The re-Avivification

 I've arrived! Or, as they say in Hebrew.... Just kidding, I still don't know a word.

But, that's all about to change: I've now been in TLV for two full days and tomorrow I start my language course. I'm going to have to set an alarm! I'm going to meet the people I'll be spending the next month with! I'm really, REALLY pleased to be having something proper to do. Wandering around this city is absolutely captivating, it really is. But there's nothing like really having something to do to put a fire in the heart and a skip in the step.

That being said, it's actually been a quite eventful two days already. I've met up with two "generosity friends" as I like to call them. One friend of a person in my choir in London, who took me out for a beer and a fantastic middle-Eastern desert which was kind of like a Snickers creme caramel. Excellent. And a friend of an artist friend from Bristol days, who showed me his six foot cannabis plant and took me for some exceptionally wonderful hummous.

The plant

The hummous

 

As well as these nice things, and what must be about 10 kilometres of strolling, I've lain on the beach and swum briefly in a ridiculously warm sea (briefly because I had no sun-cream with me, that's how hot it still is here) and visited an extremely exotic-feeling market on a Friday afternoon.

In the interests of balance, I should note that it's really shockingly expensive here. I asked one of my sympathy friends whether this was because of exchange-rate weirdnesses, everything's-imported-economic-isolation or boring old cost of living crisis. All three, was the rueful reply. I'm definitely going to have to do some work while I'm here if I'm to do anything other than live off pumpkin seeds.

Oh one last fun thing: I've signed myself up to do two hours a week of volunteering to teach English to underprivileged Jaffa kids. First session is a week tomorrow. Nice.

Some impressionistic travel blog stuff

While I wait in what must surely be the longest and most curly-haired check-in queue since the exodus from Egypt, here are a few sketches from the last day or so.

***

I went back to the surprisingly heavy-metal Rock Bar in the old town, hoping for another great performance of Hotel California, but found the place much toned down, body-count wise if not musically. Some raging blood-soaked and bemasked metal was playing on the TV and  four European rock fans in their sixties were drinking beer. I sat at the bar with a man who instantly offered me a cigarillo and proceeded to tell me, in lightly accented East German, about the various sailing trips he'd been doing around the Aegean, and the historically inspired and frankly terrifying brand of Viking metal he was into. We watched YouTube videos of sweaty long-haired Nordic men screaming about the rise of Valhalla, then he toddled home alone. I requested Under The Bridge as a palette cleanser and was humoured by the bar staff.

***

After the gym yesterday (!) I went for an evening swim in the sea, just as the sun was going behind the platoon of giant hotels. I was drying off and had just begun the complex process of getting my pants back on behind a tiny hotel towel, seated on the shingle facing away from the water, when a Greek woman came whooping and leaping from the waves. "Oooh, eeee" she shrieked, as I tugged uneffectively at the damp elastic. "Fish! Fish!" she cried. I knew I had to throw propriety to the wind and performed the final bum-cheek covering standing up, without the towel. I turned around and a vibrating and glimmering shoal of tiny silver fish had been beached by the incoming tide, thousands of them all along the length of the beach. There followed a hilarious caper as fully grown men and women scrambled to fling the pathetically gaping little fishies back into the depths, only for many of them to be instantly washed back ashore. The original whooping woman petted, baby-talked to and generally admired the strong and slippery minnows until we all decided together that it was time to give up the fight and flee the inrushing waves. I was left to put my trousers on, thoughtfully, on one of the thousands of long-empty sunbeds.

***

On this morning's golf cart ride down to the bus station, my aged host asked me if I'd met a wife in Rhodes. I said that I hadn't but that maybe I would in Tel Aviv. "She will appear" he said, smiling back at me. Then he took both hands of the wheel and made a little explosion motion with them. "Poof," he said, "like that."

Whatever Rhodes your boat

Things you only know when you're living somewhere that's not an actual home: you can cut a tomato with the edge of a metal fish slice. You can even, by applying some serious pressure and a bit of additional work with the by-now-too-long fingernails, use the fish slice to cut a lemon. But you cannot, however wide you open your mouth, use that fish slice as a fork. The human mouth just won't accommodate it.

Yes, I'm in a studio apartment in the very centre of beautiful Rhodes Old Town and the apartment has got a kitchenette, but not a jot of cutlery. After dinner in a restaurant on my own yesterday, I vowed to make my own food in the flat from now on. There would be no more Souvlaki-for-one experiences on this holiday: no mixed mezze platter is so good that it tastes like anything other than bitter ashes when you're eating on your own, and the aged bouzouki player keeps looking over at you pityingly as he plays another heartbreak solo.

