Old Jaffa

Our time on the Karoo came to an abrupt end at 6:30 yesterday morning when we left to drive back to Cape Town for our 5pm flight to Tel Aviv. The seven hours of driving were slightly less stressful than the drive several days ago… Sharon only screamed once. She wisely busied herself with things that kept her from watching the road. After the drive, we took the red-eye through Johannesburg and Istanbul to Tel Aviv. We arrived at our hostel in Jaffa about 30 hours after leaving Camdeboo, and now we’re pretty exhausted. Sharon laughed earlier when I called the hostel “cozy”…

And, here we are. I read somewhere today that Jaffa may possibly be the oldest port city in the world. Some think it might also have been named after one of Noah’s sons, Japheth, one of the city’s founders. This is where Jonah boarded the boat he eventually got thrown off of into the belly of the whale. Jaffa has been assaulted by Egyptian kings, the Crusades, Napolean… Jaffa just feels historic, and I’m guessing we’ll have that sense wherever we go in this country. When you look at a building, you get the definite impression that what is there now has been modified from a prior use, and that prior use was modified from another, and another, and so on. Bricks built on stones, then other types of stones, then tin and and metal, etc. We were in a shop today and commented on the interesting architecture of the store to which the shopkeeper replied, “oh, well, this used to be a mosque”.

After visiting the sites of Old Jaffa this afternoon, we ate a fantastic local dinner – kind of a sampler of all sorts of things with names I cannot pronounce, much less remember – and now we’re headed to bed after catching up on blogging and email and making sure we’re all set for the next couple of days. I bought a beer and some warm pistachios from a shop around the corner to help us get the writing juices flowing. Tomorrow, we’re going to sample the local coffee (which a local promised would be way better than our American coffee) and spend a little time in Tel Aviv before heading to Bethlehem. I think we are both cautiously hopeful that our time here will be one of depth and meaning.