Info

I am in here.

Posts from the Jaffa, July 2004 Category

Choose another category?

So I’m the only one in the First Class of El Al’s flight 007 to JFK. (Modern times sure bring us odd-looking integers and initials, don’t they?) I sleep on the floor on a futon for a week and a half, covered with an old red comforter with pink stitching, and I learn to walk down the dusty street past the construction equipment, and the butcher’s shop getting ready for the day’s business with loud chopping sounds, to the local convenience store to buy a 2-liter bottle of pre-chilled orange Fanta for breakfast. Seven shekels they charge the shiksa for this.

Am I still a shiksa after I convert?

Anyway, I sleep on the floor on a futon in Jaffa for a week and a half, with goats (which entered the restaurant we were dining at last night, but were discouraged from getting much past the front door) and loud-mouthed, inbred, imported, domesticated southeast Asian jungle-fowl (chickens) and a pony (whose hoof-prints I saw in the dust this morning on the way to the store) as neighbors, so of course the proper re-introduction to American society is First Class on El Al. I got my embroidered slippers on (they came in their own little ultra-suede pouch) and my baggie-o-toiletries (in a separate little ultra-suede pouch) in the empty seat beside me. Fluffy the Laptop is plugged in, the foot-rest is up, the Maccabi Beer and plate-o-cashews is beside me.

Lunch. Michal the stewardess and I discuss the philosophical underpinnings of our two countries (very similar) while feeding me beef tenderloin on a great big mushroom. “Can I tempt you with ice cream?” Oh, yeah. I trust it was a rhetorical question.

Tis after my farewell dinner with M, and the main room has been swept and adjusted for the arrival of Gil so that he and M can go over the upcoming tapings for the weekend TV show. Dafna has turned on the red hanging lamp, and lit candles all over the bureau. I snuggle in the corner with lots of pillows, and Fluffy the Laptop.

I flatly refuse to acknowledge that I leave tomorrow, and have resolutely refused to pack. Not that I have much to pack… I bought a tee shirt at Paul’s Café, and that’s it. What kind of tourist goes home without an armload of souvenirs? Maybe I’m not a tourist. If not, what am I then? “Traveller” sounds good, but how to define? Must contemplate this while I’m packing finishing my murder mystery.

One of the last nights that I’ll spend here in my room in M and C’s house. I will miss having a courtyard. I will miss jackdaws instead of crows. I will miss the goats in the neighborhood, and the chickens and the cats and the pony. Not so much the roosters, though. Nor the mosque.

Did I tell you about the mosque up the street? No? Well, then… First off, I don’t dislike it because it’s Muslim, as one might think, given my anti-terrorist viewpoints. I dislike it because of the blasted noise! Five calls to prayer a day, over loudspeakers. That, and a mysterious need for the man in charge to use the loudspeakers to recite prayers or Koran snippets at about 3 a.m. sometimes. Because he wakes me up at that time, that’s how I know.

It has the distinction of being the only mosque in Israel that has an actual person at the loudspeakers doing the calls to prayer and the readings. All the other mosques use tape recordings. Ah! The perils of progress.

You know you’re getting soppy when you do pre-reminiscences about minor neighborhood annoyances, so I’ll stop at that. Especially since there’s nothing more to say about it, really.

  • jellyfish stranded at the high water line
  • Muslim wedding receptions with men and women at separate restaurants
  • the tribe of goats that meanders down the street, eating the leaves from the trees that they can reach
  • heat
  • not minding the heat so much anymore

The afternoon of Shabbat spent on the beach in Jaffa: just me and a couple of hundred of the people whose acts I’ve been decrying in this blog, as if they’re a people of only one mind and opinion. I still decry those actions. But I can no longer see all Arabs in the same simplistic light as before.

I meandered up and down the beach among children and adults building sand castles, flying a kite, playing some sort of paddleball game, having picnics, gossiping. Sometimes some nasty Israeli pop music was blared over the loudspeakers at the lifeguards’ hut. Jellyfish lay scattered along the high water line, rather bewildered to find themselves dead all of a sudden, and looking like some glassblowing experiments gone awry. Collected 2 shells, 1 rock, and 1 jellyfish sting, quite inadvertent, I assure you. The thing rammed itself into my ankle.

Walked back to the house, but I slipped out of M’s weekly pre-Havdalah teaching because it was almost all in Hebrew which, as we all know, I don’t understand yet. Very frustrating, because I’m sure I would have loved it. Sat on top of the restaurant across the street with my dinner of hummus and tea, and watched the sun set into the Mediterranean.

I came back for Havdalah itself, because that doesn’t seem to be language-dependent. And I’d finished my tea, too.

Twenty minutes to Shabbat. Friends came to spend Shabbat with us all, and we spent the late afternoon at the beach at Jaffa. M pointed something out as we sat there, getting sunburned: we were the only Jews there.

People in Tel Aviv, about 10 minutes away, refuse to come to this beach because they’re terrified of the Arabs. Some friends in Tel Aviv won’t even come to M and C’s house in Jaffa because it’s in a mixed neighborhood — Sunni Muslims, Christian Arabs of a sort of liberal variety, Jews.

But it was a lovely afternoon. Everyone frolicked and swam and talked, and the children chased each other and swam and flew kites. Some women were draped in dark clothes and scarves, but still had no problem plopping themselves down in the surf despite the yards of cloth.

I was hoping I’d get by without too bad of a burn, but my nose is already turning pink. I think I might not be online till Shabbat is over, but then again, who can resist the lure of the laptop?

  • The shouk this morning in Jaffa, and all the stuff it had out for sale:
    • several top halves of mannequins
    • huge copper pots, pre-tarnished for your convenience
    • damp, mildewy looking rugs stacked like a cord of wood
    • third-hand furniture, in the same condition but unstacked
    • hubbly-bubblies
  • swarm upon swarm of cats, who seem to travel in packs that revolve around the local dumpster
  • the Afloka restaurant across the street, without which I’d have starved by now
  • settling down for a good read in the lobby of the TV studio where M is taping some shows
  • flowers blooming everywhere
  • learning how to say te with nana because every café and restaurant serves that (tea with mint) (fresh mint)

No, I didn’t get new earrings in tonight’s venture into downtown Tel Aviv. I am getting rather sentimental about the ones I have in now. Remember when I got the new piercing? Those earrings are still in there. Never been removed. I’m not sure I know how to do it. Ear piercing isn’t for wimps. I am growing attached to them, but I doubt I’ll keep the same ones in for the next fifty years or so.

Dinner of tea with nana (mint), an olive, a peach. A remarkably wonderful and tasty peach. I learn to look for “Kosher” signs on restaurants, in Hebrew, of course. Many dogs in downtown Tel Aviv. Many cats here in the side streets of Jaffa. Coming up with a reason for this will give me something to do as I fall asleep.