Israeli Accommodation
A good friend of my wife (of
mine as well) who travels quite extensively comes home and colourfully relates
her overseas experiences punctuated with terms such as "our limo
driver", "champers", "the Qantas Lounge", "five
stars", "twenty four hour room service". You get the trend? And
the Brandenburg Gate she visited, the Eiffel Tower or the Guggenheim in New
York - to name but a few - don't really
sound like the places I once spent time admiring. Well perhaps not admiring, but at least ticking off my
bucket list. But we each bring home different memories!
She is not only interested in her own travels
but also expresses interest in other people's trips. When I arrived home from
my two weeks pilgrimage to the Holy Land one of her first questions was, "How was the accommodation?"
"Carol*,
my dear," I replied," my single supplement gave me no less than a
queen-sized bed nightly, and indeed in one hotel, two queen-sized bed in the
one room. I felt like a king surrounded by all those queens. I slept in a
different spot on each of the four nights I was there!"
Only kidding!
Our Jerusalem hotel merged
beautifully into the hillside. Here fate gave me a third floor room. This
proved to be a problem in itself for I was always confused whether to go up or
down to get to my home base there. It was a problem wherever I was in the
hotel. Who ever heard of checking in at the front desk and then having to go
DOWN to get to the third floor? And I could never remember whether to take
lifts A, which took me to one section of the huge hotel or lifts B, which had
me trying to open the wrong door.
A confused guest at the hotel not knowing whether to go up or down to arrive at the third floor.
Tiberius
found me in a second floor room (i.e. the floor above the main reception area)
overlooking the Sea of Galilee. How wonderful a place to pull the curtains and
say "Good morning" or "Good night" to the world outside.
And here I could spend time sitting on the balcony day-dreaming, meditating,
projecting myself back two millennia. So this is peace. This is contentment.
Embrace me with your quietude, oh sweet waters!
In Tel Aviv I reached great
heights - floor eight. Marvellous, I think, I can watch the sun setting over
the Mediterranean. Bad thinking!! Some rather unimaginative architect had drawn
the plans for my room to look East, away from the gentle sea breezes. And what
do I see as a substitute? I see the tops of emerging sky-scrapers in the
distance, the tops of tenement blocks and the dust and noise of a building site
in the foreground.
As King David of old, my eye ran
over the flat roof tops, but apparently this was not the time for bathing. Even
if it had been that evocative hour, the tops in my view allowed no room for
roof-top bathing.
Oh Dear! They seemed to be the
depositories for unused, worn out and broken household stuff. I can imagine the
householder below these flat-topped rooves thinking, " out of sight (up
there on the roof) , out of mind." No, mate. Not out of sight of the
visitor who pulls the hotel room curtain aside to see the blue Mediterranean.
And I thought of my wife who is always agonising about my stores of treasures
which may be of use some day. "Thank God we don't have flat roof tops,"
would be her immediate response to this Tel Aviv scene.
No space for a bath tub on the roof of this Tel Aviv apartment building.
Back to my friend Carol.
"But how many stars?" she would want to know.
"You know, Carol, there on
my balcony overlooking the Sea of Galilee, with the clear sky above, I thought
of Abraham (of Biblical fame) when the Lord took him outside and said,"
Look up at the heavens and count the stars - if indeed you can count
them." I never yet have looked in a Michelin star chart to see if I've had
a good night's sleep."
* The name has been changed to protect the
innocent.
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