Rob's Life: Wisdom and Kindness

A few days into my Hostel Abraham experience, I had the kind of rock bottom moment you often need before you realise you're barking up a wrong tree: I went to see a promising-sounding apartment in a cool, central area of town. It was only £1,000 per month which, for Tel Aviv, is very much on the reasonable side.

Things started to feel wrong when the estate agent who'd contacted me (he contacted me? Should've rung alarm bells) didn't turn up and stopped answering his phone. He also got the address wrong, and then the floor number wrong too. He clearly hadn't visited this outstanding opportunity. After twenty minutes of glum waiting around I finally got the message that the owner himself would show me around. To cut a long and dismal story short, it turned out that my £1,000-per-calendar-month dream home was in fact a room in the owner's grotty flat, with it's own bathroom. The "kitchen" was a sink in the corner of the room, next to which they'd put a bedside table to act like a kitchen work surface. The "bed" was part of a sofa, other parts of which were distributed around the room and balcony. When I said "I can't sleep here, I'm leaving" the owner angrily insisted that the sofa "was very expensive! It Georgio Armani sofa!" I squeezed past him in the corridor and beat a hasty retreat.

Returning to Abraham Hostel, with its large, Zen-level lounge with cool relaxing music playing, and it's extremely ample breakfasts and constant stream of friendly not-too-young people made me think "What the hell am I doing?" Why on earth would I look for some grim apartment in which to be alone, rather than living in this extrovert's dream pad at what works out as the same price as the Georgio Armani sofa in a corner of an old man's flat? All I needed to do was swallow my "I'm too old for this" misplaced pride and embrace communal living and ever-changing room mates and I could be happy as Larry the Downing Street cat, slowly becoming a fixture familiar to the staff and to some of the other long-termers who hang around the kitchen and lounge areas.

That same day, in the queue for reception to extend my stay, I got talking to a Mexican girl with pink hair and we agreed to have a coffee later. Over that coffee, she showed excellent wisdom: why stick around in one place pretending to establish a life when you're only going to be here for three months anyway? Isn't the smart thing to do to use the basis in Hebrew I've now got to start going around the country, staying in Kibbutzim and volunteering on farms and all the good stuff that comes with accepting that you're going to be itinerant, that you're not going to buy a bike or rent a flat, and you're not going to book a second month at the language school.

This is an extremely relieving and liberating realisation. When I get back to London, due to the recent landmine I put under my old life, I'll anyway have to do plenty of finding stability and unpacking and settling in, finding flatmates and joining choirs etc. etc. and I think I'd subconsciously brought all that work forward unnecessarily.

So it's official, I'm going to stay at Abraham Hostel for the remaining two weeks of my language course, after which time, I'll be able to just about get around in Hebrew. I'll sing Mozart's Requiem with my geriatric choir-mates in Jerusalem on Saturday, and I'll entertain/occupy my last hyperactive Arabic child under the thin veil of teaching them English. Then I'll head off into the rest of country, hopefully to volunteer at a few different Kibbutzim and/or wwoofing opportunities, and use my Hebrew out in the real world.

The one really sad part of this decision is the idea of not going to the Ulpan every day (my language school.) It really is an amazing place, full of energetic and thoughtful teaching, and mostly very willing learning. The people are really friendly and cool, from the founder himself, right down to the reception staff and the people running the cafe. I'm really going to miss this place when I leave, but a month is a really good chunk of time and, short of getting a job here and abandoning the old world altogether, all these good things must come to an end when I leave anyway.

As for the kindness mentioned in the title of this blog? I've been ill these last couple of days. Being ill in a dorm (albeit a very luxurious four-bed one) is a strange experience, but not at all unpleasant. I've been drifting in and out of sleep while various people come and go, asking me if I'm feeling better. An Austrian guy has even been feeding me from his seemingly infinite stash of paracetemol, and a friend of the family who lives in Jerusalem ordered me a delivery schnitzel today, right to the hostel.

People are great really, aren't they?