I left Baldock at 6.50am - a very frosty Baldock, ice-cold and white. The trip to Heathrow through the rush-hour made me glad I'd chosen to take the early bus - we were 40 minutes behind schedule by the time we reached the airport. All we bleary-eyed passengers disembarked to the sound of some hysterical Arab woman berating the driver ('I'm sorry love, I can only do what I can do. This bus don't have wings, y'know..')
The next several hours of hanging around were excruciatingly boring, so I'll skip those and move straight to El Al's incredible security process. No, they didn't strip-search me. What they did do was frown upon my hand luggage, which went beep when they scanned it, and made me repack it into my rucksack. They kept the bag of clothes from my rucksack until I was about to board the plane, so I couldn't interfere with it in any way.
Travelling as freight did Tal's CD collection no good whatsoever. Half the jewel cases got cracked in transit, including the single one I'd packed for Zeev. The security manoeveuring at Heathrow also meant that I didn't have access to the PHP magazine I'd been planning to show security at Ben Gurion to explain myself - it was also buried deep in my rucksack, due to the CD still being attached.
The flight itself was great. I meant to sleep, but the air hosts/hostesses kept on coming by with stuff - food, wine, newspapers - all of which was free, and most of which was good. The Israeli contingent (ie everybody else on board) muttered audibly about plastic food, but then Israeli food is overwhelmingly fresh .. to a British palate it seemed just fine :)
There was a holiday mood on the plane, and if I felt isolated from the general sense of relief as being among their own, at least I wasn't entirely excluded from it.
We arrived at Ben Gurion bang on time, and my troubles there began immediately I said the word internet. I should've said I knew Zeev from Germany instead maybe. The security guard who was interrogating me ('Why are you coming here? Who do you know here? Where are you planning to stay?') made a quick phone call and escorted me to a back room where there was a bigger, scarier-looking security guard. He wasn't unfriendly or intimidating, just asked me a few questions and then cut down my visa stamp from 3 months to 2 weeks before wishing me a pleasant stay. I walked out of there, very tired, very bemused, and realised as I reached the exit gate that actually my flight home is booked for 2 weeks and one day ahead. I asked for the extra day, but the guards just ushered me out, assuring me there would be no problem.
Yeah, yeah. I'll bet it's not the same guards on duty on my return..
Retrospective comment: In fact I learned on my final day in Israel, after 2 weeks of worrying about it, that there is a 14-day 'grace period' after the visa ends, during which time you can leave the country without any problem whatsoever. They merely neglected to share this useful information with me.
I met an English couple at the bus-stop who had come over for a weekend, just for a wedding. The guy spoke fluent Hebrew, which came in useful when the 222 bus arrived, because the driver had no English. This bus drops people by their hotel; the driver had never heard of Bnei Dan, or youth hostels, or (apparently) the Yarkon river.. We drove around Tel Aviv for ages, shooting red lights on occasion, blocking green ones sometimes as he shouted to other drivers for directions. Eventually we reached the Yarkon mouth and he turfed me out, saying it wasn't far from there. Depends on your terminology, I guess, and on whether you know where you're going - it took me another 40 minutes to find the place, and I walked in bang on the dot of 11pm (closing time for checking in).
Retrospective comment: It's actually a good 20-minute walk even if you know where you are..
The hostel in TA is built like the buildings look in illustrated copies of the New Testament, all pale and airy with lots of archways and gardens. I really liked it there, immediately. There are 4 buildings, each one containing 3 floors of rooms divided into 3 blocks. Each floor within a block has 2 rooms at each side, built to accommodate 6 people. There is a shower room (3 showers) and a pair of toilets (unisex) for each pair of rooms. There is also a kind of balcony area on the upper floors. You can't hear your neighbours when the bedroom door is closed, which I also liked, given that my neighbours were a couple of units of IDF-ettes.
Retrospective comment: The male version's much, much louder.. !
I hadn't fully appreciated just how young the soldiers in the IDF are. 18 sounds older than it looks, for sure.
I talked with the girl on the night desk about her unit. She wanted to know, was I a volunteer? - apparently there are many, from all over the world, and most of them stay at Bnei Dan for the duration of their stay. One thing I just can't get used to is the way these kids' faces light up when they talk about their unit. It means everything to them.
I reckon they could do away with Bar/Bat Mitzvah altogether and replace it with IDF service ..
Bnei Dan was a really relaxed place, the guys there sat up late in the 'TV lounge' - which is actually a 3-walled building, but covered - bubbling their way through something in a bong and drinking cheap beer from the supermarket, watching Hebrew-dubbed American horror movies and talking politics and girls. And the breakfast was good too, but then the food in Israel is always good :)
I was nervous about catching the bus to Jerusalem in the morning, probably unnecessarily so. It was a blazing hot day and I was thirsty after the walk to the bus station, so I made a bottle of Coke my excuse for sitting in the bus-shelter and letting 2 buses full of IDF soldiers and orthodox Jews go without me. (The service runs every 12 minutes.) I think I'd be inclined to try and look less Jewish, but I admire their guts, and their reasoning.
The third bus was relatively internationalist-looking in terms of its passengers, so I boarded that one and bought a one week return ticket (32.5 shekels). The journey was maybe 40 minutes long.
Jerusalem's central bus station was another bag-searching nightmare, and I determined to find the hostel ASAP so I wouldn't need to go through this again with anything more severe than a carrier-bag .. There's a shopping arena within central, and lo, an inet cafe on the top floor!
Extract from mail home:
Palm trees. Orange trees, and yes, with fruit, at this time of the year. An ostrich, when I went for a walk this morning (don't ask, it was actually in a caged environment, alongside a gnu). Some strange bird that woke me in Tel Aviv this morning sounds exactly like an over-excited 6-year-old with a rusty pogo stick. It's all very alien, and very warm, despite Tal's outrageous lies re the shiver-factor in February. More porkies pertained to the percentage of the population here who can/will speak English. Half the security ppl don't, which has been frustrating at least twice. ('No please don't do that, I'll repack it .. please ..' (crunching sounds))
I got virtually free cigarettes via an in-flight duty free voucher in combo with a special offer on Marlboro :) This is good news, it means I can afford a map now.
Breakfast today was a scrambled omelette with white toast (the grill is a slow-roller) and a massive and varied bunch of salads. I had green peppers, tomatoes, huge chunks of white radish, something that tasted like Quark with pitted olives and red peppers sliced into it, and some home-made jam on the sweet kosher bread I can't remember the name for, to follow. Lush!
What else? Jerusalem's built across the top of a huge hill (series of hills?) so the scenery on the way in was quite something, also there were a lot of terraces supporting orchards, and pretty much everything's in blossom right now. It's a bit like May is at home.
Better go and read some news while I've still got time on the clock here, I've no idea what's going on here, never mind in the rest of the world!
Take best care all -
- Steph xxx
Nobody ever heard of Yitzhak Rabin hostel except the taxi drivers, who, once they established that I wasn't about to take a cab to get there (too many one-way streets, I wanted to know where I was exactly) cheerfully pointed me in the wrong direction and let me get on with it. Some things are the same the world over, I'd have done that when I was a cabbie too :)
Jerusalem's supposed to be colder than Tel Aviv but trust me, on hot days it isn't. I invested in a map (65 shekels, but the best move I made yet) and walked around for several hours trying to make sense of it. I have a mental map of central Jerusalem now, but when you first arrive it throws you that what the road is called on the map can be so unlike the name on the road sign..
By the time I reached the hostel and unpacked, I was tired and thirsty. I changed into something vaguely respectable and went out in search of a bar. Thus began my week-long relationship with Aza Street :)
There's a bar named 'Haylay' (allegedly, it looks like HiLi to me but they should know) where I met Ilena, the evening manager from the Sheradon Plaza hotel, on my first night in Jerusalem. She's a sweetheart, and gave me her contact details, telling me to get the guards to call her if I had any problems over the visa on the way out of Israel and she'd vouch for me. She also sweet-talked a free beer for me out of the owner - a very good-looking boy who (I heard later) lost his mother to cancer recently and is struggling to come to terms with that and run the business on top.
Retrospective comment: At least they're far enough from central Jerusalem to not be reliant on the tourist trade.. Haylay was busy every night, and always with local people. Ilena said that her own hotel took mainly commercial travellers and was doing okay too.
