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February 18, 2004
Tel Aviv
so it's early morning in Tel Aviv, around 7:30 or so. i've become even more of an early riser over here. just walked with nate to the bus stop to catch the bus to the airport, now pretty much all of the folks i met from the tour have returned to the states or went to kibbutz, cept for evan, who flys home the same time i do.
did a lot of walking around yesterday, i met up with ran rimon, my good friend who i met in honduras, and he showed me some of the cooler neighborhoods.
tel aviv as a city has a good feel to it. several people have told me that since the second intifada was declared things are much quieter, plus it's winter over here, which still means long sleeve shirts are fine to wear but it's no 100 degree summer heat. the architecture varies widely, ran was telling me about how in '48, when all the immigrants were arriving from all over the world, how one solo architect designed all the housing, and though his design was fairly generic, they boxed it up even more, so that many neighborhoods look, in a word, bleak.
but the bleakness does not extend to the people. i sat watching them walk around yesterday, like i always find myself doing in foreign cities, wondering that while they are living their actual lives, i'm playing the role of a traveler, visiting and watching but not accomplishing much towards the contemporary "normal" goals in my own life. this is a role i quite fancy, but at times it feels suspect.
ran is a political science major so i naturally quizzed him about the domestic politics of israel. he speaks eloquently and frankly has amazing english, a bigger vocabulary then anyone i've met who wasn't a native speaker. his vocab is probably bigger then most americans, not that i'm knocking americans, but when was the last time you heard someone back home use the term "ethos" to describe the feelings of the populace? ever?
anyways, it was a lot to absorb, but i feel like my perception of the domestic situation is rounding out, that if i was to move here in a year or so to learn hebrew, i could tell someone beforehand and after i got here about the divisions within the jewish population of israel, about the history of the conflict with the palestinians, about where i stand on such issues as the barrier fence first as a jew thinking of what this land stood for after world war 2 and secondly as a human thinking of human rights abuses.
yesterday before nate and i dropped jessie of at her bus full of american environmentalists heading to a kibbutz to study the environment, we found a veggie restaurant called taste of life. everything was vegan, and it was owned by one of the original 101 black jews i'm pretty sure they were who moved here to israel from chicago in 1969. he said there are 2000 of them now, all living in a vegan community. pretty cool. their restaurant kicked so much ass i can't tell you. homemade vegan icecream and tons of fake meat goodness, i can't wait to eat their again for lunch.
one thing i haven't written about is the cab ride that justin and i had from dahab, egypt on the sinai peninsula back towards eilat in southern israel. as soon as we got in the cab driver launched us into a political discussion that spanned the entire 2 hour cab ride, his face glued for a disconcertingly long part of it to the rear view, watching us as we spoke to him.
it was good to talk to someone with such a different worldview. he felt that hezbollah, hamas and islamic jihad ard fighting the good fight, that jews control congress and masterminded sept. 11th, that the arabs will never let america steal the oil, instead preferring to fight to the last death. justin and i tried to get through that jews aren't evil like he'd been taught, but it was so indoctrinated, and made me wonder about what i've been indoctrinated with.
Posted by bendan at February 18, 2004 10:18 PM
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