His mother taught him Polish and Yiddish, which he spoke fluently until the age of seven. Then he started learning Hebrew, though, and quickly forgot his first languages. As of today, he hardly remembers any words.
I walk up the hill to the pretty-looking fortress, which dates back to Ottoman times. There's a nice little park next to it, from where you have a good view over Jaffa and Tel Aviv. The gardeners are all proto-Ethiopians. At least some of them found a job.
I find one of those tiny hidden cafés where old Jewish men sit and play Tables, a game similar to Backgammon, all day. In Israel it's called 'sheshbesh',
which means 'six and five'. I sit down and order a Turkish coffee. Amongst the familiar clack-clack, a man with yellow moustache and weather-beaten face stares at me with intent, piercing blue eyes, wary of the intruder. He looks like an old boat captain, and I can just imagine him down at the shanty in various harbour cities around the world. The men follow the game with sad eyes and weary concentration. Every now and then, they start arguing, gesturing wildly while shouting angry guttural and alveolar-heavy words at each other.
The next chapter in the book I'm reading is called 'The Ruination of Jaffa', meaning the events that took place on 13 May 1948. The author writes: "When Jaffa fell, the entire population of 50,000 was expelled...people were literally pushed into the sea when the crowds tried to board the far-too-small fishing boats that would take them to Gaza, while Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion."
I wonder how many of those bickering octogenarians were around at that time. What did they see? What did they do? Were they the ones raiding villages, raping women, pushing people into the sea? Their tired, leathery faces
say more than a thousand words, but they don't reveal everything that's hidden deep somewhere inside.
"Allahu akbar!", the muezzin starts calling in the familiar wailing voice. Some of the Arabs expelled must have come back, then. The old men don't seem to notice, and go on rolling the dice and moving the pieces unperturbedly.
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Shay
non-member comment
What ?
"The next chapter in the book I'm reading is called 'The Ruination of Jaffa', meaning the events that took place on 13 May 1948. The author writes: "When Jaffa fell, the entire population of 50,000 was expelled...people were literally pushed into the sea when the crowds tried to board the far-too-small fishing boats that would take them to Gaza, while Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion." I wonder how many of those bickering octogenarians were around at that time. What did they see? What did they do? Were they the ones raiding villages, raping women, pushing people into the sea? Their tired, leathery faces say more than a thousand words, but they don't reveal everything that's hidden deep somewhere " ---------------------------------------------------------- Which book is that ? SS book ? raiding villages ? raping women ? from where do you bring all this BS ? BTW - the men who play sheshbesh probably were Iraqis Jews - they came after 48 (short history lesson) You are not so sophisticated /cosmopolitan as you think you are (by your blogs) - you are just a German "nudnik" who think he is "Something" - and you are NOT! Another thing - I visited lots of countries in this world - I always tried to find the good thing/people and less being critical out of respect !