Last Day in Israel

Tomorrow I'm off to Istanbul, leaving the land of my ancestors (well, some of them) behind. It's been a very interesting week, but I've had enough. Mostly, I've had enough of being alone, so I'm looking forward to being with friends in Istanbul.

Speaking of friends, I was not actually alone today. I went to Pardes Hanna, about 40 minutes from Tel Aviv, to have lunch with my dear friend Sat-Sung. Neither of us can quite remember when we last saw each other, but it was somewhere in the neighbourhood of twenty years ago. Two hours wasn't quite enough time to catch up on two decades, but it was a good start. Thank you, Facebook, for helping us to reconnect!



In addition to seeing an old friend, it was interesting to see a small Israeli town, and the landscape around it.





Random observations:


There are a lot of cats in Tel Aviv! All kinds of apparently domestic cats, just strolling around the streets. Why don't New Yorkers let their cats out?

There are an awful lot of soldiers in this country! Yes, I know this isn't news, and I haven't exactly been surprised. (Little in Israel has really surprised me, since it's so much in the news, and in the minds of American Jews in paricular.) But it's remarkable, and certainly unusual for me, to see women and men in uniforms, carrying big guns, all over the place. Most of them appear to be off duty, but it's still a little disturbing how militarized the society is.

There are a lot of security checks! In particular, at the entrance to every train station, bus station, and shopping mall. And occasionally individual stores (I saw this in Jerusalem, not in Tel Aviv). Sometimes there's a metal detector and an x-ray machine; sometimes just a person checking bags. And none of them have seemed particularly interested in me, which I attribute to racial profiling. I must say, though: As unnerving as it is, it makes a lot more sense than what passes for security in many New York buildings, where one is asked to show ID and or sign in, but nobody checks what people are bringing in with them. (And speaking of bogus security vs. real security, when I went through security in the Istanbul airport to board my flight to Tel Aviv, I didn't have to take my laptop out of my bag, I didn't have to take off my shoes, and nobody said anything about liquids! I look forward to seeing what security at Ben Gurion Airport looks like. Stay tuned.)

Israelis drive on the right side of the street, but the trains run on the left, apparently because the Brits built the system. But didn't the Brits build a lot of the roads too?

The creation of modern Hebrew amazes me. Until around the turn of the 20th Century, Hebrew was not used for conversation by anyone. The early Zionists decided to leave behind their European languages and turned a "dead" language into a living one. It seems like it would have been easier for most of the early settlers (invaders) to stick with Yiddish and a mishmash of other languages, but they didn't. They said to themselves, "we're starting a new society, and so we're going to speak a 'new' language." I think that's pretty cool. (On the other hand, how might things have been different if they had learned the language of the people who were already here, Arabic, and tried to join the existing society, rather than replacing it?)