Elegant Slumming

Tomorrow it’ll be a week since I moved to Tel Aviv to start phase two of my WUJS programme – the PSJ (Peace and Social Justice) internship. Although it’s only been a week there’s lots to say about this new chapter in my Israel adventures, so I’ll try to work through them in a systematic kind of way….one blogpost at a time….

THE APARTMENT
I’m living with 3 other WUJys in an apartment on King George St, which, if you don’t know Tel Aviv, is very central to all the good stuff – the markets where you can buy fresh produce, jeans, bread, tchachkas, and whatever else your heart desires; cool cafes and shops.The beach isn’t so far…. (OK, so it’s kind of a shlep on foot but not for a hardened Welly walker!). The apartment itself is pretty small for four people, but fortunately two of our roomies have kind of taken to living elsewhere so it’s mostly just me and Laura, a cool Canadian social worker. The apartment interior is brand new; the fridge, toilet, and pretty much everything else still had the “brand new” labels and stickers on them when we moved in. The apartment backs onto a little park, with some fun kiddie playground equipment and a dog exercise area. We are on the 4th floor, with no elevator, which means shlepping up the stairs every day…which is probably a good thing as that’s about the most exercise I’m getting these days….apart from swinging on the playground swings of course!

In the apartment, there’s a door in the living room that opens onto an open roof/balcony thing. This might have had great potential for evening lounging, except for the fact that it is a complete garbage heap. Really. See, the building adjoining ours is a completely abandoned slumville. Meaning: it’s a dirty dirty mess filled with abandoned dirty and broken furniture. There is more dirty broken abandoned furniture on the roof/balcony that connects our building to theirs, not to mention large piles of bashed up gib board. I assume this came from our apartment when they were ripping out all the old dirty crap before transforming it into the modern chic interior we have today. Fortunately, Laura and I are doing our best to redecorate the apartment so that it’s more in keeping with our environs. We call our style “ghetto”. This look is achieved by finding various not-too-dirty additional elements of furnishing and dragging them into our apartment to make it more homely and/or practical. Thus far we have brought in a couple of mattresses, and a filthy broken wardrobe which we cleaned up and used to string up a “privacy curtain” for Laura, whose bed is in the living room. There are some dress mirrors in the slum that would be nice, if we could figure out how to unscrew them from the wall…..

Anyway all in all there isn’t much to complain about, apart from the LACK OF INTERNET (this shall be the subject of another blogposting), and the location could hardly be better. Oh – importantly the shower has great water pressure. I thought I should mention that, especially in case Greg is reading this….