An Appetite for Adventure

Saturday doesn’t even need to be mentioned, as the entire day consisted of sleeping, E! Television and leftover fried food. This was already planned, as Friday was a big night out.

I got back into the vaca groove on Sunday with some more sightseeing, though the lackadaisical pace signaled that this leg of my adventure was slowly winding down. Shirley and I walked in the warm breeze over to Rabin Square. On this huge municipal plaza, the site of many public gatherings both joyous and dangerously charged, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, by a radical Israeli angered by his stance on the peace process and support of the Oslo Accords. He has just finished a rousing speech, and was shot while descending the main stage platform, the hospital confirming him dead upon arrival. Every year on the anniversary of his murder, the square fills with people supporting his memory. However, in recent years, the gathering has become increasingly politicized, for better or for worse.

After a lunch of hummus and a delicious dessert featuring stringing, syrup drench pastry enveloping chewy goat cheese clumps — forgive me for not recalling the name — we sauntered up the wide, tree -shaded Tel Avivi boulevards, including the most famous, Rotschild. Constructed mainly from the 1940s-1960s, Tel Aviv bursts with the angular, minimalist white buildings made famous by the Bauhaus movement, mostly an import from the German and other European Jews that immigrated to the area to build the country. The World Heritage Foundation even recognizes Tel Aviv for its proliferation of Bauhaus stylings. Over the past 30 years, since Israel had, um, more important things to worry about, many of these funky edifices have fallen into disrepair. Thanks to a huge push by the new mayor, there has been a flurry of renovations, slowly restoring the city to its once famous glory, known as “The White City.”

An unusually cloudy day helped deflect the suns singeing rays, and we were able to walk to Neve Tzedek, one of the first neighborhoods of modern Tel Aviv. With its haphazard, tight streets, Neve Tzedek is akin to the West Village in NYC — very historic, but confusing as hell to even native Tel Avivis. We managed to find the approximate location of the house in which Shirley’s mom was born before heading home for a nap and a chill evening in.

[08.06.29] Tel Aviv