Never stay in a hotel that’s located between two major highway off-ramps.  Also, if you’re looking for your hotel on Google earth, and there’s a large blank spot where it’s meant to be, a spot into which roads just seem to disappear, a spot which itself doesn’t even officially exist, you’ve chosen a hotel right next to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, which makes finding your way around rather difficult.

Israel is a strange country to fly into, almost as though you’re flying into a walled fortress with enemies on all sides. Thirty minutes out you are told to stay in your seats for the remainder of the flight.  Israel invented airline security. The plane approaches from the west, from over the Mediterranean, flies low over a military base, and then banks hard to come back around from the east.  I suppose if you didn’t bank hard you’d end up somewhere near Damascus watching a vapor trail racing upwards.  The Israeli desire to keep the West Bank becomes very clear.  This is not a terribly wide country.  And neither are its people.  As my room service waiter said, “Israeli women are hotties, but don’t try a one night stand because they’re demanding, especially the Moroccan ones.”   That’s why he’s divorced now.  He thought Italian woman were hot too, but realized they were “dogs compared to Israeli women.”  Important advice, I suppose, I just wish he’d remember to bring up my fruit plate.

What to think about Tel Aviv?  There are places you love immediately, places you grow to love, and places you fear something is going to love growing on you.  So far Tel Aviv is somewhere between the latter two.  It’s a chaotic mixture of southern Mediterranean neglect and modern prosperity.  There are newly built glass towers interspersed between rundown buildings with mildew stains streaming down from cracked stucco.  The big Latin American cities come closest in atmosphere, but Tel Aviv’s air is cleaner, it’s skyscrapers taller, and there’s no one out to kill you, well, not just you.  And cats.  Everywhere cats.  They’re as common as squirrels here.  It’s also remarkably secular, even though some 95% of its inhabitants consider themselves Jewish.  I finally spent some time today walking around the city and other than a few skull caps, and a Hassidic man praying up against a wall at the beach while a bikini clad Moroccan lady showered off sand nearby, it could have been any prosperous European city along the Mediterranean with attack helicopters flying watch.  Montreal has a more overtly Jewish population than Tel Aviv.

I suppose if you came into Tel Aviv from almost anywhere else in the region, and even big parts of Europe’s Mediterranean coast, Tel Aviv really is an impressive city.  It’s alive at all hours, full of people walking the streets to see and be seen, and most with a liberal view of life.  On my first night, at three AM when I was fighting jet-lag, I caught a documentary on gay Palestinians who flee the West Bank to live in Israel proper where they aren’t persecuted.  What a complex little place this is. I’ll give it some more time before I decide what I really think.

Curiously, despite the history of car bombs, suicide bombers, and surprise invasions, I do feel very safe here.  Perhaps it’s the hundreds of young female military recruits in olive fatigues and flip-flops coming out of the ministry each evening, talking on their cell phones, doing their make-up, and holding shopping bags from lunchtime excursions.  They make me feel safe until I realize the ones who serve at the ministry are those who couldn’t pass their physical to get out to the combat units near the border.  After that I just feel aroused.

Perhaps after you’ve passed through your hundredth security checkpoint, where some sleepy guard waves a wand over your shirt and passes you through despite the fact that his wand beeped, you just don’t notice it anymore.  Even standing behind a solider holding his M4A1 assault rifle in one hand, and a bag of bananas in another, I’ve stop noticing it all that much.  I travel to Jerusalem in a few days. Maybe it will be different.  Incidentally, if I ever had a son here, I’ll tell him to fail that damn physical and spend his next three years at the ministry with the girls in flip-flops.

Tomorrow before work starts, I’m off to a little place called Apollonia.  It’s on the coast, just a five minute walk from my temporary office in Herzeliya.  It was founded by the Phoenicians, and then occupied by Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, Muslims again, Brits, and now Israelis.  Plenty of history around here.