Come rain or shine

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Welcome to Israel! It's...raining

I had big plans for today, a jaunt up to Caesaria, a famous Roman ruins site, a head-first dive in to Israeli culture, history, and the bus system. But instead, I’m snuggled with my boy on a foldout couch in my friend Uri’s apartment, after he and his flatmate have left for work, wondering if it will stop raining.

Last night, when I walked out of the Tel Aviv airport, I was greeted with an enormous clap of thunder. Though I was all business, looking for a taxi cab while trying not to look too much like a callow tourist, I couldn’t suppress an inward gleeful shake. I whine often about the sad dearth of thunderstorms in California (if you live in the Central Valley or the SoCal coast), missing my Texas rolls, peals, flashes, and downpours. So while I know that rain is not often conducive to sightseeing, I still wish for another thunder peal. I easily find the line of taxis and get a taxi driver who searches on his phone for my destination, Dr. Shakshuka, a restaurant in Old Jaffa (pronounced “Yaffa”). After a couple of circles down narrow, old streets with tumble-down shuttered windows and doors, we hit upon the restaurant. It is heavily barred, secured from the outside. A doorman actually waits outside to let in customers.

I waited there for an hour for Henry and his tour trip to arrive. A lady working at the restaurant sweetly brings me tea with a huge sprig of mint in it (good idea!) and a slice of something sweet. I watch an Israeli version of American Idol (or something like it) and wait for the boy. When he shows up with his 40-person tour, I can immediately feel the exhaustion seeping out of him. He’s been here for 10 days already, a whirlwind of history, culture, politics, religion, sights, and people. And he’s barely slept.

After some food, many introductions which I promptly forgot (but for a couple), my friend Uri joins us and while Henry goes to the airport to officially part from his Birth Right trip, Uri and I take off for a little walk in Jaffa. Even at night, I can see the appeal of this part of Tel Aviv. It’s the original settlement, a seaport village that has now been consumed by the bustling, metropolitan Tel Aviv. Here you have the best views though, the highest density of artisans, and the feel of the old. Uri promises me we’ll come back here on Friday, the start of the Israeli weekend (the Sabbath comes on Saturday in Judaism and in this Jewish-dominated land, they had the prerogative of moving official weekend days).

So I am still left pondering what to do today, Thursday, while Henry goes to visit family and both my friends who live in Tel Aviv are working. First Henry and I finally rouse ourselves to get some breakfast-lunch. We go just down the street to a bakery Uri recommended and have a meal of pastries. I enjoy picking out pastries based solely on how they look, their shape, their color. I can only guess what’s inside since everything is in Hebrew. After catching up and relaxing with each other, Henry goes off to Ashdod to visit family (who haven’t seen him since he was two) and I decide to just go walking. It’s too late in the day to visit some of the most highly recommended museums as they close at 5 and I’d have to take a train or bus to get there. But I often find that exploring by foot often gets me closer to the feel of a place than curated destinations.

Tel Aviv greyness

It’s raining in bursts and spurts as I head out. My cheap umbrella is no match for these sea-style gusts and I’m thoroughly wetted in just a few blocks as my umbrella keeps flipping inside-out. I head down Arlozorov St to the waterfront. Halfway there, the sun shines forth, making things sparkle and shine, the sunchild triumphing over the surly raincloud neighbor. I keep my umbrella at ready though; I’m already learning that this place is rather unpredictable during the rainy season. I reach the Gan Ha’Atzmaut Park, just south of the imposing Hilton Hotel. I bet there are relatively few tourists in that hotel right now. This is decidedly not the season for the luxurious Israel visit…not if you want to get outside the hotel at least. The Mediterranean is blue steel and choppy, madly choppy. I encounter only two other people in the park and soon there is no one but me. And some cats. There are lots of feral cats all over this place. All over Israel turns out. I shudder for the native bird population.

I take a look at the map and decide to press into the City Centre. The waterfront street is rather rundown, weathered by the ocean of course but none of these buildings can claim great age as the main reason for the wear-and-tear. I admit that nothing is attractive to me about this city so far. It’s just…a city. Lots of buildings, pavement, cars, advertisements. The buildings themselves are often blocky, brown, and unattractive. Even the Bauhaus buildings, a dubiously distinctive style that earned Tel Aviv World Heritage status, are just rather…blah. I know that a good portion of this lack of character (to certain eyes) is due to the fact that when Tel Aviv really started growing, it grew with wild abandon. Refugees from WWII were pouring in and the country, especially this city, threw up building after building, trying to fit all its bereft new citizens into its small borders. Beauty was not an option. And perhaps sturdiness or long-lasting was not either…

But I still have high hopes for tomorrow’s journey with Uri. We’ll be going to the older parts of the city (pre-1920’s). So for now I will just enjoy the stark metropolitan nature of this place. I wind up briefly at the Ben Gurion Museum. Ben Gurion’s modest home has now been converted into a memorial for Israel’s first prime minister. I don’t spend much time in the place because there are three classes touring the small space, occupying the bigger rooms entirely. I gather Ben Gurion was quite the literary type for there are hundreds of books (my Lonely Planet book says 20,000!) crammed amidst the sparse and simple furnishings.

