TEL AVIV: WE WERE FLÁNEURS STROLLING THE SEA FRONT

We live in the Negev; when we go off road in the desert, we can spend the whole day by ourselves without seeing anybody, just us alone.

So, when we go to Tel Aviv one thing that blows up in my face is the crowds of both people and cars, it is all too much. But there is one thing that I might admit I envy the people of Tel Aviv: their access to the beach, the sea and the sea front:

Crowds in and near the water, more or less dressed

It was in the middle of January; we spend the day in Tel Aviv and at the end of the day we wandered from Neve Zedek to the beach to become part of the local scene on the sea front.

It was just before sunset, so very thing was colored in the golden color of soon to set sun. Like elsewhere in Tel Aviv crowds of people, even among the surfers, they had to wait in line to catch a spot on a wave!

A recent article in the WSJ, they used the word: flâneur for street-haunting, a word that sounded very French to me. I liked the sound of the word; it falls in a fun way on my tongue; according to the Cambridge English Dictionary it is defined as ‘a person walking around not doing anything in particular but watching people and society’. That was exactly what we did, we were flaneurs or perhaps we may say flâneuring along the sea front! The etymologic origin of the word was probably Old Norse, flana. That fact I found interesting as I believe the direction of loaning words is usually from Latin->French to the German- Scandinavian languages.

Is he looking for a little mermaid to jump out of the water ?

Surfers of the future

The lazy strolling along the coast, observing the people on the beach made me realize that people of Tel Aviv like their dogs, who love playing on the beach, in the sea just like their human owners.

Dogs

More dogs

Dog watch

Wandering the sea front changed our mood into one of holiday, vacation, leisure time, and relaxation. I thought a funny way to look at BEACH was:

Best

Escape

Anyone

Can

Have

The sea front is littered with tall hotels, they may attract tourists, but we heard mainly Hebrew and Arabic spoken around us by the locals.

A photo that is quite common among photos from the sea front is the Tel Aviv is this of Jaffa from afar you may say it is iconic photo showing the tower of the Al Bahr Mosque or the Sea Mosque, built 1675, standing tall in the flames of the sinking sun:

At last a photo without people

I play a game of nonsense with my granddaughter, she is 6 and have started school this year; for the past two years she loves to swim, when she visits our kibbutz, she is like a fish in our swimming-pool. When she comes back from the swimming-pool, I ask her how was the water in the pool, was it wet or was it dry? For 1.5 years she did not answer only looked at me like I am old and weird. But in the last few months she has started to answer me with a sly, insightful smile, of course the water is dry. When I look at the surfers here at the beach in their surfing suits, they must feel the water in the sea is dry because they do not become wet.