The only problem I have with Haylay is their insistence on tabs. I won't work up a tab, I pay as I go, because I'm worried I'll get carried away and drink more than I have the money to pay for. Daniel - the bartender in a central Jerusalem bar named 'Mike's Place' - told me that his routine on hearing an explosion consists of going around the bar and making everyone present pay up their tab immediately. He says people drift away after a bomb goes off, it kills his trade for the rest of that day. The nearest to them has been at Ben Yehuda, a pedestrianised shopping area the other side of Yafo. Apparently it shook the building - this from just over a block away.
Mike's Place is an English bar, and looks it. There's absolutely no security on the door until mid-evening, but people go there anyway - all kinds of people, tourists, foreign workers, local Jews, local Russians, local Arabs. Haylay is a purely Jewish bar, and has security on the door at all times, albeit a little lax for my liking. The first night in there I felt so safe I sat with my back to the plate-glass window at the front. By day 3 they knew my face and stopped even pretending to search me, and I never sat anywhere I couldn't see what was happening outside thereafter.
A security worker I met in Haylay told me that you can tell a suicider by the expression in his eyes, more than by anything he's carrying or wearing, and that the people around will generally be aware of his presence because of this. I asked him, had he ever seen a suicider? - he hadn't. So I guess that's a myth that goes around, that everyone will somehow smell it coming. Obviously they don't, or the suiciders would be way less successful at killing other people.
Despite this, both bars continue to do a lively trade, Haylay mostly in food, which looks wonderful (so long as you eat meat) and which is way out of my price range. I had fun trying to decipher the menu in there one night when Kiyim(?) was working and was the only person speaking to me - y'know how you get those times when everyone arrives with friends - after getting through the bar list and The Saladim successfully I struggled for some time with a thing called The Mvorger.. 'Ha' is an approximation of 'The' in Hebrew, O is interchangeable with U, and V becomes B when it's at the start of a phoneme.. Hamburger! Damn!
Retrospective comment: Kiyim belongs to a street theatre group who are planning to tour European festivals this summer. She has my email address for the Rhythms festival here in July. Unfortunately I don't seem to have hers.
Best get moving, I'm on the way to meet Tal now :) and it's a lovely warm day again. BTW I just watched my first Israeli car smash .. someone overtook at an intersection and drove straight into the lamp post on the central reservation going god knows how fast, but he smashed the passenger side, and had no passenger, and was OK, although his car suffered some.
- OK so I'm back in the Haylay bar. Rami turned up tonight at Mike's (again) demanding to know why I hadn't met him yesterday and could he have some beer from me? - so guess... I met an older guy tonight, in his 40's, whose name I misremember but who drove me home (good stuff, it's bitterly cold tonight and I was sorely underdressed for the weather).
Back to the schema, I've gotten myself badly 'unbeseder' here but it's hard to put things in order if you don't write it all down as you go..
The first full day here was hot, and I bought a bottle of iced tea and walked to Jerusalem Forest (Ya'ar Yiroshalayim). The ground is desperately stony; Jerusalem stone looks a little like limestone but isn't. (I thought a great deal of Dad that day, he'd have known exactly what the formations were and from where and when.) There were a lot of rocky outcrops and even more small pieces of stone-shrapnel strewn over the surface. The trees are mainly pine of various kinds, with some almond (currently in blossom), olive and willow - oddly - in between. The forest is in a deep, deep pit - over a thousand feet, easily - and most of it very steep indeedy. The little road I walked down was single-track with crumbling edges - memories of the Kerry Ring - and the odd sheer drop involved. To either side of this road were memorial grounds, with steps down into them and picnic areas and some attempt at landscaping in each. I walked into the first one that looked safe - dedicated to some guy who died at Suez in 1970 - and was upset at the sheer quantity of litter there. I spent some time wandering into the edge of the forest admiring the flora - red, bright, strong anemones, furry-lipped orchids, herds of wild rosemary, something bilberry-like, some pennyroyal, some thyme, several tiny alpine flowers and something very like celandine. Then I spent 3-4 hours picking litter, until the immediate terrace was clear of it, until the sun dipped behind the mountain.
Jerusalem is built on the tops of hills, mostly. I guess that's part of the reason they tell me it's 10 degrees colder here (on average) here than in Tel Aviv. It's also very beautiful; built of the local yellow-white stone, pale concrete and white marble. No wonder they call it 'golden' - it really is. On a bright day it can hurt your eyes.
All the floors here are made of marble, or marble-topped. The Yitzhak Rabin hostel - a modern building, and wonderfully designed, god I love Israeli design - is fully marble-floored, and also air-conditioned throughout. This isn't regarded as a luxury here, more as a necessity. Even Bnei Dan hostel is marble-floored and etc. The difference is that Bnei Dan lacks central heating..
Back to today, and the meeting with Tal. We arranged to meet in the central bus station (secure place). I've seen one picture of the back of his head and he's never seen me, so I said I'd wear a red mac, but it was hot, so I didn't. I wore the PHP/Zend t-shirt Masoud gave me at Frankfurt instead, I felt that would be enough of a clue. It wasn't, and I spotted him well before he spotted me :)
He's a big lad for 14, slightly tongue-tied (surprisingly!) and with a very gentle way about him. I felt we could have done with some compatriots, and more time. We snatched an hour between buses (he lives 15km outside Jerusalem) and went walkabout, intending (on my part) to go to where there was a traditional band playing at the end of Ben Yehuda, but that got knocked on the head when he figured the distance vs his bus timetable. Still, he showed me where his Dad works, and teased me about my total inability to speak Hebrew after all his efforts - not bad for a 14-year-old kid, at all. He tells me Jan______ has asked him to contribute to PHP magazine on a regular basis; I said he'd be rich by the time he was 15, and made him laugh. He seemed happy with his CDs, cracked cases and all, and ran off with my copy of PHP magazine (which was supposed to be a loan, Tal!).
Zeev mailed me today - just 'hello', but it cheered me immensely. I was beginning to feel I'd been abandoned.
The guys in Mike's were all talking politics tonight. Politics, gas masks and girls; things are changing, subtly. Mike the American photographer - who won't leave in case he misses the picture of a lifetime - is being lent a gas mask by someone whose son happens to be out of the country right now. I told Mike it's only a $25 deposit to get your own gas mask. Israeli admin at work again .. they organise this stuff, but tell nobody about it..
Sealed rooms, is the other thing. I read somewhere that 30% of Israelis currently either have a sealed room or are about to set one up. I met one of the 30% tonight. He has 4 children, and used to have 5. The survivors are all in their teens or older, but he knows how it is to lose a child already and isn't prepared to risk it twice.
American Mike's only concern appears to be bathroom facilities :)
People are very dubious generally about the likelihood of the war touching Israel. The general feeling is that it won't happen. But it might. So the preparations are in full flow. I've been asked about 8 times today, when am I going home? I say 20th Feb, most times people say 'oh you'll miss it then', twice I was told 'well the war will begin on the 15th, do you have a gas mask?' When I said I'd be staying in Tel Aviv next week, that became the majority response. Jerusalem is seen as being more safe.
Some people are evacuating to the country. One guy I met tonight runs the overnight facilities in a national park near the Dead Sea; the Philippino government have approached him for sanctuary for their people in the event of the war reaching Israel. He has 500 beds and is being asked to provide 3,000. He (understandably) wants money up front if he's to do this. They're holding back on providing the money because they don't know if the extra 2,500 beds will be needed.
The Dead Sea is seen as a 'safe' area because of its proximity to the border with Jordan and the PA-controlled areas. There's a weird theory afoot that Saddam won't choose to hit on Muslims. It has little basis in reality, I feel. However .. the Muslims I've met here reckon that Saddam doesn't have the means to distribute his chemicals anyway.
Time will tell. I guess.
I'm not sure how worried to be. But the British Consulate is calling for us all to provide details of our whereabouts now, so I expect if it gets very hairy very quickly I'll get thrown onto the first plane out anyway.
I'm very worried for Zeev, but that's different. He has no place to go to.
Enough already.
