Tel Aviv miscellany, part two

Being a further round of meanderings and babblings from the southeastern shores of the Med.

Sitting today at my favourite cafe (I already have a fav. cafe, the imaginatively named Espresso Bar on Dizengoff at Ben Gurion; I have breakfast there every day and sometimes an afternoon/evening latte) it occurred to me that there are no mosquitoes in TLV. The explanation is simple given a moment's thought: their life cycle has an aquatic phase that requires pools of stagnant water, which are not common in deserts. Call it an unexpected advantage.

Thinking about being an obvious tourist, one subtle clue is the matter of facial hair. There are only two styles of facial hair to be seen in Israel: either completely clean-shaven (not even what the rest of the world would consider fashionable stubble) or else a ZZ-Top diaphram-length full set. My soul patch is even more exotic than my pale skin.

I am (pleasantly) surprised by the secularity of Tel Aviv, I was expecting something rather more like my uninformed notion of Salt Lake City or the backwoods of the Bible Belt. The overtly religious are a minority here, the great majority wear no signs of religious affiliation that I can recognize.

I wonder what percentage of tourists to Israel are Jewish? Pretty high, I'd guess. My impression is that many, perhaps most, tourists do speak Hebrew. Sitting next to a table of touristy-looking people debating local politics in German, addressing the waitress in Hebrew and English, brought this to mind. I don't know why I should be surprised, given the size and historical age of the Diaspora it does seem pretty logical. Thinking back to my flight from Munich, I would say that the great majority of passengers were Jewish, and many of them were overtly religious in the way that the locals are not. (My friends nod and tell me that TLV is not Israel, that the rest of the country views the city as a pit of depravity and temptation.)

The military is less present than I expected, although having said that I did notice a destroyer cruising a few miles off the beach and a patrol boat circling near the breakwaters and a helicopter flying up to the second airport by the harbour, while having my midday drink at a beach bar. I heard a pair of military planes fly over the city towards the Med last night, about two minutes apart, flying fast and high in the darkness. Soldiers in uniform are a common sight, the train from the airport to TLV was full of kids going home on leave (with their guns on their laps pointing casually at each other); but again there are fewer of them than I had expected.

The local corvids are the same slim-bodied grey and black crows that I first noticed in Russia. The local pigeons are very pretty, reddish and beige-grey. Sparrows abound, of course. Haven't seen any rats yet, though I am told they are also common. (Eh, it's a city. What do you want already?)