Spectacular beaches? Check. Beautiful people? You betcha. Art deco galore? Oh yeah. The kind of pathetically short history that considers art deco to be high priority for cultural preservation? Check. Cubans? Not so much. Then again, who needs pork sandwiches when you’ve got falafel?
It’s clean, it’s got a promenade, and it’s legalized a kind of synthetic marijuana that is marketed as, you guessed it, Mr. Nice Guy. This kind of thing wouldn’t surprise me in, say, Berkeley. But here? Keep in mind this is a city that shares it’s limits with Jaffa. This is where Jonah was swallowed by they whale and Napoleon visited plague houses (taking plenty of pictures of course). Yet one of the biggest new cities of the near east holds none of the stuffy historical backwash that torments pretty much every other square inch of land in the country. I can’t help but think that it’s an American thing, but I don’t want to steal Israeli thunder here. Maybe it really was their own doing, and maybe Israel is looking for nothing other than to raze the past and look forward. No, really, I mean it. Seriously. All right, that’s going a bit far, but they do recycle and they do have dog parks and fixed gear bikes and open air artists markets selling the kind of nifty doohickeys that you could make out of that piece of plywood, the rusty nails and the leftover paint if only you weren’t too busy working a nine-to-seven saving up for that fixed gear at the international bank among whose problems is trying to figure out how much longer an eighty-floor steel building can last on a sand foundation before toppling over and taking a good six hundred would-be cancer victim beautiful people on the strip and that guy who thinks it’s okay to urinate on a wall in plain view of a toddler in one of those bathing tutus that really are cute I don’t care who you are. So that’s what they’ve got, and I took pictures.
It’s clean, it’s got a promenade, and it’s legalized a kind of synthetic marijuana that is marketed as, you guessed it, Mr. Nice Guy. This kind of thing wouldn’t surprise me in, say, Berkeley. But here? Keep in mind this is a city that shares it’s limits with Jaffa. This is where Jonah was swallowed by they whale and Napoleon visited plague houses (taking plenty of pictures of course). Yet one of the biggest new cities of the near east holds none of the stuffy historical backwash that torments pretty much every other square inch of land in the country. I can’t help but think that it’s an American thing, but I don’t want to steal Israeli thunder here. Maybe it really was their own doing, and maybe Israel is looking for nothing other than to raze the past and look forward. No, really, I mean it. Seriously. All right, that’s going a bit far, but they do recycle and they do have dog parks and fixed gear bikes and open air artists markets selling the kind of nifty doohickeys that you could make out of that piece of plywood, the rusty nails and the leftover paint if only you weren’t too busy working a nine-to-seven saving up for that fixed gear at the international bank among whose problems is trying to figure out how much longer an eighty-floor steel building can last on a sand foundation before toppling over and taking a good six hundred would-be cancer victim beautiful people on the strip and that guy who thinks it’s okay to urinate on a wall in plain view of a toddler in one of those bathing tutus that really are cute I don’t care who you are. So that’s what they’ve got, and I took pictures.
open air market
candy
No, those are not my legs.
Port of Old Jaffa where Jonah was supposedly gobbled
The Modern Reader
At a club during Shabbat
More to come on my three-day sojourn in Jerusalem...
