Making friends in Tel Aviv

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Ron. Sure, he’s in Israel, but today was a free day before our tour starts tomorrow and so I routed us out to a few sites that interested me without any regard for his interests.

First, we wandered through Carmel market, just down the street from our hotel. I was on the lookout for more of the chocolate babka I sampled at breakfast. It’s fantastically good and might be my top food of the trip, but give me another day or two to sample things because the food here is pretty awesome. Look at this stuff:

Here’s a couple of additional shots from the market. All candy, which Ron loved, and all fruit, which I loved. The pomegranates are everywhere. I ordered a juice at some point and they squeezed 20 pomegranates to make it!

We started our touring day in typical fashion with me taking us to the Bialek House, which is a museum dedicated to the life of Hayyim Bialek, a Hebrew national poet. For awhile, we walked in circles as I tried to locate the correct street. My efforts were hampered by the number of dead end streets Tel Aviv seems to have. Each mistake I made required some doubling back or re-routing and so, while the museum was only 7/10 of a mile from our hotel, it took us a good hour to find it.

I am proud to say that I entered the Bialek museum with no information about the life of Hayyim Bialek and I left the museum with no information. We were handed a book with 39 pages of details, but I was only in it for the architecture. The house is gorgeous inside:

Next door to the Bialek house is a cool Bauhaus architecture building that used to be the city hall. It’s a city history museum now – at least that’s what it’s called. I hauled Ron in there and we wandered around and couldn’t make out much of anything. There is a zoo exhibit there – detailing the development of the Tel Aviv zoo. Here’s one of the exhibits they felt was worthwhile, but I was not so sure.

Neither of these sites was my main plan for the day. The thing I really wanted us to see was the Joseph Bau House. Joseph Bau was an artist who spent time in a Polish concentration camp, working as a document creator for the Nazis in order to stay alive. He met and married a woman in the concentration camp – this marriage was featured in Schindler’s List – and then he made it to Israel to thrive and live out his life here.

So the museum is run by his surviving daughters and is supposed to be fantastic. If you look on TripAdvisor, it is the number one site in all of Tel Aviv. I contacted the daughters back in March about scheduling a visit and they said sure! We made our way over there (1/2 mile from last site – took us 45 minutes to find) and the museum was closed and padlocked.

En route, I was mesmerized by the recycling stations I keep finding around Tel Aviv – I love them. Notice Ron looking incredulous that I wanted a picture of this. What’s wrong with him??? Later on in the day I found a recycling station that was much fuller and extremely colorful with plastic bottles (sorry, Melisa) and I wanted to take a picture of it but I had just lost (and then found) my brand new phone (in my purse) and Ron wasn’t looking super pleased with me, so I passed the photo op by.

But back to Joseph Bau. We sit down on the crumbling front steps and wonder what to do. A woman walks up to us and tells us that she too wants to tour the house. She’s Israeli and able to make a phone call to one of Joseph Bau’s daughters, who says she’s on her way.

And so we wait. The Israeli woman talks with us about missile strikes, bomb shelters and missile sirens. She tells us that just yesterday, the sirens went off at 8am in Tel Aviv. She shows us how each apartment building has a door that is slightly ajar and how that is where we should go if we hear a siren. She tells us we have 90 seconds to get to a shelter, and while I start to panic thinking about it, she indicates that 90 seconds is plenty and not to worry. In the south, she says, you only have 15 seconds and I ponder how you work with that.

I’m happy when Cilla Bau finally arrives because the Israeli woman is making me nervous. Cilla arrives, apologizes for being late and hugs me randomly, but not Ron. She says she almost didn’t come and then her voice trails off and she doesn’t tell us why…missile danger…didn’t feel like it…sickness? She starts to cry and then brightens up and takes us inside. Inside it’s part art studio, part workshop and extremely messy. She says no pictures allowed and then sits us down and tells us the story of her dad’s life, interspersed with random crying and statements about how the government is shutting them down and won’t give them any money, even though neighboring buildings are getting millions of dollars. I had no idea what she was talking about but every time she started to cry a little, I felt horrible for her situation, but could not grasp exactly what it was.

Here’s a couple of additional shots from our walk today. Overall, Tel Aviv is beautiful in the same crumbling way as Athens and Sicily. For those of you monitoring my ridiculous health issues from afar, you should know that I walked 5.2 miles today with my little walking stick, some Tylenol and some gabapentin and it wasn’t too bad!