So the weather in Tel Aviv hasn’t been the best. In fact, what’s the opposite of ‘best’? Probably raining so fucking hard, so fucking often that the drains can’t cope, the roads flood and the Israelis all stay in because they don’t understand the concept. Maybe they’re the clever ones. We go out. We get wet. But you have to. It’s in the tourism terms and conditions. Act stupidly and counter to sensible at all times. There again we wouldn’t normally choose Israel this time of year, but heh, its been good generally. And fab at times.

We went to the Museum of Art yesterday morning, just a 20 minute walk in a flood, and the museum is wonderful and… arty and in an amazing building. Then just 20 minutes more of splashing round the streets and we were safely back in the warm and dry.

But when the rains desist, you go out. Tourism rule 174/G-2186.LF. So I looked and thought, let’s go the New Synagogue. Not, like, to pray, heaven forbid, but just to, kinda see it. Google maps said it was a 24 minute walk and as we were now wearing dry shoes and socks again; we set forth.

And the route took us down some uncharted territory. Bits of roads upon which we’d never previously traveled. Or if we had it had been in a car and hadn’t noticed. The surprise. Which really shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but it was. On Allenby Street, 500 metres from the Synagogue, just along from the Carmel Market, we found the ‘sex district’. Well, a few really grotty looking ‘clubs’ of a suggestive nature, a sex shop and a lot of dubious looking people hanging about… dubiously.

I don’t know why I was surprised to find a ‘red light district’ in Tel Aviv, but I was. And yet, TA has a reputation for tolerance, for ‘anything goes’ and for being almost ‘the Berlin of the Middle East’. Not that it has much competition in the region really. It not only hosts the ‘biggest Pride march in the region every year’, it hosts the ONLY Pride march in the region every year. So to find evidence that ‘the oldest profession’ is practiced in the city should not have made me look twice. But it did. Every city has a sex district, as they should, they are important release mechanisms, so why not Tel Aviv? Perhaps its because Israel is the home of western religion, home of the 10 commandments, therefore the home of our concept of morality. The problem is, ergo, of a more philosophical nature. Because you can’t shag morality. Nor philosophy, commandments or ethics. And for humans, sex kind’a trumps everything else. (By ‘humans’, I obviously mean ‘animals’, like YOU, not higher evolved beings…)

So there ya go. Tel Aviv has red lights which aren’t about the festival of Chanukah, and I’ve just arrived back home. Where it rather dry and bright.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx