Israel: Tiberius to Afula

Dear All

From the garbage streets of India through to the super modern cities of China, past the laid back beaches of Thailand and wooden Vietnamese chickens into deserts filled with giant Egyptian pyramidal stone cemetaries and beyond the beauty of Lebanese women or Syrias Roman nicknacks sits an uncomfortable little Meditteranian country which I will call home for now. It has been a massive 13 month journey which still has about two weeks of half travel and half job hunt left in it. Leaving the Middle East's most boring country of Jordan I found myself on the other side of the argument, the side that doesn’t cover their women in cloth or speak in squiggle lines. The road in front of me is paved with pothole and cracks. The road twists and turns around the difficulties of a country in war. The road is blocked with a language barrier. The road across the border wasn’t an easy an easy one especially during Ramadan.

Ramadan has always been one of those challenges I've wanted to try ever since I was a teenager. Yom Kippur, the day of atonement for Jews, is a 25 hour fast and nothing to shake a stick at but Ramadan, though only fasting for the daylight hours, is a month long struggle. I have always been fascinated to try it out but not for religious reasons but simply to see if I could do it. This year will not be that year. I decided that while I was travelling that this was not a good idea. Moving from city to city and from tourist trap to tourist trap gives those with voracious appetites (like this snackaholic) the need to graze often. Travelling the Arab World during this time means using a little discretion. Jamie and I bought food but consumed it in the hotel room. We managed to sneak some on the bus to Salt and do our best to chew it inconspicuously though often we became hypoglycemic and cranky. This is not the best time to be active and I discovered that many Muslims sneak a meal in the day but away from the public eye. The police enforce Ramadan with an iron fist though tourists have the freedom to do otherwise, as we mistakenly tasted some labane and a grape here and there without thinking. I was eager to get to Israel where I could eat in the middle of the day. The excitement was building as we packed the night before to get to the inconvenient border crossing of Sheik Hussein to enter Israel in the North.

We landed for the night in the tourist free city of Irbid - Jordan's second largest city with nothing to do. After a rest and a wander we discovered too soon that all the restaurants close at 7:30pm so we went to bed with empty bellies. The next day, we packed and caught a bus with still no food in our stomachs. Starving, the first taxi brought us to the wrong bus station. It seems that most taxi drivers know thew word bus station but have no idea about the word Israel. We couldn’t believe how confused they were when you said Israel. Eventually, an English friendly taxi driver brought us to the right station and even showed us which bus to take. The last and one of the best examples of the Arab hospitality I have come to miss now being in the serve-yourself Promised Land. The bus took us to the middle of nowhere and slapped us down off a dry dusty desert highway, under a scorching Arabic sun, and gave us the finger. The index finger and the word nus kilo which means half a kilometer in that direction. Exhausted and barbecued by the sun's rays, Jamie and I became angry and began to complain often. It seems like an empty death walk leading to nowhere when, from around the corner, peaked those familiar giant plastic orange hopscotch tack blockade. A passport check, a sweaty back and 23 Kilogram bag later we were walking down another kilometer stretch of road to the passport control on the Jordanian side. Everything was running smoothly though I was spending significant energy on making Jamie feel better from the day’s difficulties and meanwhile, I was missing an important issue. After having our bags scanned and paying the 5 JD departure tax with the little money we had left, I passed my passport over to passport control then Jamie did the same. As they looked through her passport they asked her if she wanted a Jordanian exit stamp and she replied yes as she has already seen many Islamic republics like Syria, Pakistan and Iran but they didn’t ask me. I follow her answer’ with an immediate don't stamp mine but it was too late. They stamped an incriminating Jordanian exit stamp in my passport leaving me captive to evidence of travelling in Israel. I fumed. I couldn’t believe what just happened. I spent months telling myself not to get a stamp leaving Jordan and now in the heat of the day and the confusion of placating a grumpy fellow traveler, I forgot to request the stamp on a separate piece of paper. Shit shit shit shit! It’s my own fault but still. Now this means that for me travel to Pakistan and Iran, two countries I really want to see, I need to get a new passport but I only got this passport 4 months ago. Leaving Israel from here, something I am already thinking about, I will have to go to Turkey and travel through the expensive parts of Europe instead of heading East through Iran and Pakistan like I originally wanted. I walked out of the passport control feeling very stupid and angry with myself. How could I let this happen? My day went from laughing at my burden of this inconvenient border to shaking my fist at my own absentmindedness. I waited for the bus that crossed to the Israeli side with an acidic aftertaste in my mouth and an echo in my belly.

