Beach Drums

We swung north to Tel Aviv about a week ago. Jerusalem was too cold. And I was tired of wearing plastic bags over my socks- the melting slush was constantly seeping into my $14 Syrian-made imitation Adidas sneakers.

And now that I'm back in freezy, breezy J-Town, I'm reminded of why I left.

I didn't take any photos of Tel Aviv. If you want to know what it looks like, take a jaunt down Robson, Granville, Commercial, Jericho Beach, or the waterfront. Tel Aviv is Vancouver- only everyone, from beggars to bus drivers to businessmen, is a Jew.

And I mean: "Everyone's a Jew", not "Everyone is Jewish". Jerusalem is Jewish. Tel Aviv is Vancouver with Hebrew street signs.


Tel Aviv's an anomaly in the Middle East... a secular, Western city. Western individualism and freewheeling hedonism. Secondhand English bookstores and coffee parlors. Clubs, pubs, skate shops, and theatre houses. Thai noodle bars, beach volleyball, dreadlocked hippies, pretentious scenesters, iPods, and regular bus schedules with set fares.

And girls. Normal girls. Not "girls with adjectives": ______ girls, Muslim girls, Maronite girls, Yemeni girls, girls with some weird aesthetic or religious quirk. Just girls.

Sure, teenage soldiers pack the bus stations, on route to their weekly deployments to the Bank or the Golan. Sure, the police will blow your bag up if you leave it unattended for more than ten minutes. Sure, every second person is carrying an automatic rifle over their shoulder like a handbag. Sure, there's a metal detector and a bored guard in front of every building.


Other than that, it's like home. Even the price of living. $30 a night for a dorm bed... Jesus Christ.

We stayed in a hostel called "HaYarkon 48", where, according to a dorm-mate (a verbose Jewish-Brazillian BBC technician), a pair of suicide bombers had stayed the night before collecting their forty virgins in two beachfront restaurants the following day, back during the Second Intifada.

Management should put that on the wall:

"HaYarkon 48: Best Youth Hostel in Tel Aviv 6 years running. Hot showers, huge kitchen, free cable and pool table. Recommended by the Lonely Planet and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade."

Sadly, we just missed Sextival, a three day exposition of... er... bedroom appliances and product demonstrations.

Anyway, one evening we headed down to the beach to listen to a drum convention. Every so often, a collection of drummers gather at the edge of one of the huge breakwater piers lining the beach front. For hours, they pound away, while young couples and families watch the sunset and hippies sway druggedly to the beat.

There were a few of us. Dave, a former Royal Army engineer from Edinburgh who now wanders the world living off odd jobs, smoking hash, and dispensing a collection of surprisingly hard-won, well-read wisdoms. James Ring, whose hard-drinking habits make him look a three-days-dead Heath Ledger. And a guy from Ireland with the unbearably Gaelic name of Ruaidhri Oisin Giblin. ("It's 'Rory'", Giblin would say. "You don't pronounce the A, the I, the D, or the H.") And Justin, my buddy from Beirut, who most recently had been dancing and chewing qat with tribesmen in Yemen.

In the summer, the beach looks like this:




These days, it looks a little more like this: