I cannot begin to describe how interesting Tel Aviv was.
I have been pondering how to organize the remaining stories and pictures I have to share and finally decided to organize by location. It is more my nature to organize by topic; but in this case, I think location will give you a more organic sense of what Tel Aviv is like. That means that in a post about a location, I will make comments about people, food, architecture, purses, or whatever is interesting in that set of pics.
We spent 8 days in Tel Aviv. I booked us at the beach for the first two days after our arrival while we slept off our jet lag. DH was keen on the beach and I wasn’t, so those two days were to placate him. Locals love having miles of beach so close to the heart of the city, but for me, after leaving at the beach for 17 years, I am so over sand. I was able to experience all I wanted of the beach from the terrace of our room.
After resting up from the 12-hour flight and 7 hours of time change, we went to Jerusalem and the other sites that I have described. We returned to Tel Aviv for 6 days at the end of our vacation and were booked at the Fabric Hotel. This hotel is a microcosm of what is so cool about Tel Aviv.
In the planning stage, I asked google maps where the coffee shops were and selected what I thought was the most interesting hotel in that neighborhood. This is the picture that cinched the Hotel’s selection. DH’s main reason for wanting to go to Israel was to sit in coffee shops and chat. This picture of what I thought was the lobby looked very “chatty” to me.
It turned out that Hotel was a cojoined twin with a bar and restaurant named the Bushwick. The artist-painted wall was in the restaurant and is meant to be graffiti. The Bushwick is named after a neighborhood in Brooklyn that the hotel desk clerk described as being just the same as the immediate neighborhood around the hotel. This is how Google describes that Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick.
"Edgy and increasingly hip, Bushwick is an evolving, industrial area marked by imaginative street art and converted warehouses that are home to artist studios and artisanal coffee shops. Dining options span the globe, and avant-garde nightlife thrives in clubs and quirky bars with vintage, mismatched furnishings."
Oh… What I thought was a surprising amount of graffiti on the surrounding streets in Tel Aviv is actually art. Good to know. I also figured out why the hotel is named the Fabric Hotel. I was expecting fabric art to be on the walls. Instead, the hotel was located on a 7 block stretch of stores that were 90% fabric stores. Many times, I thought that
@cowgirlsboots would be in heaven here. You would think they would call it the Fabric District, but they don’t. As far as I known, the neighborhood does not even have a name.
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The neighborhood was so ideally located. A couple of blocks in one direction was the Carmel Market, a couple of blocks in another direction was the higher-end, business oriented street of Rothchild, and a couple of blocks in another direction was Neve Tzedek which was the first neighborhood settled in Tel Aviv. A couple of miles south is the city of Jaffe.
Here is a little diversion from the hotel and the neighborhood. Tel Aviv is a new city in the scheme of things. It doesn’t feel new, but it was only settled around 1900 AD. Jaffe is the old port city established about 1800 BC that is mentioned in several Bible stories. Jaffe became over-populated, so Tel Aviv started out as the suburbs of Jaffe. Local families participated in a lottery for land by selecting seashells. Over the 20th century, waves of Jewish families around the world fleeing persecutionreturned to Israel. There were two especially large waves of Russian immigrants who settled in the neighborhood our hotel was in. The family owning of the shop where I bought my glasses were Russian, with great, great grandfather coming in 1924. Lots of servers in restaurants are Russian too.
Now the Tel Aviv metropolitan area has a population of about 4 million people. Tel Aviv is considered to be one of the most liberal cities in the world, which is a big contrast from the religiously conservative eastern part of the country. Tel Aviv is also very expensive having the 6th highest cost of living of cities in the world. I read that as many as 25% of the people living in Tel Aviv are thought to be LGBT. I find that hard to believe, but maybe it is true for within the city limits, rather than for the greater metropolitan area.
Back to talking about the hotel. The hotel gives you daily vouchers for a free drink during happy hour at the Bushwick.
We went to the enclosed patio portion behind bar-restaurant proper. Happy hour started at 6 pm and people from the neighborhood started pouring in at the stroke of 6. The tables were populated by groups of friends and by extended families.
The bar prides itself in exotic cocktails. DH asked the manager for recommendations. He touted the newly arrived cognac. My drink had a dried rosebud floating in it. That is one of those ideas I thought I must do at home.
We read the English version of the menu but didn’t know what a lot of the things were.
I looked at other people’s food as it went by and said "I will take what he is having". It was so tasty. I thought it was breaded chicken on raw cabbage with peanut sauce—sort of Thai style. It was so tender, I wanted to know know how it was made to be so melt-in-your-mouth. It turned out to be so tender because it was breaded and fried tofu.
This hotel had ratings of 9.4 on Booking.com and was rated #3 out of 160 hotels on Trip Advisor. The main thing all the reviews raved about was the hotel breakfast. I am going to discuss Israeli breakfasts and food in general in the next post.
Before I move on, I wanted to tell you two more things about this hotel. First it had the smallest room I have ever stayed in—16 sq meters (172 sq feet). The size did not dawn on me in the booking process because I don’t think in meters. We could not even open our suitcases without putting them on the bed. All of the other great things about this hotel like the location, staff, and restaurant made the room size mostly unimportant. I did learn a lesson though. In booking, pay more attention to the room size.
Second the hotel had such a lovely roof-top deck. It was a great place to hang out after we checked out of the room and before we went to the airport. It seems like a lot of the nearby buildings had roof top patios that people use for parties. I read that the gay scene in Tel Aviv is not so much centered in bars, but in parties that it is easy to get invited to. We did not go to any parties, but I do think rooftop parties are definitely a thing there.
Pounced on it, painted it so the colours were more to my liking, and then carried it, loved it, petted and hugged it to death. 
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I was gifted 5 bags in the past year (for my last birthday and the one just passed). I haven't had a chance to use those bags yet, so I kind of forgot about them. Oops!
