Five days before Passover, and everyone* in Jerusalem is cleaning to save their lives; meanwhile, Tel Aviv is full of Dionysian spring energy, colored lights on Rothschild Blvd. and huge blown up old photos of old time Tel Aviv kitsch from the twenties and thirties: little girls playing with what looks like retro doll sets, stiff sepia photos taken to send back to the relatives in Europe - everything twice life sized. Tonight there's supposed to be dancing in the streets, fireworks maybe. In Jerusalem it's easier to see the seam lines: the yuppie neighborhoods still carry the names of the Arab villages they displaced. Here, one hundred years ago -- only sand. It's a more complicated mental exercise to imagine what if's. What if Tel Aviv weren't here? What would be here instead?
The kube soup guy at Rabin Square tells me he brings his kube all the way from Jerusalem, it's more authentic; the hipsters have taken over the old ladies' cafe on Ben Yehuda street, and the old ladies with the knotted silk scarves now order their cafes and sweet things at the new geletarias. The frozen yogurt trend is being replaced by a French rotisserie trend. Passports are the new pornography: this one has a Polish passport, this one a Hungarian one, a German one -- the German classes are full to the brim (I counted 8 beginner classes at Goethe and 12 intermediate), everyone says they want to get out, and they ride around the wide modernist boulevards without any helmets. The pregnant ladies wear skintight clothes (take note Berkeley pregnant ladies!), and at the beach eleven African tourists in full tribal garb stroll at the water. Apparently, I'm the only woman without a tattoo in the entire city. Happy Birthday Tel Aviv!
* Ok, hyperbolic...
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