(Friday night)

Shalom from Tel Aviv. Who knew that the climate would be so much like Southern California? Right from the get-go, on the cab ride from the airport, I saw a number of plants I recognize from LA, including the trees that turn purple for commencement (as my colleague BS likes to put it). I could have been on the 10. I guess that's what they mean when they say California has a "Mediterranean climate:" It's like, you know, the Mediterranean.

I got in late this afternoon, in the sunshine, and after checking in at my hotel, I walked down to the beach. Glorious. The sand is so fine it feels like you're walking in flour. And there's nothing like a west-facing beach on a sunny evening. I sat in a plastic (yet comfy) chair on the sand, ordered some hummus and falafel and a local beer, and leafed through the guidebook I got in the airport. Heaven.



Speaking of heaven, it's shabbat, so many things weren't really open, and won't be until Sunday. In fact, there's an elevator in my hotel that goes up and down automatically between Friday night and Saturday night, stopping at every odd-numbered floor, so you don't have to do work pushing buttons on shabbat (orthodoxy takes the whole sabbath rest thing quite seriously).

For dinner, IS (one of my linguistics professor hosts) picked me up and drove me down to Jaffa. Jaffa is right next to Tel Aviv, and in fact was the original town that Tel Aviv was built as a suburb of. It is one of the oldest harbors in the world, or so my guidebook says. It's an Israeli Arab neighborhood. I asked her what the difference was between "Israeli Arab" and "Palestinian," and she said you could use either for the people in this neighborhood, depending on the political statement you wished to make or not make.

Jaffa reminded me of Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas, another harbor town with crumbling concrete walls and tight corners for cars. Dinner was at a family restaurant (and boy, were there a lot of families there) where the waiters brought about twenty little dishes of amuse-bouches (falafel, hummus, beets, eggplant, coleslaw, guacamole, ...) before you even ordered anything. It really was about twenty. The waiters must all get carpal tunnel syndrome putting so many little dishes on the tables! And every little while they would play a cheesy rendition of "Happy Birthday" on the sound system, sung in English and then in Arabic, and bring out desserts with sparklers in them, for some lucky table. There's no way that that many kids actually had birthdays. :)

By the way, I felt about the food today the way I felt about Mexican food when I went to Tucson. I had never really gotten what the fuss was about, with Mexican food, until I had Mexican food in the southwest. Even average Mexican food is pretty damn good in Tucson. (And in LA.) And now, yeah, I get it about Middle Eastern food now too. Good falafel, good olive oil... yum.

It was nice to talk to IS, who I don't know very well at all, but anyway, nice to start getting to know her. She is Israeli (damn you, Beck, for that song that's been going through my head for the last three days with the line "She looks so Israeli"...) and grew up in Tel Aviv, in fact. She also spent four years recently in Brooklyn, so we talked a bit about the Hasidic community there, which she has little patience for. And we talked shop, too, of course. She's a syntactician, but has been thinking about noun phrases like "John's chances of winning," and the stuff about chances is much more in my line of work, so we talked about that.

I know you all want to know about the security situation. Aside from seeing someone on the tarmac in Paris scanning all the cleaners and caterers who were turning around the plane before we got on, I've seen nothing out of the ordinary. And because it's the sabbath, it's pretty empty around here, so it seems to me, anyway, that it would hardly be worth a bomber's effort. Anyway, I have no plans to get on a bus or go to a club or a crowded café, so no worries.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to be lazy, more beach, maybe some working (I haven't yet finished the paper I was working on, and should prolly spend some time on it), and a bit of wandering. Meeting IS and/or a postdoc for lunch, and more wandering, and then a cab that (with some instructions from IS) will drop me off at the door of the university guesthouse, in Jerusalem.

I wish I had learned the Hebrew alphabet when I lived a stone's throw from Fairfax Village in LA... half the signs there are in Hebrew. I got a little book at the airport, but it's not very helpful for figuring out phonological rules, and the vowels are always a crap shoot.

Okay, time for bed. I took a bath, which makes me happy since I don't get to do that in Paris! And there's internet in the hotel; a nominal charge, and it involves going down to the front desk to get a username and password, so I'll just do it tomorrow morning. Also, I'm delighted to report that my cell phone does work here.