Diary of a housewife

A trip through Tel Aviv to discover the delights of the city for a couple of days.

By HADASSAH BAT-HAIM
Jerusalem by night view_521 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Jerusalem by night view_521
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
After careful deliberation and frenzied organization we arrange to leave the fastnesses of Galilee for the delights of the big city for two days. The obstacles are enormous. A trip to Tel Aviv seems to involve more difficulties than one to Russia. (Have never been to Russia, of course, so this is just a theory.) We dispose of the children to various unsuspecting friends and set off, turning back only once to make sure that the gas is really off.
As we approach Tel Aviv, I discover that I have left at home the address and telephone number of the person we are going to stay with. Am convinced that she lives at number 27 and insist on this fact in very loud and inaccurate Hebrew to the tenants of the various flats in this house who are all very indignant and deny her very existence. Wonder if she could have been got hold of for the white slave traffic, but would in this case reserve my sympathy for her unfortunate buyer. By a serious of ingenious manoeuvres I find out her address, which turns out to be 37, not 27. Am very glad not to have been reduced to the expedients of her previous guests who forgot her number, too, and wandered up and down the street for several hours shouting “Gerda.” Head of the House, instead of congratulating me on my cleverness, merely says that if I hadn’t forgotten the address in the first place, we shouldn’t have put the street in such an uproar.
We are very impressed with the metropolitan aspect of Tel Aviv. The traffic lights, the mounted police and the swooping cars are frightening to yokels up from the country. Am quite overwhelmed by the elegance of the women, and feel that the suit which has graced the major functions in Nahariya for the past five winters is perhaps not quite as up to date as it could be. Am rather annoyed to find that prices are in general cheaper than at home, and say that if we lived in Tel Aviv maybe I could afford to buy some elegant clothes, too. Feel, however, that the night life would be too much for me, as we sit in a cafe till half past eleven and I try desperately to be gay but only succeed in being sleepy.
We proceed to Jerusalem to the gathering of the British immigrants where I am delighted to see a lot of people that I haven’t seen for many years and even more pleased to greet some whom I see once a week or so at home. It is surprising to note the number of hats that have been borrowed from other women’s heads for the occasion, which as I point out to the Head of the House proves a solidarity between women which he is often at pains to deny.
Exhausted from all the gaiety we crawl quietly back to our little grey home in the west (of Galilee) where, though there are no mounted police, there are also no lakes in the middle of the road, and we don’t have any traffic lights because we don’t have much traffic. We look forward to next year when we will probably venture out again.