Travel with Manfred

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Copyright © 1999 by Manfred P.. All rights reserved.

Sep 27 - Sep 30, 1999

The Country of History

On Stop-Over in Tel Aviv

by

Manfred P.

Keywords: Israel, Tel Aviv, tourist, travel trip report, travel log, travelogue.

Israel is a country I know very little about. That is actually an exaggeration. I know close to nothing about it. Maybe it is better this way. I will not have preconceptions.

My journey brought me to Tel Aviv. The first pleasant thing to notice was the weather. 32 degrees. Nice and hot. Just the way I like it. Reason enough to go directly from the airport to the beach.

Tel Aviv is the most modern city of Israel. Also the one with the least amount of history. Certainly not a rival to Jerusalem. It doesn't pretend to be a cultural hotspot. It is the economical and financial center of Israel and to compensate for all the hard work, it boasts close to 10 miles of beaches. The beaches were to my liking. Given that they were city beaches, they were quite nice. Cafes and restaurants line the long stretch of beach walk that reaches all the way from the south, the old port of Jaffa, to the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv. Alongside the beach are small parks, and dozens of large international hotels. At night the joggers come out and use these miles to increase their adrenaline level and get their bodies sweating. At daytime it is rather empty, too hot for most people.

In Jaffa, which once used to be the main town but now acts like a small suburb to Tel Aviv in the south, old parts of the city still remain intact. When the sun sets over the ocean and paints a thick layer of red all across the horizon, the muezzins in the mosques start their prayer which can heard hundreds of yards away. Mosques and Christian churches stand next to each other here, like in many other places in Israel.

With the given heat, it quickly becomes obvious that the people here love air conditioning. It is everywhere, the buses, the taxis, the hotel, and the workplace.

Religion is clearly an important piece in the Israeli culture. The strongly religious people can be seen on the streets in their traditional black clothing, beards and long sideburns. In the hotel and at work, next to every single door, actually in the doorframe most of the time, is an indescribable thing. It is a reminder of when the Israelis painted blood on their doors, as described in the Bible. For religious reasons people don’t work Fridays and Saturdays. All public work comes to a halt. For example, the city buses stop and the shops are closed. The conservative religious people don’t work. Their objective is to study the bible and to learn. This is considered a contribution or a service to the state, just like any other work. In exchange for studying the bible these people receive a small salary from the government. The interesting part is that for these religious people, the learning never stops. They study the bible their whole life long.

Tel Aviv is a very safe city. Still, machine-gun-carrying can be seen frequently. This is no surprise given the internal struggles and the disputes with its neighbors in the last decades. While violent crime is rare, car theft is popular. Cars are then either transported east or sold back to the owners.

I did most of my getting-around on bus and taxi. The cab drivers are by law required to operate their meter. Out of 10 times though 9 times the cab drivers did not operate the meter and charged or tried to charge me double or triple price. So much for honesty and religion. Looks like there are some minor differences between theory and practice. Well, after being wildly overcharged 4 or 5 times I figured out the scam and from then on I was in a position of arranging for a fair price at the end of the trip.

The biggest surprise came at the end of the trip. I was at the airport trying to leave the country when a young security office "assisted" me. First of course you have to wait in a long line until a security officer is ready for you. While I am used to the usual questions like "Did you pack your luggage yourself? Was the luggage always in your possession? When and where did you pack the luggage?", they are taking this game a step further here. When I heard the question "Where do you live?" I said "oh, oh" to myself. Since I have been steadily traveling for years and haven’t been really living anywhere for quite some time, this is a tricky question for me. This concept of not-really-living anywhere is difficult to understand for most people, so I thought I avoid any possibilities of problems by answering "I live in Spain". Of course the next question then was "Since when do you live in Spain?" My truthful answer was "Since a few weeks" and I felt the trouble coming up. "Why do you live in Spain?" "Because of my girlfriend." "Where did you life before?" Time to start lying, otherwise she will be confused. "Austria.". Which countries did you visit in the last weeks?" Time to lie some more. I better not tell her I was in Portugal, Austria, Czech Republic, France, and Spain in the last two weeks. "Only in Spain". The of course she starts digging through my stuff, she opens the closed name tags on my suitcases and finds my business card showing London as my residence. So, now here I am with an Austrian passport, living in Spain, with a business card from London, and working for an U.S. company. Worse I had requested that my passport not be stamped at the entrance, because with an Israeli stamp in your passport you cannot enter Islamic countries anymore. The questioning continues "Why did you not have your passport stamped? What do you do for a living? More precisely, what do you do on a day-to-day basis? What does your employer do? Why are you in Israel? What have you done in Israel? Whom have you seen in Israel? With whom have you talked in Israel? Which hotel did you stay at in Israel? How did you get from the airport to the hotel? Did you go from the airport directly to the hotel? What did you do in the hotel? How did you get from the hotel to the office building? How did you get from the office building back to the hotel? With whom did you talk during the work hours in the office?" Giving the security officer 3 names to whom I talked with in the office was not enough. She wanted to know with whom else I talked. Now I was starting to get a bit annoyed. Does this person think I can remember every secretary to whom I said "Hello"? I remained calm and polite, smiling. I knew that this is the only way to get through this quickly and my time was ticking away. If this continues much longer I will miss my flight. Then I had to show her prove that I spent the time with the mentioned company. What proof? "Do you have contracts? Paperwork?" "No." "You must have something." "Eh, mh, I have some business cards that the people gave me." "Can I have them." "Yes." "Can I call these people?" "Yes, if you want." Then she took the business cards and disappeared for 15 minutes. I assume she made some phone calls. Once back "You must have some other paperwork." "No, I carry no paper." "You must have some paperwork, an invitation, or something." "Eh, I have some emails." "Show them to me." Starting the computer, going to my emails, I find one email that is 6 lines long and says "this is the customers address, see you at 9 a.m." "You must have more emails." "Yes, I have one more that says which hotel I am staying at." "Show me." All in all I had the please to spend 45 minutes talking to this lady. I was afraid that I had missed my flight, but this is Israel, I was afraid for no reason. The flight was delayed by 2 hours for security reasons as there was luggage on the plane without their owners onboard.

And if you think that was bad, I have something else for you. I told this story to a friend of mine and he says, "You got away easy. I was there last month with a friend. They put us two into two separate rooms interrogating us separately and then comparing the results. They also wanted to see documents. All in all it took an hour until we could leave the interrogation room."

The next time in Tel Aviv I will check myself into a hotel on the beach to absorb the good times and be at the airport two and a half hours before departure.