This is where I first felt the paranoia of the most hated people in the world come into play. The bus drove for a few minutes then stopped at a gate. Two young adults, one boy and one girl, came out both wearing mirrored sunglasses and dressed casually. The only thing that wasn’t casual about them was the boy was caring a very large gun and circled the bus staring at the passengers inside, assessing the situation. The driver, a Jordanian, held his hands up and then stood as part of the system to surveille the bus for bombs or weapons. The girl used a large angled mirror, like a dentists mouth mirror but bigger, to check for bombs under the bus. Slowly, we got let through.

The border on the Israeli side was modern and systematic. We got approached by a very attractive security woman who starting inquiring me with some basic questions like if I had packed my own bag, did I get any gifts from Jordanians to bring to the other side or what were my plans in Israel. When I started to talk in Hebrew she began to warm up. I did request to speak in English and she continued in English but became very interested in my time in Syria and Lebanon - those mystic countries that Jews aren't allowed to be in and have only heard stories about. I was quickly let through, bag searched and sampled for bomb dust and finally stamped into the country (not on my passport this time). I didn’t realize that this was my interview. Being Israeli was definitely an advantage and it sped up the process significantly to about twenty minutes. Jamie, as a shiktse, wasn’t so fortunate. She was interviewed and her passport was held. As we both waited my passport was requested again and I handed it over. Then the real waiting began in the empty fluorescent tube lighting of the passport room. It took two hours to get the passports back, something for me that should have taken only a few minutes, and with a smile and a welcome, we entered the holyland.

The women at the passport control were just stunning. At the time, I wasn’t sure if these girls were just standard fare or if this was a ploy by the tourism department to promote Israel but this place was a beauty pageant with a gun. The people that processed us were young, busty and beautiful more than any other border I have been to where the police stamping and checking me were heavily mustachioed, grizzly and ungiving. One undercover cop asked me, in Hebrew only, if I was afraid of being in Syria. I told him that I wasn’t afraid, that people generally didn’t ask me for my religion and that the people are very good as I don’t know the word for nice or peaceful in Hebrew. It surprised him and he walked off thinking in a different light.

Jamie and I walked to the other side of the world that day. We entered a new language, a new thinking and a new pace. The economy of the country was the first thing to grab us, as the only taxi to the neighboring city was 40 NIS (new Israeli shekels) or a whopping 9 USD. On our budgets, we couldn’t agree to this price and we scrambled to find an alternative fruitlessly. Luckily we hitched a ride to the border town of Beit She-an where we waited for a bus to Tiberius.

The first thing you notice when you cross the border is how green it is. The temperature drops slightly, the humidity increases and the foliage seems to grow off of everything. There are plants and trees everywhere. There are western fashions, girls in bulging very tight pants and early twenties youths in army gear with more very large guns and very large sunglasses. The bus stops have numbers and destinations listed. You get receipts when you pay for your ticket on the bus and stores all have prices listed on the products. This is a brave new world I have come to call home. I come back to the West and everything right and wrong about it.

Tiberius is the first city we decided to stay at so that Jamie could bike around the lake. It took us 8 hours from the Jordanian side to the Israeli side, door to door, and we were happy to get to our room. Our expensive room with color TV and air con. TV! Oh sweet TV how I have missed thee. Then, after settling in, we finally ate our first (very expensive) meal of the day of shwarma which in every other country should have cost next to nothing. The cost of this place is beginning to hit us and we start buying our food at the local grocery shop.

You do notice some differences in the way people behave when you leave the complicated life of the East and enter the West. First, nobody welcomes you to the country like the Arabs did but also nobody forces you to buy anything. I can walk into a store and out of one without a purchase and without hassle from the staff. Whereas most people in the West feel that customer service is a dead industry I feel the lack of attention and force that shopping had on me in the Third World as refreshing. Sometimes, I just want to know the price and not buy anything but up to now this was impossible. If you ask for a price it implies to the staff that you want to buy and the tourist price is instigated and a bargaining process begins. Here it is nice to be left alone, pick what I want and know that there will be no fight for the food, soap or whatever I want to buy.