It's a bright, restless day - my last full day in Jerusalem, and there's somehow a shower out of this almost-cloudless sky. I'm sitting on the balcony under a warm sun - everyone here thinks I'm nuts, (so what's new?) but I'm actually going brown, so it's warm weather to me, til nightfall at least. I have a cup of cinnamoned mocha in front of me, all's well with the world, God's in his heaven, and I just discovered that the Post Office acts on behalf of Western Union here. 250 NIS (£40) will see me clear from here, it's just trying to get it here that's proven problematic (no bank account). But I'll figure something.
My last day in Jerusalem, and I haven't even mentioned the souk. I spent the best part of 3 days hanging around there, so really should.
Most of the Old City is one massive trading centre. Like everything else hereabouts, it's very steep - the alleyways that pass as streets have steps and slopes cut into them, the latter so that the barrow-boys can actually move their barrows. Some of these barrow-boys look to be around 90. They're surprisingly athletic.
Retrospective comment: I have a photo here that my grandfather took of St David's Street during WWII. Those slopes are new. I doubt anything else has changed greatly in 3,000 years.
The whole place is made up of these narrow alleyways, lined with stalls on either side. Sometimes if you walk up a side alley you find the places where people actually live. Although there are 4 quarters in the Old City (Armenian, Christian, Jewish and Muslim) you can sit in one spot and watch the Arab children go home from school, and the Jewish children go home from school, and I swear they all head the same direction.
Each shop has a man standing outside it hassling passers-by to come into his shop and look at his wares, to drink tea (with mint, with sage, or purely herbal) or strong coffee, to spend time in there. The way it goes is that they befriend you, and then you feel honour-bound to purchase something from them. It sometimes works. But I have to say that one of the funniest things I saw here was one of Ami's friends, when I was helping out down there, lowering his voice to a deep seductive growl midway through a perfectly normal conversation and aiming at a Jewish girl who was passing by, "Come into my shop, pretty lady, I have jewellery, I have fine clothes.." She shrugged him off without even glancing at him, and he and I both fell about laughing. That bunch have a wicked sense of humour.
My first day there, Ami made me a pair of lapus lazuli earrings for free, and planned to take me out that night. I cried off because, by the appointed time, I'd already met Buzby, who collects coins from the desert. Buzby showed me ancient mites (as in the widow), shekels and Roman coins, coins with Alexander's unmistakable head on them. The Bedouin find these things and Buzby buys from them, selling them on to collectors at a massive profit. I wish I could've afforded a mite, but I couldn't, so we had to forget all about that, and he put his collection back into the secret hiding-place with some regret. It's a passion with him, as well as his main source of income. The bead shop he operates from is kind of a front.
Buzby took me for a drive through the pissing rain, up the Mount of Olives, where he pointed out all the sites of antiquity and the sites of lesser antiquity (eg Begin's tomb). He dropped me off by the Garden of the Tomb - a designated Christian site which everybody else visits by coach - and advised me to walk back into the Old City via Damascus Gate and keep going straight.
The whole area outside Damascus Gate is taken up by a street market, unlike the tidy Jaffa Gate most Westerners enter by. The place was heaving with fat Arab women, scores of children, and those antique barrow-boys. Some women sat in the middle of the way, between the rows of stalls, peddling herbs and root vegetables out of wooden boxes and trying not to get kicked. It was still pissing it down with rain, and very slippery with wet litter everywhere underfoot. And I got hopelessly lost.
Underneath the arches in the Old City I found all kinds of places I shouldn't have been in.
I wandered about, casting caution to the winds and openly studying my map (a big no-no), trying to find something that matched up with what was around me. Al-Wadi could also be Al-Wad or just Wad. It could also be Ha-Gai. You tell me. The street names are in place throughout the Old City, they just bear no resemblance to the information on the map, the alleys splitting from the main streets are all wrong.. Eventually I stopped and asked an Arab guy in a quiet archway somewhere the right side of Temple Mount. He introduced himself as 'Mike' (Arabs think Westerners can't cope with their names), with 6 children, and desperate for trade due to the upcoming Haj (2 days to go). I ended up parting with 20 shekels for a couple of machine-cut wooden trinkets that he lied fantastically about regards workmanship, labour costs and value, but by that time I'd have given him the rotten 20 shekels, he'd so obviously sold nothing for days. It was a formality, so that we could call it 'trade' and not 'begging'.
'Mike' sent me up (and I do mean 'up') an alley that was totally counter-intuitive regards direction, purely residential, and definitely not on my map. There is nothing beautiful about these alleys, with their litter and their endless wet steps, the rusty iron doorways and the flapping clothes people have strung hopefully from their windows to dry. They're like slum areas; you can smell the poverty, and the pride. People who live here refer to the rest of Jerusalem as 'outside'. The Outside. Your heart aches for the children here.
Retrospective comment: In fact, given a normal tourist industry, the people here do pretty well for themselves by all accounts. It's just the troubles of the past 2 years that leave it this way.
A vaguely familiar voice yelled "Hey Engleesh! Where's my brother? Where's my car?" as I stepped out of this depressing place back into the bazaar. Somehow 'Mike' had it right, and I was less than 5 minutes' walk from Jaffa Gate.
I purchased some postcards from Buzby's brother, seeing as he'd inadvertently funded my bout of tourism, and left the Old City. Mike's Place was an oasis of calm, and I borrowed Daniel's cellphone to call off the assignation with Ami.
Extract from mail to Zeev:
Zeev, sorry -
I can't think who else to say it to that won't be unduly alarmed.
I'm meeting an Israeli Arab guy tomorrow night and am a tad nervy because he refused to meet up with me in an English bar.
If I'm never heard of again, here's his stuff: (follows contact details)
If I should die horribly, the best person to mention it to is probably my brother Chris (follows contact details).
All this because I didn't make a will yet, I dunno ... !
It's probably fine, I'm just 'in case' - ing.
Que sera, sera.
Take best care, be in touch, I'll be with you soon enough assuming I survive the souk.
- Steph
Something about Ami makes me very uneasy. I can't 100% put a finger on it, but on that occasion I know there were two things that set my alarms going - a) the refusal to meet in Western Jerusalem, and b) his insistence that I tell nobody we're going on a date (a date? wow!).
Retrospective comment: Zeev said later that he felt Ami may have been watching too much James Bond..
Perhaps I was overly cautious. When we finally went out it was a lovely evening; we drove up the Mount of Olives to a derelict house he'd just bought there, way up high, and he showed me proudly around the echoing empty building (yes, electricity and water were both on) that he's in the middle of renovating, before lighting a fire in a tin chimney and dragging it out to the balcony. We sat warming our hands over the flames - it was a bitterly cold, clear night - and talking, the whole pageant of the Old City below us, the Dome of the Rock gleaming to the fore (Ami's face lit up as he tried to describe how beautiful it is inside the building, which of course I'll never see).
Then Ami's cellphone rang. It was his mother. His sister had arrived from Jordan, could he come now and bring his brother? - there are 8 Ami-siblings, 1 in the West Bank, 1 in Jordan and 6 in East Jerusalem. Ami doused the fire and bundled me back into his car, venerating his mother between cellphone calls all the way.
We had an incident as we circumnavigated the walls of the Old City. A banged-up car with a missing headlamp carved us up. Ami read the bumper sticker and started physically shaking. It said 'Death to all Arabs'. The girl driving the car wore the 'Aunt Dolly' hat, she was an Orthodox Jew. Ami said she was a settler. I tried to calm him down - he was mad-angry - without a great deal of success. I pointed out that not all Jews love the settlers either. He answered, fairly unarguably given the circumstances, that the settlers were a problem the Jews had created. There was a very awkward silence. We evidently don't share an opinion as regards whose control Judea and Sumaria should be under.
He dropped me by Jaffa Gate, still secretive. I don't know who he knows, but I'd guess they aren't the type of person I'd want to know. And I fled straight back to Mike's safe bar.
Days have passed. I'm sitting in the TB shed (sorry TV lounge) in Bnei Dan, drinking a fairly pleasant, if expensive, double espresso and mourning the end of the mocha supply. It's noon, and I only just woke up, but it's okay, I ate last night for once. (Generally if I miss breakfast I just don't get to eat.) I went to 'Mike's On The Beach' - yep, the sister bar to the one in Jerusalem - and watched a blues band there last night. I made the mistake of telling the keyboard guy he was good. He was good, in fact he was brilliant, but we're in Tel Aviv, where a compliment goes as a chat-up line. (God alone knows what the women do to the men here, they're all emotional wrecks..)