But there truly is some global-level strolling to be done here in Rhodes. The old town's absurdly atmospheric, with the widest street being a Brighton back-alley's width and the side lanes coming off it being rarely more than mazey little entanglements with lean stray cats and the occasional bakery or coffee house.

The tourism, though, that clogs these pretty little arteries has got that proper off-the-cruise-ship vibe about it, with hoards of vacant-looking Nordics, Russians and Brits being extravagantly beckoned into shops selling tiny plastic Greek warrior helmets and I heart Rhodes bum bags. It's very much the sort of scene that makes me desperately want to stride confidently through it with a bag full of groceries and a look that says "I'm just here to get some daily life done, man. Leave me be." Unfortunately this is pretty hard to pull off when the limp folded map in your hand is the only thing between you and total disorientation.

I'm drawn to the least lovely corners of this admittedly lovely place, in search of something which feels Greek. Today I had some excellently workaday tasks to complete because I needed to buy nail clippers and a phone charger. These are not things which takes you to the M&S or the Zara on any of the main shopping streets and I instead walked the cigarette butt-strewn backstreets. I had an outstanding iced coffee and bowl of crisps in the kind of bar where the staff throw an ashtray down in front of each person who arrives and where your change gets artfully sifted out of a bumbag full of coins.

* * *

The journey to get to Rhodes was largely uneventful and definitely had that quality of floating silently through a noisy family-filled human world. I tend to get very detached in these moments, and I walk around airport terminal and bus station alike with a feeling of watching it all unfold on a screen, not unlike the weird "jog along a forest path" simulation you get on a modern gym's more expensive-looking treadmills.

But despite my being insanely early for the flight, there was no sign of a let-up of whatever force-field ensures that I must always, at some point during every journey, run towards a closing check-in desk or ticket barrier. I'd got to the gate at just the right time to eat my Pret and gaze about me, and Speedily Boarded™ the EasyJet bus to get me and the other non-extra-fee-paying pleb passengers to the actual plane, when I realised that my glasses, which had been hastily thrust into the side-netting of my rucksack, were no longer with me.

I excuse-me'd my way off the bus, and ran back up the steps to the airline passport control, went back through the gate and back into the main body of the terminal. Miracle of miracles, I found my glasses right where I'd earlier been merrily biding my time. I ran back to the gate with visions of a night in a hotel airport flashing through my mind, to find that the non-Speedy Boarders were still at it and the bus I'd been on 15 minutes ago was still on the tarmac. All was well with the world.

p.s. back in the old-town kitchenette, it basically goes without saying that as I was tidying up my fried egg/bread/salad meal which I'd eaten with my hands and chopped up with a fish slice, I discovered that the little table has got a drawer in it. There lies a whole array of cutlery. It's quite possible I'll never slice a lemon with a fish slice again. And there's something not unequivocally happy about that.

Gallery

A tea and a Kit-Kat on the plane

Ah yes, Falikiraki's on Rhodes

My host picked me up from the bus station in a golf cart

My swanky apartment. Cutlery not included.

A rock band in an old-town bar playing Hotel California

The excellently named butcher's MeatArt.

 

A bruising first encounter with the language

The world turns out to be surprisingly much like one of those "good news/bad news" kids' jokes they seemed to be so fond of in the 1980s. You know the drill: "Good news, I've got a new bucket! Bad news, it's got a hole in it! Good news, the hole's in the top! Bad news, the top of the jumper I'm wearing." etc. (I made this up obviously but, on re-reading, I think this might actually be something dredged verbatim out of my earliest kids-comic memories.)

In this particular case, it goes: "Good news, you're going to Israel to learn a new language! Bad news, the school that everyone has recommended you go to is sold out! Good news, they're actually not sold out if you email them! Bad news, you have to do a  language test! Good news, the test is over the phone! Bad news, they're going to call you at seven o' clock in the morning!! Good news, the woman doing the test is incredibly friendly and reassuring! Bad news, it turns out you basically know nothing about Hebrew as a language!"

Yes, it's true. I've just got off the phone from this incredibly early first encounter with Hebrew as an actual medium of communication, rather than one of prayers and songs, and I'm reminded a little of my experience during the written part of my French GCSE. That moment of panic: "Oh god, I can't remember the verb 'to have'". In the French GCSE context, the situation persisted, and I had to write the whole exam without that crucial verb, like someone writing a novel without the letter E.

This telephone language test was full of "floor caves in" moments like that. She asked me to translate the sentence "I have a big house". And I thought: Ok, I know how to say "big house", but what's the word for 'to have'? "Can you give me the infinitive?" I asked, trying to wow her with my knowledge of how languages work in general (already a sure sign that this interview was going to be a flop.) She told me gently that Hebrew has no word for have. A trick question! How cruel!

It was time to admit defeat. The test was an abject fail: I don't know even the basics of having a conversation in Hebrew. When she asked me what my name was, I guessed correctly that it would be the first question she'd ask, but that's a high-wire guessing game. Picture the incorrect guess: "Are you ready to start the exam? My name is Rob Levy." The stuff of nightmares.

So, come next Sunday (the week is Sunday to Thursday there -- exotic!) I'll be in the lowest level they offer: the dreaded "Level Aleph". I'll be in with the people who don't know the letters. There'll probably be tiny chairs and tables, and I'll be made to eat my packed lunch with a bib like the other children. No doubt the first of many language-ignorance-based humiliations to come.

But this is exactly what I've signed up for: Learning a language "in-country" involves precisely this sort of hubris-trashing experience -- not knowing what someone is saying then finding out it was "Where are you from?" -- over and over again until eventually the things you didn't understand or can't say involve words and concepts which are sufficiently advanced that you can call yourself a speaker of the language.

I've learned this painful truth before, when I was in a noisy German applewine bar and realised I had no hope of following the conversation and it was still hours before closing time. But it's what the process is, and it's part of the reason it's so wildly effective.

So bring it on. I'm ready for the pronunciation fails, the misunderstandings, the shaking the hand of people who've put out a hand for payment etc. etc.

I'm old and wise now. I can handle it. I have a big house.

From the rubble of the old life...

Not wanting to go into the gory details, let's just say that I'm once again living out of a suitcase and booking complex, multi-stage trips involving a hundred browser tabs.

The plan this time (almost five years after my last post here) is to go to Israel. This might sound familiar to long-term readers, since that was exactly the plan that led me to getting stuck in France in 2006. But this time it's not quite the "sell everything and never come back" statement it was then. Although it's not far off that.

I've got a job to come back to in London in February so it's definitely just a jaunt to see the country and, crucially, get to grips with the language.

Me being what it is, I've left it so late to book anything that I opened my laptop this morning to find that the course I wanted to do is fully booked and the flights in the week I wanted to travel are completely sold out. Mid-October is a busy time in Israel because there's a super-Saturday-style cluster of big name Jewish festivals around then, so it's a bit like expecting to get flights home one week before Christmas.

But I like to think that I still remember how to turn a crisis into an opportunity so I've sent a begging email to the language school, and booked a multi-leg flight to Tel Aviv via... why Rhodes of course!

So I've got three nights in a little apartment in the centre of Rhodes Old Town, which looks pretty beautiful and should offer me some decent strolling opportunities. I might even get to swim in the sea.

Then I'm off to Tel Aviv where I've got an apartment in a trendy neighbourhood booked for the first seven days to find my feet and work out what's what.

Despite all the personal chaos of the last month or so, I'm excited. It's all new and unknown, and with the prospect of a job to come back to, I don't have to feel like I've completely TNT'd my whole life.

Driving home for Christmas

After a brief trip back to snowy London, and what I would say was our most successful volunteering experience in a small farm/hostelry near the citrus-infused city of Seville, we are now officially on a road trip to bring the Robmobile back home in time for Xmas (if yule pardon the abbreviation.)

We've booked it out this time, rather than the free-wheeling, outdoors-sleeping escapade of the route down. So it's characterless Airbnb's all the way back to Paris, a five-day drive since we're taking it relatively easy. We'll do two or three hours each behind the wheel each day. That seems like enough to me. We've got nothing to prove on the "how far can you drive in a day" front.

So right now we're in Salamanca, a bustling and handsome place in the middle of Spain's seemingly completely blank western province of Extremadura. (I haven't checked this, but I like to imagine that it means "Extremely hard", since that's what life must surely be on this unrelenting sun-scorched plateau. Probably it means nothing of the sort though.)

We landed in the student area so had a fairly fun evening of beer and pinchos (for some reason they don't call them tapas here, but it's apparently the same thing) surrounded by people doing the first flush of youth business, which I always think looks rather exhausting, but at least makes for lively environs.

Back on the road today, as our schedule calls for us to wake up in San Sebastian tomorrow, then Bordeaux, then "somewhere outside Paris", a vaguely threatening term that sounds like an excerpt from the opening scene-setting of a thriller screenplay. Let's hope it all goes smoothly...