People in Israel speak very good English who is very bad if I want to learn Hebrew. So far, I have managed to communicate with a few people when we needed help getting around and also being able to read Hebrew, I have been able to read where we are going sometimes. I spent my time in Tiberius watching TV, thinking about my future in this city and eating the best chocolate spread in the world. Tiberius itself is a very nice city compared with many I have passed through but boring and we needed to get on our way.

We planned to see Nazareth but things kinda fell through. We woke late, missed the first bus and had an expense crisis with the cost of leaving our bags at the bus station being over three USD. We eventually got to Nazareth but left immediately. Jamie went off to see a friend and I called an old friend of mine, Yifat, and she welcomed me to stay with her in a town about an hour south of the Nazareth called Afula. Nazareth itself is a modern urban jungle with the relics of Jesus past lost in the bowels of a new age. We ended up in the Christian Muslim quarter passing the churches we heard about but didn’t go into. We justified it as there being little to do in this town after a day racked with mistakes, assumptions and unnecessary spending. Saying a sad goodbye to Jamie and getting on the bus to Afula, I said a warm hello to Yifat and entered the Israel I was so familiar with when I was travelling through India and Thailand. The Israel that opened its arms to me and gave unconditionally. The Israel that welcomed me as part of their family and fed me until the seams split. The Arab hospitality has shifted from the sawdust filled teahouses in Egypt to Israeli mom cooking and talking over Nescafe.

Yifat has let me stay at her place even during this chaotic time of her moving house. She has invited me to every meal she has had with her family and welcomed me to her family and her family has accepted me like a son. I have eaten chamin again like I did in Goa and chicken soup, home made humus and fresh delicious vegetables as the Israelis from my past have all promised would be waiting for me, chopped in little diced pieces. Both her and her flatmate Smadar have been absolutely wonderful to me offering me whatever I need to get my life started here where finding work as a foreigner can be difficult.

I cannot leave out Orit in this equation. She has been unquestionably altruistic in my quest to find my new life. Her first idea was to go to an expats bar in Tel Aviv and talk to the local foreigners about working here. So, one and half-hours later we were in Tel Aviv. It is amazing how close everything is especially if you are only looking around the North. We arrived at night.

Tel Aviv by night doesn’t look like an anything-special city. It has roads, sidewalks, shops and pubs and all those regular things that make up a city. There are skyscrapers and city residences though relative to the rest of the Middle East this city is better organized and isn’t just a series of incomplete concrete houses without paint. We arrived at MASH (stands for More Alcohol Served Here) to find ourselves as one of only two other small groups in the bar on a Saturday night. Israelis aren’t known to be drinkers and this is evidence of it. The bar was empty though for those who know the Hebrew days of the week will know that Sunday is called Day One in Hebrew and is the start of the working week making Saturday night for us actually Sunday night for them. I asked the owner what I could do to find work in this country and the answer was bleak. He told me to get legal. Find the necessary papers to be allowed to work legally here and then go and find work. Otherwise there are bars on the waterfront who may need waitering or cashier work. In all honesty, this limited option doesn’t fill me with much hope. There has got to be more. The waitress at MASH, a Dutch girl going for citizenship, found this job by word of mouth of a friend. Here, there are no websites for expats unlike in the Czech Republic where a quick search will lead you to great sites like www.expats.cz which has accommodation, jobs and more for the newcomer to start their life. Here you’re on your own.

So now I am now in this gray area of travel and work. As I am now unemployed I have started the process of finding a job. This isn’t going to be easy in a country with 30% unemployment. I have done some research and with the edge of having Israeli parents, I will next head over to the Israeli equivalent of the Home Office and figure out how I can get a residency status or ID card without getting a passport or doing my Aliya. Then, to find a job will require more effort and I will seek out that next step when I head to Tel Aviv and make it my home. The days pass fast in excitement of settling down, having my own room and learning about a city fully instead of just running through it.

Next, I go to the doctor and dentist for a well-needed post epic check up and tune up. Then, I will make my way to Jerusalem and see all the necessary tourist holes and look for jobs there. Haifa is in the works and Tel Aviv is last. Let the games begin.

Be well



Oren Jalon
Immigrant Job Seeker