We went for coffee after the band had finished playing and eaten their supper (which I was invited to join), and we talked some. He was a settler. I was shocked. When you see some of the extremist right wingers in action it's hard to remember that there are also decent people living in the settlements who just can't afford to live anywhere else, but I've met one now.
He walked me back through the remnants of the 'tropical storm' that greeted my arrival in Tel Aviv. I did warn him it was a couple of miles, but he flagged down a taxi as we left the beach area and spent the entire journey saying over and over again, "You walked? So far?" - okay, 3 miles. Mainly because I got lost in the downtown cafe area though.
He accompanied me into the hostel, presumably in the hope of sex (not a chance), which was less good as a) I saw the clock (turned out the bands here play until 2.30am) and b) the Coke machine needs refilling, even if we'd been able to get change for it, which we couldn't. It was nearly 5am and my heart sank - I do love the breakfasts, and I knew I'd no hope whatsoever of waking up in time to get any!
When he finally left, I walked through to my block only to find it guarded by an IDF-ette. We have a unit in residence, or had .. she explained that they'd been distributing gas masks in TA and were due back on base today, I didn't follow where 'base' was exactly. I took the opportunity to put out feelers about volunteering at this point. Between my non-existent Hebrew and her frail English, I think we both managed to offend one another! - the upshot basically was that she didn't know what I was talking about, the only foreign volunteers she knew of were from her kibbutz, and they were all young, whereas I (she pointed out tersely) am old.
It looks as though I'm going to have to wait until I see the girl who held the desk the last time I was here, because until I talked with her I'd also assumed I was too old. Either that or find some other way of getting information..
I do actually want to help, now. I don't like a lot of what is happening in the territories, but I believe that what the PA would like to do to Israel justifies much of it. And I think that if Iraq really does go off, if it has anything at all to throw, Israel doesn't stand a hope in hell. I also think the other surrounding countries are more than likely to seize the moment to do whatever they can to destroy Israel.
I can't forget how Ami was when I said I was meeting Tal. He wanted to know where, and at what time, and whether we planned to move from there. Later I heard there'd been a double suicide attack planned. (The IDF prevented it.) I think Ami knew about this plan. It leaves me cold inside.
I guess there's a war on. But even so..
I met a girl in Jerusalem who is based in Ramallah, one of the few Americans working there. She works in infrastructure - a touchy area for Palestinians, and one they need help in. She is paid well, she likes her boss, she enjoys her work. She has the air of someone who is very good at what they do.
One day when she was catching a bus to Jerusalem for her evening off the bus-stop across the road from where she stood exploded. Seven people died.
She's still trying to make sense of this, and failing.
Reliving the incident, she says that in her mind she took a cab directly the bomb had gone off and went straight to Mike's in Jerusalem. It's a 20-minute trip. She has no memory of the extra 40 minutes it took her to make that trip. She thinks she probably just stood rooted to the spot. By the time she reached Mike's the news was already known. Apparently she walked into the bar, white and shaking, and told those present that she'd been there but it was OK, there was no blood, nobody died.
The truth we'd like to have, the reality we'd like to be shown. Floyd's still alive, too.
She says life in Ramallah is rough, the check points are a pain, the IDF are a pain. She says terrible things happen every day there, and I'm sure they do, but she hasn't seen anything that shook her in the same way as that explosion, or she'd have launched into descriptions. She says the IDF lie about which towns are open, which closed, to spread confusion. It was on the tip of my tongue to say that from my experience of Israeli administrative skills it's far more likely they just don't know. (I just spent most of a week being 3 people according to the hostel. I even ended up with 2 keys.)
I didn't say it..
To lighten up a little, there was initially an American woman sharing my room in Jerusalem. I asked why she was visiting Israel at a time like this. "I work for an airline company, there was a draw, I won a free trip to Israel," she said, with no trace of irony. Every now and again I think of that and giggle inside. ("And the second prize was .....?!") She didn't stay long. Like, 2 days.
Shabbat's coming, I'd better stock up on beer and cigarettes and then go tell the Embassy I'm here.
"B'v'kesh, echad noblesse lites. Lo, yarouk. Toda."
"That will be 8 shekels 10."
DAMN!
So it's 3.30am already, well that's a 2-hour improvement over yesterday. It's Valentine's eve. The band in Mike's tonight was brilliant :) I'd met the vocalist in Jerusalem but didn't recognise him until he came over and said "Hi, decided to try out the Big City?"
Retrospective comment: There is a fair amount of movement between areas in Israel, I actually re-met a number of people I knew from Jerusalem throughout the second week. Much more movement than there is back home.
I didn't actually stay to the end this time, it was just a long, slow and very wet walk back. I went the beach route and was lullabyed by the howling Med.
Alex was so sweet tonight, but I couldn't find him when it was time for me to leave or drop. Alex is a Russian guy who fended for me yesterday when I ran out of shekels and ale. He's a very beautiful alcoholic (I repaid him by warding off the many homosexual advances he attracted) and very Russian, spending hours telling me excruciatingly bad jokes in a thick Slavic accent. I introduced him to someone as an angel tonight and they thought I meant it.
Maybe I did.
The down side to Tel Aviv so far is that I don't have an equivalent for Haylay - only Mike's, and Mike's in TA is very American, proudly so. It's next door to the US Embassy, and is very popular with young Israelis and bored everybody elses. The up side of this place is that everybody goes there, rather like Rick's Bar in Casablanca - you get to meet some interesting people in the early evenings.
So tonight I met an English journalist (working for The Sun), the guy responsible for comms in the US Embassy, and a guy on a mysterious mission that has something to do with aeroplanes. That's all he'd say, so that's all I know. But he has my email addy and says he will use it, which is good, as I liked him immediately. Back home in the States he's an inventor. Of what, I have no idea..
The journalist kept me amused for a while. He was trying desperately to be interesting, but there's a lot of competition that way in TA and he wasn't doing so well. After a while he gave up completely. He stole Alex's seat while Alex danced, and sat staring glumly into his beer. "Happy birthday!" I said, clinking his glass. "Fuck, how did you know?" "It's the only time the English get so depressed," I shrugged. The inventor got the giggles at this point, wished the journo a happy birthday too and then burbled, "That is just sooooooooooo British!"
I also met a local character named Doron who gave me his cellphone number and told me to call him Sunday if I'm serious about volunteering. So I will. He was for real, he left early.
Gal: "I'd just like to make an announcement. Mike's Place will be open as usual for the duration of the war."
(Rousing cheer.)
It's February 15th. We all expected the war to begin today. Ben Gurion airport even scheduled closure due to the anticipated incoming missiles.
There was a group of English Christians at breakfast this morning. Older people, from all over the UK, over here for a bible study weekend. They were the first to tell me that the war has been postponed for 3 weeks.
Rousing cheer from me, too.
I'm wondering now where Zeev is, and whether imajes managed to make the inet booking that can keep a roof over my head for the next 4 nights, and whether or not the Surf Center is open today. I think it's possible (nay, likely) that my mail isn't always getting through the series of hoops it's having to go through at present. It seems odd not to have heard from either of those two.
The TV is too loud for me to think straight, and I can't figure a way to either turn it off or lower the volume. It's relentlessly cheery and trivial, except for brief news items, none of which I can understand of course.
Machines have died for less.
I think I have to take a shower and head into town, despite the floods. It's been raining heavily all morning, again. Far more than it ever does in England over a sustained period. Apparently this isn't normal for Israel either, even in February.
It's not difficult to take a lateral leap and see God weeping over Israel.
"When do you fly home?"
"Feb 20th."
"I have my birthday on the 21st. If the war keeps you here, come back to Jerusalem and find me. My name's Tom."
Tom works for the UN, and understood why I laughed when he mentioned their role in border protection. He had an interesting take on the Finnish contingent in UN soldiery: "The Finns are great guys, great guys. And then they get drunk, and they are not so great guys."
I thought of Jani and had to smile.
Back on the 12th - Zeev's birthday, which would you believe I forgot! - I made my way across Jerusalem to Yad Va-Shem, the hall of names.
