i saw london i saw france

now i pretty much am seeing rei in his underpants.

i arrived in tel aviv yesterday after a grueling morning flight from london. my flight was at 8:30 am, which sounds fine, until you get to london and find out that heathrow is 80 million miles from london and that it costs 100 bucks to take a cab there. i took the underground in, which was cheap but took 2 hours. that wasn’t an option for returning because the tube doesn’t start running until 6 am. so i was fucked and i had to take a cab. sigh.

the best thing about being in israel right now is not being in london, which has a “door tax” like new york, only higher. you can’t leave your house without spending 30 pounds. what a disaster. thank g-d i was only there for 2 days. avivit did a marvelous job of showing me around and i will post photos soon on flickr but for now i will just say it was exhausting. i liked it, but it didn’t have any magical pull for me at all. i didn’t find myself wondering which neighborhood i would live in, what bar would be my bar, which dudes i would be making out with…it just felt like a mildly different big city that was fun to visit.

i was worried for awhile in there, though, that i was somehow “over” travelling abroad, that nothing would feel exciting or exotic again. but here i am in tel aviv and it’s totally exciting. of course, it’s not exotic in the least. it’s loud and crazy and full of jews and cheap produce. i feel totally at home yet lost. it’s a great feeling.

ironically this is the first shabbat in probably a year that i’m not going to shul and a dinner somewhere. i had to get to israel to blow it off i guess. rei, for those of you who don’t know him, is totally secular and so all he could muster was dinner at his mom’s house. so we’re heading to haifa in about 10 minutes to meet his family.

don’t worry, dear readers, i have 3 more shabbats here and all of them are planned to be more on the shabbosy side. i feel a bit bummed to be missing out on something tonight but honestly it’s great to be doing not much, just recovering from the jetlag with another cup of bad instant coffee.