Wednesday, 20 April 2011

the coffee trail

I'm sitting in a tel aviv coffee house.  In Israel, it is coffee in the morning, coffee in the evening, and coffee interspersed several times during the day.  Coffee and chat, although at the moment I am not doing any cha t. I'm looking over a high ceilinged room with arched windows and antique lights hanging languidly from the ceiling.  Girls in dark glasses sit outside talking and gesticulating and a family next to me pick at salad and matzah (it's passover).
Yesterday we visited another, 'cooler' coffee house in Tel Aviv, where we literally bumped into Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister out for a power walk with his wife.  This guy is, right now, one of the most unpopular men in israeli politics, and we got about a foot away from him and his security entourage.  I didn't recognise him myself, but I must admit his security men looked a bit prattish.  It's a small place around here.

Tel aviv has all the chic coffee places and bat yam, well bat yam, well bat yam has the overcrowding made good, the great beach and the mafioso mayor who renovated the place.  And of course it has the block of flats where my grandparents used to serve us spinach and meat fritters, israeli salad, and a lot of love wrapped up in the small flat adorned with tapestries my grandmother had done.

We made our way up the staircase - we only saw the doorbell, and the rack where my grandmother used to hang the washing at the back but it was enough.  The cracks in the walls had grown, and it seemed as not much had changed except that the people we knew had gone.

On the beach we sat with my cousin's family laying back on easy chairs, watching the parasurfers on the beach.  I was, of course, the only mad Englishwoman to paddle in this cold weather (20 degrees centigrade).  Another coffee, another chat.

Then we went to see some other relatives, and again we were offered drinks, chocolate and cake.  They're bulgarian, so the tapestries were on the wall, and the cake was decorated with something white which I have yet to understand what it was, served on those brown pyrex plates that I think everyone over the age of 60 in this part of Israel owns.  Perhaps it was given out to them when they first came here. Nevertheless, it was nice to make their acquaintance again.  It made me feel good.

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