Tel Aviv – Trendy as

View the full set of Tel Aviv photos here

Tel Aviv, at 400,000 people, is surprisingly small for a place that looms so large on the international stage. It feels like a much bigger city than that as well, or maybe it’s just seeing big skyscrapers and a metro system after barely anything over two stories for so long in Jordan that skewed the perspective. Or maybe it’s the parking situation. No sooner had we arrived at the very nice, modern apartments that we were staying in than we encountered an issue uppermost in the mind of many Tel Avivians – where to park? We unloaded the car in a loading zone and did some research on the internet which didn’t provide many good solutions. Sarah and I tried driving to a big nearby mall to see if we could park there but on the way were sidetracked by a plethora of paid carparks to try. It doesn’t help when parking instructions are in all Hebrew but we managed to find a parking guy to give some money to (many thanks to the kind Israeli gentleman for translating for us).

Tel Aviv feels as trendy as a Paris or Sydney. It is a modern city with lots of little design shops on a beautiful white Mediterranean beach. It does not feel like the epicentre of a cultural struggle between Israel and Palestine but then you read about things like the 1996 suicide bombing at the nearby Dizengoff shopping mall which killed 13 people and you realise it’s not that far from the frontline of this dispute.

Israelis have a gruff manner about them. Even in the service industry they are not quick to smile or say hello. They could be the Parisians of the Middle East but it would need more probing than we had time to give.

I bid the Low family a hearty farewell and we went our separate sightseeing ways for that one day. I needed to step off the carousel briefly and I was glad I did when I heard what they got up to. They hired bikes and tried to ride to a museum on the Jewish diaspora in the University which was way up north across the river. They got through the security search then tried to take the bikes up an escalator, failing to notice the nearby lift. Sarah lost control of her bike and grazed her finger. They never made it to the museum in the end and stopped for lunch in the park. On the way back to the beach Jackie’s bike got a flat tyre. I meanwhile had strolled along the beach, sat in the park typing my blog, wandered around the mall (also going through a security check to get in) and was sitting by the beach when Sarah and Jackie rolled by on their bikes (Rick had taken Sarah’s to get fixed).

And that was about it for Tel Aviv. We drove north that afternoon to the beachside town of Haifa.

View the full set of Tel Aviv photos here