It had to be done, but I found it very heavy going.
The Holocaust museum is designed so that you walk through the unfolding of events. There are a lot of blind alleys and areas that look as though they might give respite, but whichever way you turn, there is no respite and there is no way out. It's almost like living through it, in microcosm; even when you know (or think you know) the history, there's always some new atrocity around the next corner. In a couple of areas there are short films screened on a continual loop in tiny cinemas. It ends, not where a European version would end, with the liberation of the concentration camps, but with the declaration of Israel as an independant state. To the Jewish mind, this is a part of the exact same story, and everything relates from now directly back to then, in a straight line, with no deviation. The centuries of persecution prior to the Holocaust are barely mentioned, but are ever present (eg "The Jews were given full civilian rights in country X in 1890") throughout. The story of Israel is the long, long story of the victimisation of one group of people by pretty well everybody else. And that includes the British.
One thing I hadn't known (or hadn't grasped) before is that the Jews in Germany - half a million of them - found the gateways of Europe closed in their faces when they tried to leave in 1938. Another thing that hadn't sunk in is just how long this particular bout of anti-semitism lasted. It went on for 12 long years.
We didn't lift a fucking finger. In 12 years.
I always believed that we didn't know what was happening to the Jews across Europe. That has to be one of the greatest modern lies there is. I saw ample evidence that we knew precisely what was going on, throughout, and chose to turn a blind eye. Maybe not the rank and file - the common soldiers and the women in the factories - but certainly the politically-aware public knew. There were newspaper reports throughout, certainly in America (cuttings were on display) but also in the UK.
When war broke out, our excuse for not helping the Jews was that there was a war on, didn't they know?
Before war broke out? Those 6 years, there were a couple of meetings about the Jewish situation that never changed a thing. The British continued to block Jewish entry to mandated Palestine as well as to the UK, the former on the grounds that the Arabs weren't too happy with the idea.
The Arabs still aren't too happy with the idea. But Israel continues to exist, although it has to fight hard to do so.
So many people I've met here were born somewhere else. But they all say the same thing: I'm Jewish. Israel is my home.
Across Nazi-controlled Europe, different countries implemented the anti-semitic laws in different ways. There was no standard symbol that the Jews were made to wear, it varied from region to region and even from town to town. There was no standard procedure of victimisation, it depended on the way the locals felt like implementing it. In one country - I forget which, Romania? - things carried on more or less as they always had. In most countries, an early move was to take Jewish businesses out of Jewish control and 'Aryanise' them.
After the war ended, there were several small pogroms and massacres when the surviving Jews tried to return to their homes. Their old neighbours killed many of them.
I didn't know about that, either.
And it was widespread.
All over the hills of Jerusalem, rosemary ("rue, for remembrance") grows wild.
And they say there isn't a God.
Here in Tel Aviv, the last flash-flood is starting to melt into mist, the palm trees and the orange trees are dripping, the obligatory ceramic urn is drying to the colour of pale sand. It's like the Palm Houses at Kew when it rains here. And always warm, permanently, although the locals shiver and tell me I should wear socks.
There are four small children playing on the patio, just like small children everywhere do. The blasted TV is still blaring out, I've sought sanctuary under a row of pine trees that never allowed a raindrop to touch the ground. The nuts are nearly ripe on the tree growing next to these. It's a fruitful season in a fruitful land.
I want to come back here. Possibly to live.
A new era dawning. It's a beautiful day in Tel Aviv, the trees aren't dripping anything more severe than wide purple flowers, the IDF-ettes have turned up here in droves, and I just heard from Valentina that imajes sorted my last few days for me. (Thanks, James! and Nigel!) The TV's tuned to CNN today so I can actually see what's happening in the world. Someone even turned it down. The Christians at breakfast were all talking about security checks and what kind of questions we can expect to be asked as we leave (this was useful information). They're leaving today.
The headlines on CNN are focusing on the 4 Israeli soldiers blown up in their tank in Gaza yesterday. (I knew about this already.) Hamas have claimed responsibility. I know that when I catch up with the Ha'aretz reports the soldiers' funerals will already be under way. I also know that the names and ages of the soldiers will be listed there, and that they'll all have been kids of around 20. The children who laid the mines that blew them up were probably even younger, but we'll never know that for sure.
It's Sunday today, the start of the working week here, and I need to phone Doron and talk volunteering, see what I can usefully do in the three days remaining to me (if anything). I think if/when I come back here it will have to be in an admin capacity of some kind.. Israel is (or should be!) crying out for administrators.
I've actually been offered 3 jobs since arriving here, one on a kibbutz and the other two 'real' jobs (these last illegally). The kibbutz in question is a pig farm, strangely. That's not the only reason I turned it down .. but it had a lot to do with it. I haven't eaten meat since I got here, apart from one night when someone shared some chicken with me. I haven't missed it, either. The chicken gave me a dodgy stomach for the next 2 days.
That said, if anything sudden happens between now and Thursday and I should get stuck here, the kibbutz route would be the sanest one to take. Kibbutzim arrange work visas and provide full accommodation as well as pocket-money, so I'd be protected that way. I'd just be unlikely to afford the flight home on the amount they pay.
It's good to know that there are alternatives, anyway. And it's possible to live here on less than 20 shekels a day .. possible, just not very likely ;)
I met a Glaswegian girl in Mike's on one of its crazier evenings. I was sitting with a fair, plump and happy-looking Orthodox Jewish guy whose only language in common with me was German (this seemed so weird, to be conversing in German in Tel Aviv, and with him) and who (Canadian Dave assured me later) only comes into TA once a month, buys every female in the bar a drink, goes to find a prostitute and then goes home. I take Canadian Dave's tales with a pinch of salt, but it has to be said - this guy really did buy every female in the bar a drink and then leave!
The girl from Glasgow sat the other side of me, and was talking with me about how Israel began, and about the alternative venues that were being looked at as a 'home for the Jews' in the beginning, and whether they would have been better off somewhere in Africa than here. I said I thought a Jewish nation would have had the same problems with its neighbouring countries wherever in the world it had been, and that they'd done the best possible thing by campaigning to return to their original home, even if it also meant returning to their original enemies. "We'd have had the same problem anywhere in the world? Do you really think that?" she asked, upset. I thought of Yad Va-Shem, of the 12th-century massacres in York, of the lack of international response after Kristallnacht, of the indirect political support many of my own friends back home give to the current Intifada, and the (unacknowledged) thinking that lies behind that support.. "Yes, I do," I said sadly. "Just look at what happened after WWII."
We were both close to tears. We clinked our glasses and moved apart by mutual consent - we were supposed to be out to have fun.
Another day, same bar. I met an English-educated Israeli woman who is hunting for a rich man :) She was a wild woman, evidently not short of a shekel or two herself, and had met with a friend to go to 'the American bar' where nobody would be shocked if they were seen to be drinking in the afternoon. (I should maybe mention that in addition to its policy of tolerance, the 'happy hour' in Mike's runs through from 4pm until 9pm. It makes it a very cheap and cheerful place to be.)
This girl was very bubbly and had a lot of amusing stories to tell, including the one about waiting for the Palestinian contingent to turn up at a conference she'd spent some months organising between Israeli and Palestinian businessman a couple of years ago. Eventually she had a phone call from one of the PA guys: "Turn on your TV. War just broke out in Jerusalem. We can't get out."
"Thank you so much, Ariel Sharon," she concluded, rolling her eyes. "Why did you have to choose that day of all days to go to Temple Mount?"
She had a less amusing story to tell about a trip she made to Germany for work. She was understandably nervous about going there (this was her first visit), but did it anyway, and took a taxi from the airport to her hotel. "Where are you from?" asked the cabbie, conversationally. "Tel Aviv." His tone changed immediately. "Tel Aviv? There is no such place as Tel Aviv. You mean Yaffo." "Stop. Please. Stop the cab, let me out, I'll walk.."
"Of all the cabs in Berlin," she said fretfully, "I had to pick the one driven by a fucking Palestinian."
I was staying just behind the Knesset in Jerusalem - although it took me 2 days to realise it, due to the map situation - and through a chance conversation in Haylay I found that there was public access, and even public tours. Of course, there are no sessions at present - Sharon's still trying to figure the component parts of the 16th Knesset - but I thought it'd be interesting to see the building at least.
