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My first impression of Israel was of the heat, humidity and the chaos of the immigration hall at Ben Gurion Airport...

Israel

Hank Shiffman
2003-11-29 14:49:24

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My first impression of Israel was of the heat, humidity and the chaos of the immigration hall at Ben Gurion Airport. My flight, which was scheduled to arrive just before midnight, was delayed by more than an hour due to mourning for the Greek President. In typical fashion Greece shut down everything in the country including air traffic control, leading to interesting routing problems for my flight.
I got my second impression when I woke the following morning and looked out my hotel window at the Mediterranean. Having spent most of my life near one ocean or another, a mere sea didn't seem such a significant body of water. I was forced to revise that opinion pretty quickly. The scene reminded me of my first visit to my grandmother in Miami Beach in '69: highrise hotels along the beachfront and tacky lowrise apartment buildings everywhere else.

Things start to look a little more interesting once you get a couple of blocks from the seashore. The architecture starts to look a lot more Mediterranean or Middle Eastern or at least less like transplanted Florida condo. It also shows signs of its battle with the elements. A lot of the buildings have experienced far more wear than I would have expected. After all, Tel Aviv is a contemporary of Los Angeles, not Jerusalem.

The architecture I encountered in Tel Aviv runs a range from the practical and boring through the ethnically quaint to the downright peculiar. The tower on the right is an example of what I mean: it looks like a modern version of the Tower of Babel. I'm guessing that the designer was having either a very good or a very bad day.

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