Beth and I slept well and were up and out before 8am. Just down the street we had an obligatory cream cheese bagel. Just sitting on the street side patio in the quiet morning traffic, we both felt that we were already deep in to vacation mode. Maybe the lack of trips over the last couple of years had ensured that we were not going to take a few days to really get there.
We asked Eric for an active tour, and so far I think he was delivering. We connected with a smiling Eric and Alex and Kim outside our hotel, and he took us for a walk through the city. Today, the focus was architecture and how the city of Tel Aviv was founded. Basically, the old arab part of the city, Jaffa (or Yafo), is a thousands-year old port city and Tel-Aviv became a Jewish settlement just north of the city...
By the beginning of the 20th century, the population of Jaffa had swelled considerably. A group of Jews left Jaffa for the sand dunes to the north, where in 1909 they held a lottery to divide the lots acquired earlier. The settlement was known at first as Ahuzat Bayit (Hebrew: אחוזת בית), but an assembly of its residents changed its name to Tel Aviv on 21 May 1910.
The main avenue of Tel-Aviv is called Rothschild - a tree-lined boulevard with cycling and walking paths down the middle. It was from this street, using buildings and monuments and a little supplementary binder, that Eric weaved his story of the city. Scooters and bikes zoomed everywhere... I eyed Alex and we nodded - scooters were in our future.
That reminds me.... (this is how the jokes usually start...)
A Chinese man and a Jewish man are sitting alone at opposite ends of the bar. After a few drinks, the Jewish man walks over to the Chinese man and slaps in the back of the head.
"What was that for?" the Chinese man asked.
"That was for Pearl Harbor!" the Jewish man said.
"Pearl Harbor? That was the Japanese. I'm Chinese."
"Chinese, Japanese, you are all the same!"
The Jewish man returns to his seat at the bar. After a while the Chinese man gets up and walks up to the Jewish man and whacked him in the head.
"What was that for?" the Jewish man asked.
"That was for the Titanic!"
"The Titanic? That was an iceberg."
"Iceberg, Goldberg, you are all the same."
After a short coffee stop we circled back through the first neighbourhood built north of Jaffa - the very cute Neve Tzedek. The whole area was filled with one to two story houses and shops and was super quiet. Eric pointed to a gelato shop he said was the best and we filed that away. Eric continued to grow on us even more.
We walked south even more, past the old main train station and over to the roundabout on the coast that signals you're entering Jaffa. Immediately the architecture is different - more limestone, some cobbled streets and gently rising hills. Eric took us through the Mariott's " The Jaffa" hotel built around an old french hospital. It was another fine example of how the local authorities are pro progress, but want to maintain and restore all old buildings.
In Tel Aviv, Eric showed us many examples of this - you would see an old, two-storey building that had been completely refaced and updated, then five or 10 more levels above that building, built in a different, but complimentary style - in order to highlight "this part is old, this part is new". Another interesting thing he point out was a way to upgrade existing, older buildings that weren't up to today's safety standards. Private public deals are made so that the private developer is responsible for fixing up the current spaces (and finding current tenants a place to live during construction) and they would profit from anything built above the existing building. Eric described a lot of private-public deals that appeared to be win-win throughout the trip and it seemed like a concept all to foreign for us Canadians.
Over to Jaffa. Chicago Zionist rapper. Cobbled gently rising streets. Ileana good museum. Hotel - old with hospital.
We passed an outdoor musician rapping over classic eighties melodies, and Eric pointed out that the man (he was black) was most likely from a small group of people from Chicago that had moved to Tel-Aviv as part of zionist movement a few decades ago.
Eric took us through the pretty eclectic Ilana Goor Museum (I'm guessing by the number of self portraits she is quite enamoured with herself) which showed off some really cool architecture and a wonderful view of the city from the top.
We were hungry - a good thing to be in Israel. Lunch was shawarma and meze - a double dose of food the way we ordered, but it was amazing. The meze get automatically refilled (and charged!) if you're not quick to wave them off, but every bite of everything was so good. Eric took us through the old Jaffa market area (everything was closed today) and showed us where we had made a reservation for dinner.
The five of us walked back along boardwalk until we said farewell. Eric had parked midway in case we had over estimated how much we could walk, but I think he was quickly getting used to our stamina as foot-based explorers. What a great first full day with our trusty guide.
That evening, we took a Gett (no uber in Israel - they tend to love their home grown solutions, and I have to say... they're not wrong!) back to Old Jaffa to a restaurant called Onzo. The area was hopping now, with small and mid-sized restaurants lit up and pumping out music. You'll read this a lot, but the food was spectacular.
We decided to walk the 3km back to the hotel via the boardwalk area. Nice, sixteen degrees with a gentle breeze... we were in heaven.
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