A French girl took us around the place - a group of Jewish students from the University, most of whom knew as much as she did, and one of their tutors who probably knew even more, a group of Dutch visitors, and The Tourist (me). She was very good, very much at ease, critical of some areas, very open. She spoke of the nightmare of the 15th Knesset, which had more lists (== parties) in coalition than had ever been envisaged when the building was designed, and the way the board representing the party presence had been consistently wrong for the last 2 years as a consequence. The table layout was designed in a specific and symbolic way; for Sharon's first government, an extra inner circle of tables had to be erected. She said he'd promised to sort out the administrative headache for the 16th Knesset, and then gave a very Gallic shrug. "Sharon is Sharon. We will see."
The Chagall hall is impressive, mostly for the sheer size and colours of the three tapestries. I don't have a lot of time for Chagall's paintings, but the mosaic in there really suited his style.
The entire building is light and airy, and smells of a most un-Israeli efficiency.
There is a database kept there of every soldier who ever fell in the cause of Israel. A flame of remembrance flickers on-screen and each soldier who died on this day over the years is shown for around 30 seconds. The program is on a continual loop.
It goes some way to showing just how many have died for this place, and just how important Israel is to the Jewish population of the world.
Next to the screen there's a computer giving public access to the full database. There's an impressive amount of information about each soldier. The whole life - not just the military history - is celebrated and honoured. One of the Dutch group knew someone who had fallen at Suez, and looked him up. The same guy had been the tutor's company commander. One of the students had also known him, because he was friends with the student's father from childhood. The three of them exchanged notes for the next 20 minutes.
It's a very small country.
As we finished the tour we were shown the canteens (one for the MKs, the other open to all) and given free access to all the areas we'd been through. One of the students said to me, "They don't pay their bills, the MKs. They owe their canteen 10,000 shekels."
I'm afraid I laughed out loud.
Last night in Tel Aviv I met a bus driver on his night off (it being Shabbat). He shared a cheese/onion/green olive pizza with me - heavily spattered with tabasco, which hurt - and then started chatting me up. I spent all yesterday being very tired (probably because it was unusually cold, I couldn't get warm all day) so I gave him short shrift, thanked him for the food and left the bar.
That guy was fitter than he looked. He followed me nearly 2 miles along the beach, with me ducking and diving all the way. Every time I thought I'd shaken him off he'd turn up again. When I reached the park by the cliffs I cut through the trees and down a dry stream bed to get to the main road quickly. I had to wait for traffic. When I reached the other side, I saw him waiting for traffic too. I patted a passing dog and exchanged a few words with its owner, then looked back. He was still there, still following me. There was a taxi driver cleaning his windows by an empty bus-stop. I went and talked with him, told him I was being followed. He didn't understand much of what I was saying, so I did a lot of gesticulating.
That seemed to do the trick.
To be sure of it, I 'disappeared' myself behind a parked van as the taxi drove off and stuck to the shadows until the next junction, which leads into a lively and cafe-filled street. I was a little jumpy all the way home.
And yes, I had confronted him on the beach at one stage and told him he was scaring me. It made no difference whatsoever, and that was the biggest problem.
Just like home, except that I don't know enough Hebrew to ask passers-by for help.
Another honey of a day, warm and vaguely muggy, a very Tel Aviv day. I caught the sun yesterday while teasing the lizards that live on the high cliffs above North TA. I found a huge old one - maybe 8 or 10 inches long - and played hide and seek with him for nearly an hour. So the old melanoma's out in force today, and I look about 90 :(
I walked for hours trying to find a coin box to phone Doron, I'm too low on funds to invest in a card. I fought off 5 men on the way to Jaffa and 3 on the way back to Mike's. They were glad to see me in there. English Dave had been worried about "that creepy guy" following me out last night. Heh.
I borrowed someone's cellphone and called Doron, but there was no answer, so I guess I'd left it too late. Oh well, the thought was there..
Jaffa/Jaffo/Yafo (depending on where you look) is a tourist board enterprise now, and looks very lovely. As in Jerusalem (another city built atop a hill with defense firmly in mind) there are walkways and steps everywhere you look. Unlike Jerusalem, it's clean, and the only shops are around an open plaza at the top of the mount. There are also some excavations up there that have had a museum built around them. People have been living here for 3,000 years plus. The Crusaders termed it 'the gateway to Jerusalem'. Solomon traded through this port. So did the Phoenicians, and pretty well everybody else, right up until the last century. Nobody lives there now, the final population (of immigrant Hungarians, mostly) were rehoused in Tel Aviv and de-ghetto-ised. The arrangement seems to have been a mutually convenient one.
Coming back down the beach (fighting off another Rami, some guy from Jamaica who told me he's a karate instructor, and a sad-eyed coffee-coloured gentleman) I finally went and looked at the monument out on the jetty by Mike's Place. It commemorates the shelling of the Altalena, with 930 imported soldiers on board, by the provisional Israeli government. I went and read up on this incident on the internet later, it made no sense whatsoever. The guys who did the shelling were on the same side as the guys who were being shelled .. weren't they?
It was all to do with Begin, who was at the time leading the International Zionist League, known locally as the Irgun. The powers-that-be (which included Ben Gurion at that time) felt that the Irgun-funded shipment of soldiers and arms would produce 'an army within an army'. This was not - by all retrospective accounts - Begin's intent at all, but you can understand the nascent Israeli government's fear, if not their inability to communicate.
The soldiers weren't all killed, miraculously. Begin himself went on board the Altalena, staying until every man aboard had left it, and only a handful died (mostly as they reached the shore).
Victims of one of the earliest Israeli admin cock-ups, all.
Back in Mike's, I met George (who is coming to the UK soon, and has my email addy) and he fed me cold onion rings and beer. I already was given 2 slices of pizza earlier (with meatballs on - I skipped breakfast this morning because I'm still digesting them) and another 2 later (with red chillies, thanks Adam :). I got well looked-after yesterday :)
I met a guy named Robert who was talking politics with Adam. It's impossible to say where Robert comes from (Adam comes from here, he's the chef in Mike's). Listening in, Robert had also lived in Cuba, and in Beirut. He now lives in Ramallah, "next door to Arafat". "So, how is Arafat as a neighbour?" Adam asked, smiling. "Oh, he seems OK. There's not much left of his place though. I think the resale value of my property may be affected." He has said this often, for effect. He smiled and added that it's OK, he rents.
Outside of everything else, I couldn't figure how he got out of Ramallah this week, it's supposed to be closed. He turned out to be the Chief Technical Advisor on the UN's local rural development program. That'd explain it, then.
We talked about the road blocks, and about the poverty, and about the lack of birth control. He asked me why I hadn't been to the PA areas, was I afraid to go? I said no, I just didn't have enough cash to get myself out of trouble. He offered to take me with him to Ramallah. I hesitated, torn between the urge for adventure and the need to catch a plane home on Thursday. "Can you guarantee getting me back to Tel Aviv tomorrow?" I asked finally. "No, I can't," said Robert. "That settles that, then. But next time I'm in Israel, I'll take you up on the offer." He gave me his card as he left.
Working there - in that kind of area - would also help Israel. One of the biggest fears amongst the Jews is related to the almost-complete lack of birth control amongst the Arabs, and particularly amongst the Palestinian Arabs claiming to have a birthright to Israeli lands and property. There are already too many of them to allow Israel to remain a Jewish state in anything but name if they were allowed to be a part of Israel. In another decade the Arab population would outweigh the Jewish population. The moment that happens, the persecution of a Jewish minority becomes possible. The whole point of having a Jewish state is to have one place on this planet where that's guaranteed not to happen.
Robert accused Israel of being an apartheid state. I pointed out that certain factions of the community do not contribute to the state, and that government funding relates to the contribution made by a given area. Hasidic Jews don't do any better than Israeli Arabs do. Israeli Arabs don't starve, but they don't join the IDF either, so they don't do too well. The Druze, by contrast, do join the IDF, and are accepted as an equal part of Israeli society. When you look at what happens with them, you get a picture of how Arabs could live in a Jewish state.
Hmm.
