One of the best, but also disorientating, things about travelling is the way it compresses time. It's insane to think that I've only been here just over a week. Here's a short rundown of the seemingly infinite things that have happened to me in that time.
I arrived in seriously down-town Tel Aviv on the bus from the airport and rolled my giant suitcase along leafy and quiet suburban avenues. The absolute giantness of my suitcase is one way of reminding myself that I'm older now than I was when I last did this. So far, in the era of not having a permanent place to live, the suitcase has been an insane encumbrance, meaning that it's a huge hassle to go from venue to venue, something which, as you'll hear, I've had to do a lot of. I'm sure that once I'm installed somewhere more permanent, the fact that I brought three pairs of shoes (including walking boots), my comfy trousers _and_ my dressing gown, will be a source of great comfort and joy to me. But right now it's just a whole load of kilograms to carrily inelegantly up and down narrow middle-Eastern staircases.
Anyway, the first place I stayed in, for a week, was expensive but incredibly luxurious and relaxing. A studio appartment with a kitchenette, although it wasn't until after I did a "big shop" that I realised that there was no hob: I'm now carrying around the unopened bag of pasta which this mistake has produced. When that luxury expired (paying over £100 a night isn't really sustainable for three months) I was left facing a stay in one of the 12-bed dormitories at the Hostel Abraham. Am I too old for such a thing? I actually don't know. Maybe it's fine. Maybe the giant suitcase is actually the only reason why I feel resistant to the idea.
I was telling my Kiwi friend, who's also doing a course at the language school, about my housing woes, when a German friend of his casually said that I could stay at her house for the weekend since they were away. The generosity of this sort of blows my mind. We hadn't even exchanged a single word, she could just see that I was friends with someone in her language course. It's from this apartment that I write this blog post now. Amazing.
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The language course itself has been fun, if a little on the slow side. It's fairly close to the tiny plastic chairs and songs where we clap our hands that I was fearing when I heard I was in the very very bottom class. But that's actually quite fun and, if I'm honest with myself, I couldn't really handle anything much harder. It _is_ my level, whether I choose to accept it or not. My classmates are a bunch of usual and less usual suspects. There's one other Brit, a North London NJG (apparently "nice Jewish boy/girl" is a common enough phrase here, that you can dash it off as an acronym and expect to be understood!) There are also the usual young, sporty and boring French and Dutch people. But there's also a Serbian teenager who seems way cooler than her years, extremely dry. And two Russians, one in his mid sixties who seems to be taking the singing and clapping and tiny plastic chairs with relatively good humour. (I'm joking about the tiny chairs obviously, but learning the alphabet and being asked to repeat after the teacher "I want ice cream with chocolate" etc. is definitely strongly reminiscent of the sticky hands of childhood.)
But the language school itself, "Ulpan" in Hebrew, is actually a genuinely cool, friendly and relaxing place to be, with a self-owned cafe downstairs with wicked strong coffee and tasty chocolate balls to gee you up for your morning's singing and clapping. I'm seriously half-considering working either in the Ulpan or in the cafe once my Hebrew is good enough to make it work. (Judging from the baristas they have there at the moment, this level is not very high. Nor is the level of general barista-ing they expect, so I think I'm a shoo-in.) Every Thursday after class (remember Thursday is Friday here, and Friday and Saturday are Saturday and Sunday respectively) all the students and staff from the Ulpan get together and learn a Hebrew-language song to sing together. It's all deeply uncool and extremely good fun.
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At the opposite end of the "making it easy to learn Hebrew" spectrum must surely be my experience yesterday of a Hebrew-language choir rehearsal. I contacting the "Israel Philharmonic Choir" on Facebook to ask if they could recommend a choir for me to join. I got an immediate reply saying "please come to the rehearsal tonight in Jaffa, and please be ready to audition." Well! This is the sort of abstinence from beating about the bush I'd heard so much about. So I took an evening off from my usual routine of hunting for cheap falafel, well-paid contracting jobs and reasonably-priced sublets, and went down to Jaffa for the rehearsal. The conductor is a ferocious Russian 50-something, of the old school, who yells and fumes and stalks about the place, berating anyone who nods off, ends a note early or ends a note late. His waves his hands aggressively and tosses his incredibly sweaty curly hair to imbue in us the passion he wants to hear in our singing. The choir members seem to take this in amazingly good humour. Not a soul among them is under 65 and many seem a good deal older than that. They answer him back and joke around and generally seem very happy to be there. The whole thing is conducted in Hebrew and I simultaneously have absolutely no idea what's being said, and can very much tell what's being asked of us. I've been to enough choir rehearsals in my life to understand perfectly when he shouts STOP STOP STOP halfway through a passage anmd produces a torrent of language emphasised with mocking versions of the singing he's criticising or rhythmic claps of the hands to show where we went wrong.
While I'm a little unsure about the idea of singing in a choir where I'm the youngest person by a clear 25 years, it's a great deal of fun and certainly something completely different from the pattern of hipsters and learning the alphabet I get in the rest of my day. It's also amazing timing that we learned the verb "to sing" on literally the same day I went to the rehearsal. Meant to be?
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The final little anecdote I want to relay, is that I went to visit someone I know from the Cambridge Jewish Community today, in her apartment in my first non-Tel Aviv location. I took and hour-long bus ride out to the middle of nowhere, and was welcomed into the first not-at-all decrepit or ramshackle interior space of my trip so far. After we drank a coffee, the kids came back from nursery and were instantly crawling all over everything, me included, and leading me off to see their toys and their bedroom. It was all very lovely. A particular highlight involved the little boy, who I'd been told was late with potty training and had had to have an intervention from a parenting professional. His father said "go and have a wee" and he said he didn't want to so I told him that I was going to have one and he should come with me. This he duly did and I convinced him that there wasn't anything scary about the toilet (he said he was scared of it because it flushed: fair enough. I think I dimly remember being scared of the rushing roar of a flushing loo.) Anyway, we successfully teamed up to get him to have a wee in the toilet and it was all very joyous. I realise on writing this that it's not a very travel blog anecdote, but it was nevertheless a fun thing which happened to me.
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Much more travel blog-esque was the journey home from this remote place. The man of the house insisted on driving me home on what he called his "scooter". Friends, if you saw this thing, I'm sure you'd agree with me that this was a fully fledged motorbike. We flew along the motorway, dodging in and out of traffic moving at proper-car speeds and I was both terrified and elated throughout. Once we reached the city, I thought my ordeal/amazing experience was over, but of course riding through a busy city actually _is_ the scary part. I clung on for dear life and arrived back in town in one piece.
My hosts are coming back tomorrow, so it's into the warm embrace of the Abraham Hostel and its 12-bed dorms tomorrow. I should enjoy the tranquility of this big empty flat while I can.
P.S. Google the title of this post for the obscure pop-cultural reference.
P.P.S Some potential progress has been made on the housing front. More on that surely soon.
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