I wind up on Dizengoff Street which is the shopping center mecca for Tel Avivi’s. I am not in the mood to shop nor do I often enjoy going to shopping areas when I’m playing the tourist. But today, oh well. At least I get to people watch more. There are pockets of other brave souls out, umbrellas at ready. I go all the way to the Dizengoff Centre and then head east and after crossing the large and bare Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Square, I promptly get lost trying to find the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. When I finally backtrack and side-wind to a main street I can find on my tiny guidebook maps, I have to head back to Uri’s apartment. I have his key to his place (no spare) and so I have to be there when he returns from work.

Young soldiers

I spend the next couple of hours at Uri’s place, catching up with him and snacking a bit. The two things I have trouble quickly adjusting to are 1) the lights of the bathroom is outside the door (i.e. in the hallway) and 2) the toilet is split from the shower/sink. Oh yes, and there is no water-guard wall for the shower. You have to squeejee the water after the shower so it goes down the drain. I don’t think the floors are slanted at all which is very strange to me but I shrug and chalk it up to cultural experiences. Henry tells me that all the bathrooms he has encountered in hotels are like this.

Henry and I decide to go see the famous Mayumana show this evening. It sprung from the American Stomp show but its more recent shows have diversified in content. It’s in Old Jaffa and Henry and I take the bus down. We are running late because we accidentally took the bus headed north instead of south and then we got off one stop too late and had to backtrack. But soon enough we are in the area that Uri and I were wandering around in last night, along the waterfront. Working warehouses, filled with fish in the daytime, abut renovated warehouses that now house high-end, urban art.

Mayumana is a good show, interactive, funny, and full of talent. There are some weaker points but the bits where the performers play with technical toys to enhance their simple singing and instrument are really quite innovative, nothing I’ve ever seen live before. At Mayumana we meet up with one of the girls who went on Henry’s Birth Right trip and we leave with her to head all the way up north via taxi (oh, it’s raining again) to join with many other Birth Righters who extended their trip and seven of the Israeli soldiers who joined their tour. Every Birth Right trip has some soldiers (sometimes students) join the trip as part of a cultural exchange (not bodyguards!). The BirthRighters range in age from 18-26 and the soldiers are pretty much the same age.

I find it difficult to picture this array of young people as solider material. Because everyone has to join the military in late teenager-hood for at least a few years, there is no stereotyping like one can do for American soldiers. I don’t talk soldiering with them but I do talk with one boy/man about his upbringing at a kibbutz. Turns out he was one of the last cohort of children to be raised separated from their parents. Many of the kibbutzes were truly socialist and so children were common, not to be “owned” or “claimed” by any one set of parents. The idea was that the community would raise them. This young man has his own opinions about the worth of that approach and he’s glad to say that that has changed since he grew up. I wonder how many of the modern-day kibbutzes resemble the fiercely free-thinking and determinedly socialist kibbutzes of the 50’s and 60’s.

We wind up the night at a club that one of the Israelis has recommended. The place is not what he remembered. I don't know what it was like before but now it’s downright crappy. Cramped, bad music, poor setup, very young clubbing vibe. But we’re here to enjoy the company, not the place…or the entire lack of dance space. And so at 3 AM, we toddle home after the bar shuts down. Henry and I collapse thankfully on the pullout sofa. I pray that the enormously fat cat who belongs to Uri’s flatmate doesn’t wake us up the next morning with his reverberating, deep meows. I forgot to mention that our sleeping-in was somewhat hampered by the cat who was perturbed at us taking his sleep spot and so decided to demand to be let into his owner’s room. He demanded for two hours. I made sure to make space for him on the other couches, hoping we could crash in peace until at least mid-morning.

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Photos

Tel Aviv marina
Wind was blowing somethin' fierce!

One cool building
This was the most interesting building I saw. And it was really quite neat! Reminded me of the Spanish architect, Gaudi.

Cute little cartoon character
Just a random streetside tidbit

From the bar-restaurant "Moses"
The group of Birth Righters & Israelis (not my photo, FYI)

Enormous cat
Our morning tormentor