The guitarist whose name I always forget (mainly because he's a spit for two other people I already know here) played in a duo tonight, badly. He needs to play with a drummer.
And Big Didi offered to lend me shekels, should I run out..
I'm out of wine - the cheap, sweet Hebron wine, 11 shekels a bottle and vaguely honeyed. I need to buy more, and some Mustang (8.5 shekels a pack), and am wishing like crazy that I'd known beforehand how easy it is to get B&B for 45 shekels a night in the local hostels here in central Tel Aviv..
So, I'm on to the last but one day here.
I met one of Floyd's fans last night. He's English, his name's Mark, and he's a total mess - I think Israel is a country that can eat souls. He's the only person I met here that I've ended up advising to sort out whatever keeps him out of the UK and get the fuck back home.
We went out on a major session, found an Irish bar after Mike's closed at 4am, stayed there until 7am. (Tel Aviv never sleeps.) I walked home through an amazing sunrise - the clouds all nicotine-stained and hanging low around the rim of the world - and got in just in time for breakfast, which finishes at 9.
Naturally I slept until around 3pm and so didn't hit the inet cafe until 5pm today. Equally naturally there was an email there from Zeev some time the previous eve suggesting that we meet up at lunchtime today :I
Ho hum.
We sorted it out via irc, I'm walking in to Ramat Gan (fairly close to where I'm staying) tomorrow lunchtime to meet with him and hopefully get a look around Zend too.
I can't wait :)
Tonight I met an amazing character. Toby is an American ex-hippy who joined the army in order to fund the final year of his first degree. He still hasn't completed the degree several years down the line - he keeps being sent on defense missions instead. He's seen an unfair amount of active service, and now pushes pens. His advice on Israel goes something like "Get the fuck out of here by the end of the month."
Strangely, we had a good night :)
Toby figured I was short on shekels (I don't know how, I'm sure I never mentioned it) and slipped me 20 as he left, which was dead nice of him, and his card (from the Defense dept at the US Embassy). I used it to stock up on Hebron wine and Mustangs, and arrived home clutching both at around 2am. Big mistake. There were a handful of IDF babies in the lobby when I arrived.. sure enough, they're staying in my block. These boys are ordered out of bed at 6am. Loudly.
Consequently I'm still brain-dead from 2 days ago and feeling utterly washed-out. Hopefully the walk up to Ramat Gan will go some way to clearing my mind...
Hmm, it really didn't. It wasn't far enough, for a start. Zeev's directions were good (I could've just done with knowing that the '3' at the end of the street name was the building number & then he wouldn't have had to spend so long giving them). I'd allowed an hour to find the place and it actually took me less than 30 minutes; not owning a watch and not knowing the area meant I didn't want to leave it to explore while I waited, so I spent what seemed like an eternity hanging around on the plaza outside, watching the palm trees bend and debating whether to spend my forlorn handful of shekels on inet access so I could tell Zeev I was already there. As I lit my third cigarette he walked past me with a group of people and didn't see me! (I was still pretty early, to be fair.) I followed them to a nearby cafe and grabbed him when the crowd thinned. Too late, he'd already ordered lunch and was obviously in the throes of discussing work stuff. I said I'd take a wander and found another place a couple of doors down that sold espresso and had ashtrays on the table.
He was quick, I'll give him that :)
We took a walk around the block and he showed me Ramat Gan, or at least, his part of it. It's an odd area, a bunch of skyscrapers in a central position and all around it just housing. You can turn a corner and find almost anything there, I liked that about it. The part I didn't like was the severe lack of greenery in the neighbourhood, but I guess that'll improve as it comes together (irony: Ramat Gan means 'Garden Heights'). As with most of Israel, large areas of Ramat Gan are still under construction, as if to erase any doubt about just how new this country is, and just how immediate its history.
Zeev's taller in Israel :) I don't know how to explain that one, he just is. He seems well, if tired, and is finally putting on some weight.
The wind was building up for the later storm, so we went indoors and drank coffee in a yuppie cafe at the bottom of the Zend skyscraper and talked politics and history. (No, they don't own a skyscraper. They have an office halfway up it.) As we finished up, I asked to see the Zend offices. He was amused - he knows just how crap my coding is - and asked if I really wanted to see them. I explained that Derick would kill me if I came all the way to Israel and didn't visit Zend. This was unarguable, so he took me up.
Those lifts are great :)
People were busy up there, and I was strongly advised not to interrupt Stas, which was sad, because I'd like to have shaken his hand. We went and stood talking in a meeting room with a wild view of the whole of Tel Aviv spread below us, right to the sea, but it's too far from there to see that the sea was mad that day. Zeev pointed out Givatayim and the IDF building (which is way too close for comfort in my opinion, but he pointed out that it's one of the better-protected buildings in TA).
It became obvious that I was keeping Zeev from his business, so I made moves to leave. He escorted me down to the lobby (I've a strong suspicion that Zeev gets a kick out of those lifts too :) and more or less echoed Toby's advice. I told him I was planning on coming back.. it seems to me that nowhere will be safe if Israel goes down in flames. Zeev mentioned that at least nowhere else had the PA to contend with.. No, we don't, and I won't argue with the man on that score.
Thanks Ze'ev for being so polite even though I still say your name wrong :)
I was stopped in the street by a girl as I left the Zend offices.
"Slicha, ma sha sho?"
"I'm sorry, I'm English, and I don't have a watch."
Two can play at this game...
The morning I went to meet Zeev, I'd had the 6am wake-up call again so I went to breakfast early. When I got back to my room, my bed - and everything on it - had been stripped. I went nuts, and grumped all the way through the procedure of claiming new linen and remaking my nest, but I could imagine exactly what had happened.
Boss: "Clean Block 3 today."
Workers: "OK."
- those admin skills will forever let Israel down.
Still on the subject of Israeli administration, a guy I met that evening in Mike's told me a very sorry tale indeed.
His family had come to Israel when he was a small child, and the immigration officer who dealt with them had mistaken him for a girl. The error wasn't noticed for some time, and he has remained female in all fields of civilian activity ever since.
This included the day he was sent to join a female IDF unit.
The issue of his gender still hasn't been resolved, although the IDF refused to believe he was a girl and gave him a more manly role. This means that his IDF history conflicts with his administrative records, which has led to yet more confusion.
He introduced himself to me as a female :)
My final night in Israel began well, despite the fact that I had to go into the bar at a stupidly early time because the wind was whipping up a sandstorm by the beach and I had nowhere else to go. I was starving hungry, but Canadian Dave somehow picked up on this and fed me pizza whenever any came his way. Adam the chef was on an early shift, finishing at 9pm, and came to sit with me, being too tired by then to go home and sleep off the previous night's party. Pretty well everyone in TA is continually partying now; the war didn't begin, the tension is still there, we're all powerless, what else is there to do? Gal was on a late shift, but came in early and joined the merry throng for a beer before he began work.
It was an open mic night. A few of the guys had brought guitars, and a couple of them opened up with some 12-bar blues and old folksy covers, quite nicely, all very low-key (unlike the previous all-come-ye which had a full brass section and turned into a trad jazz night). Adam was being his happy self, just digging the singer's voice ('Listen, he's singing two notes together!') - the boy on stage at that point really was good, especially when it came to Neil Young covers. Mike's Place was filling up, and the mood was very relaxed and laid-back.
Outside, the wind was getting up and the rollers were crashing nearly onto the promenade, real high scary waves. It wasn't possible to walk any distance, and I was trying not to think about how I was going to get back to the hostel. When the rain came it was heavy and sudden, cleaning the windows in a matter of moments. I prepared myself for a very late night, waiting for the storm to blow itself out.
An English couple blew in out of the dark. They'd only just met, and he was the archetypal lager lout football fan kind of Englishman abroad. I really thought that Israel would be the one place where that wouldn't be a concern; so be it, we're all wrong sometimes. The girl was a Scouse who was staying in TA for one night only, on her way to the airport to go home the next day. She plainly adored the guy. As he stood by the bar he grinned at all within earshot and said loudly, ostensibly to her, "My best mate's coming here tomorrow, you should stay, you'd like him, he's a National Front guy too. National Front, ha ha, I bet none of you even know what that is, do you?"
