Hitch hiking in the desert

My two days in Tel Aviv are fast and intense. After the first night clubbing I found myself crashed in somebody else's couch with my original host and another friend. The second day I awake in a couch full of sand without any clue. But for some reason everybody I meet seems to remember me from the beach party in the preceding night. I tend to associate this behaviour with the social capabilities of the arak :-)

Anyway, a series of coincidences — typical of the hospitality-exchange world — lead me on the next day to a small kibbutz on the Dead sea (the relevant photos are here).

But the amazing discovery is that you can easily hitch hike to almost every place in Israel! You just wait in a some big junction — even in the middle of the desert! (Check the picture and count the cars on sight :-)

And you will realise soon that all class of people can pick you up: from the young religious to the SUV-family to the hippie couple in a dark green Punto (by the way, a big thank you goes to the Indian girl who translated the hindi inscriptions on my yellow bag).

So I grab my casetta and I start flashing the drivers approaching my spot with big smiles, and in virtually no-time I found myself in front of the walls of Jerusalem!

Welcome to the Holy Land

Bump!

I wake up when the plane hit the land — I mean the Holy Land :-) — and I start looking around me: I'm alone in the last row, the only goy in a plane full of happy and noisy Israeli families coming back from their Turkish holidays — the Shekel is kinda high, these days ….

My thought goes to the preceding hours — and I feel the nightmare slowly fading away. I arrived from Olimpos to Antalya very late the night before, I woke up early and I went to the airport. Turkey did not want to let me go: after discovering that I cannot go to Israel via Cyprus (because you cannot pass the border from North to South, and from Turkey you can only go to the Northern part) I somehow managed to sneak in an Israeli return charter. But, alas! the girl at the travel agency forgot to add my name to the flight list. After a couple of hours of frantic phone calls eventually I passed the check-in. Three minutes before it closed.

So, this is how Israel looks: … nice!

After discovering that I can pay the train ticket (2.50 €) with my credit card The Big Smile shows up on my face! And it gets wider when, first on the train and then on the bus, I realise that almost everyone — including the elder and the young — speaks English.

I happily settle down on my couch in Yafo while I let the hot air, the smells and the sounds of Middle-East slowly soak my body. In a few hours I realise that it will be hard to leave this place.

—
As usual, more photos of Tel Aviv here.

Buckatürk?

At the beginning of the Nineties, we used to play a quite popular board game: Trivial Pursuit.

I remember a day, playing in Ally's kitchen, when the question « Who is the father of all turks? » panicked most of us. And then somebody — with the beginning of a smile sprouting from his lips — said this single word: « Atatürk? »

Many years passed, and eventually I have an answer for that: reincarnation!



Further proofs of this theory here.

Blue is my favourite colour …

… as in sky and sea!

The mighty SummerCamp in beautiful Naxos (Paros, Sexos) ended, and I moved my casetta to Syros, but it was only for having a real sleep — after a week between no-sleeping and sleeping-on-the-floor — and for doing the laundry.

After that was Samos! Due to the lack of CSers there, I opted for an hotel, made sure it had an internet connection, rented a small motorbike and went for the wild-and-deserted-beaches tour.

The results are posted here below :-)

For some reason the blue in Greece seems bluer than elsewhere, thus I'm planning a little come-back on the next week.

More photos of Samos here.

Stay tuned for more blue!

Greece, fifteen years after

I'm on the boat to Samos, trying to catch up with my thoughts and feelings after a couple of weeks lived with my whole body and soul.

What I feel now is a bit of loneliness — the least one could expect after such an intense social activity. But it is a good opportunity for recovering energies and preparing the Turkey trip. And update the blog :-)

I'm sorry, but I think that this post will be appreciated — almost — only by few of you, namely the participants of the 1993 El Harén mission.



Walking the same streets after 15 years make me feel like as no time had passed — although it was the other century — and at the same time I know that I'm a completely different person (eg: I don't feel anymore the urge of climbing that headless statue, yet I can't stop laughing my a** off remembering the museum guard getting mad at us!)

And next came Naxos (Paros, Sexos).

And that wind (I still have sand in my mouth after three days). So I had to take this photos also, although the lack of our friends makes me a bit melancholic.

This is how we looked fifteen years ago!

This hug is for you, my friends.

You can find more photos of Greece here.

A big smile

As a friend of mine use to say, when you succeed in escaping from your slavery you will have that big smile stuck in your face all of the time! Well, as far as I know, he is right :-D


So my passport will have the same big smile in it. I've two series of photos taken, one with beard and one without, for the visas I'll have to do during the trip — my shaving habit is on the lazy side.