Erm.. I do, actually. They're the white supremacist bunch from hell. I don't know what these guys are doing in Israel, and I don't really want to know. But that little speech of his took me from 'oh god this guy's going to be a pain in the arse' to 'oh god' in less than 2 seconds flat.
It meant rather less to the largely Israeli audience. Adam noticed me tensing up and said, "I thought this too at first, but he's okay, he's a nice guy, he's always like this, and he comes in here a lot." "He is NOT okay," I said through gritted teeth. By this time the subject of our conversation had slapped the new waitress (this being the first hour of her new job) on the backside while she was carrying food to a group of people at a table, and was now heckling the musicians. "That's a tough one for her," said Adam, laughing. "Poor girl, I hope she doesn't think it's always like this."
In an English bar he'd have been banned at that point.
Up on the stage, a trio of musicians were ploughing determinedly through a medley of Bob Dylan numbers, trying to ignore the disruption. This wasn't enough for our man. "Oh look, he's going to sing!" said his girlfriend softly, a pleased little smile around her lips as she gazed cow-eyed at him. (I prayed that she wasn't booked onto my flight.) He grabbed the mic from the singer and shouted, 'It's open mic night, ennit? Well it's my turn now," and launched into a surprisingly tuneful version of 'A Hard Day's Night'. The musicians took it well and blagged it along with him, but at the end of the song, one of them quietly unplugged his guitar, packed it away and left the stage. A silent and dignified protest. The audience seemed tense and uncertain; this wasn't what they'd expected, or what they wanted, but maybe they just hadn't seen any English tourists in a while? Is this guy a joker or is he dangerous? If we laugh at his jokes can we call it 'having fun'? If we ignore him, what will he do next?
This character then went back to the girlfriend at the bar, making obscene gestures and remarks to every female he passed en route, and loudly. By now the tension in the room was palpable, everyone wearing slightly sick smiles and pretending it was funny. It wasn't funny. It was suddenly hugely, sickeningly obvious to me how things must have been when Nazi Germany began its stealthy persecution of the Jewish community: They don't really mean this .. just wear it and let it pass, it'll be okay .. but they did mean it, and it wasn't okay, and 6 million corpses paid the price of appeasement.
I'd just reached this unnerved state when he turned his attention to me. He's evidently a bad judge of character. He came and stood less than 2 feet in front of me and made some loud reference to my genitals. I gazed into his dead, psychotic eyes, and noticed a small cut on the bridge of his nose. "Is that a broken nose I see before me?" I asked sweetly, and punched him on it as hard as I could. He swayed slightly and took a step back. "Oops," I said, and watched him go back to the girlfriend. "Dammit, I didn't hit hard enough," I muttered to Adam. Adam laughed and hugged me, and a guy I didn't know who was sitting the other side of me offered to buy me a beer, which for once in my life I refused.
I was actually feeling sick - physically sick - by this point. The Nazi had just got back on stage and wrecked another Israeli attempt to play something gentle, the captive (because of the weather) audience were uncertain what to do, uneasy, nervous, waiting for the explosion to happen, hoping that being nice would prevent it somehow. So I wanted to leave. And had no money left. I drank the last of my beer quickly and got up to make this final protest at least, and the guy who offered the drink said, "Okay, I know a nice bar, it's not far from here. Would you like a drink with me there instead?"
I could've kissed him. In fact, later, I did :)
We had to take a taxi the 300 metres to King George Street, because it still wasn't possible to walk against the wind.
So my last night in Israel ended in a good place after all, with gentle people and happy music and small plates of crunchy salad and complementary light-bangles in a jar on the bar. The landlord bought me and my new-found friend a large shot of whisky when we walked in (presumably against the fearsome weather outside) and we sat on bar stools, warm and comfortable, getting to know one another.
Eitan's story was funny and cute. He was raised in a very strict religious family, one of many, and rebelled as soon as it was physically possible to do so. ("We have people like you in England," I told him. "We call them 'Roman Catholics'". Eitan laughed - he's met a few.) When he was in the IDF, just after his 19th birthday, there was a terrible week when both his girlfriends informed him they were pregnant by him and wanted to keep the child. Despite the panic at the time, both girls forgave him somehow (it seems he was forced by the circumstances to 'fess up) and set him free. So now he has two almost-adult offspring, both by separate mothers and both the same age, for whom he fights battles with an email client (which he refuses to do for anyone else).
He doesn't even look 30.
Eitan did my soul good, he was such easy company, very sweet and very funny. We seemed to spend a lot of time laughing, and I wished we'd met earlier in the week. The bar was a really cool Israeli bar, too - something I'd been missing ever since leaving Jerusalem, as the ones I'd looked into in TA were definitely not my kind of place.
After an hour or so there was a final squall and a rush of rain outside, and then a couple of the guys went outside and tipped the awning to clear the water out of it, and came back in pronouncing the storm over.
I was really tired by this time, and had to go. Eitan did the Israeli thing and offered me food (I don't think I met any Israelis of either sex that didn't do this at some stage) which I declined, and asked if I was okay to walk (which was a bit silly given that he couldn't have done much if I'd said 'no'). I wanted to walk, anyway. I needed to say goodbye to Tel Aviv at night; the place isn't alive in the same way in the daylight hours.
The 19-year-old boy guarding Block 3 at the hostel looked tired and strained. He spoke fluent English, and told me that his unit were being sent to the North in the morning, and that he was nervous of going there. I'll bet he was, too. When Iraq is bombed, the biggest danger is less likely to be the chemical weapons landing on Tel Aviv than the Lebanese (and pretty much everyone else with an axe to grind) deciding it's a good time to attack the Zionist usurper. I wished him mazel tov, and meant it with all my heart.
For once I was grateful to know that I'd be woken at 6am. It meant there was next to no chance of my missing the plane.
So here we go. A half-full bottle of sweet Hebron wine - that can't go on the plane - okay, okay .. I took a paper cup when I checked out of the hostel (which I had to do at 10am) and went to the Yarkon Park, intending to run my eyes over the amazing birdlife along the Yarkon one last time while I drank the stuff. God had other plans, and the sky emptied itself on me for the next 3 hours solid. No birds were to be seen, but I did at least find a dry park bench under a tall bush, and I sat there for my 'wet picnic', hoping not too many people would come by. I'm not generally a morning drinker, it took me an hour to struggle through two cups of the stuff, but hey, I was pretty relaxed at the end of the hour :)
I took a rather aimless wander around Northern Tel Aviv after that, to kill time. And still it rained. I gave up when the third flash flood of the morning came before the second had drained from the roads, and I went and sat resignedly in the 222 bus-shelter.
A Danish woman waiting with me there shared her concerns about the anticipated bombings. In the Gulf War every window in her home was blown out, but it was okay, she was young and had no children. Now, she has an 8-year-old son. "He will be old enough to remember it," she said fretfully.
You can't protect a child from its future, no matter how you try. And I don't envy one mother in this beautiful, crazy part of the world.
The bus ride to Ben Gurion was uneventful, the security check as expected - give or take the extreme reaction to my claim to have walked pretty much everywhere, which I had to prove with my map because Israelis don't walk - the departure lounge was excruciatingly boring, and on the flight home I got a window seat entirely to myself and even slept after it went dark. This is me, who is terrified of flying, sleeping on a plane. I told you El Al were good!
I was really glad I'd done that when I reached Heathrow and found there were no buses to Hertfordshire for the next 7 hours. After all, if I hadn't slept I'd have been too tired to hitch home, which would have ruined a long-standing tradition :)
On the night of April 29th 2003 Mike's On The Beach in Tel Aviv was visited by two English Muslim guys taking an 'alternative holiday'. One of the visitors blew himself up; the security guard threw his own body in the way of the explosion. The second visitor fled - presumably to hide amongst the rocky breakwaters - and was washed up on a TA beach some three days later. Three of the Mike's Place people lost their lives that night; Dominique Hass (a long-term waitress in Mike's Place who came to Israel from France), Yannai Weiss, and Ran Baron (musicians playing on this, an open-mic night). As you'll have read above, open-mic nights could be very busy indeed at Mike's Place. This one was no exception, and despite the heroic efforts of Avi Tabiv - the security worker on the door that night - over 50 people were injured in the explosion, some quite horrifically.
There but for the grace of God go I.