Kibbutz Office – Tel Aviv (Day One)

The bus dropped us and our baggage on the right street and with a minimum of fuss, we found the right place and the sign on the door which said opening hours 08:30 to 16:00.  Great, well we only had three hours to kill until opening time.  But wait, what is that just across the road from the Office, down the steps across another road and yep you have guessed it, Tel Aviv beach.
Now somewhere you would have thought that someone would have had the common decency to put up a warning sign.  They are very quick with their ‘no litter’, ‘no walking dogs off the lead’, and their ‘no swimming when the red flag is flying’, but nowhere is there a sign that says ‘Beware of the Wrinklies.’
If you intend to beat a path to Tel Aviv beach first thing in the morning consider yourself warned.  All over the beach, you will find groups of swim suited individuals, average age between 60 and 80, taking part in physical exercise.  It was like Baywatch collides with Tai Chi on Bad Acid. Now don’t get me wrong I have nothing against the ageing community anywhere, but to have walked into that sight totally unprepared was, to say the least, an eye-opener, and at worse, a breakfast loser.  I did feel sorry for the guys who had obviously spent the night in one of the beach cabana’s and were waking up with hangovers to that sight, at least we were still drunk.
We were lucky enough to find a stretch of beach that was largely deserted and sat ourselves down to wait.
Over the years I have read plenty of accounts from people of their first morning in Israel and how they sat on the beach and watched the sunrise, usually with an accompanying YouTube video of the song they associate with the experience.  I honestly cannot remember that kind of detail.  Checking up with Dingo, he seemed to recall that we sat and drank some of our duty-free scotch and played some songs on the guitars. That may have been a contributing factor to the apparent emptiness of the beach around us.  After a night-flight of no sleep and too much alcohol, I am sure we were not in the best condition to be tuneful. (Not that we ever really were).
Time passed quickly and the hour approached so we saddled up and beat a hasty retreat to the Office.
There seemed to be little or no science in the allocation of places or kibbutzim.  We were shown a map of the country and asked where we wanted to go.  We waved in the general area south of Tel Aviv. Dingo had spent several months the previous summer on the countries northern border with Lebanon. So rather than return to his old stomping ground, we decided to try somewhere new. The staff were helpful, lists were consulted, computer keys were tapped and phone calls made. Eventually, a smiling face informed us we were going to Erez.
Where?
Nowadays anybody who follows events in the Middle East in any detail will probably be familiar with the name Erez.  It has been the scene of suicide bomb attacks and peace talks but back then it was completely unknown outside of Israel.  There was the northern border checkpoint, The Erez Checkpoint into the Gaza strip and lying just across the road the relatively small Kibbutz of Erez.  Dwarfed by its more famous neighbour, Yad Mordechai, where the Israeli Army had halted the Egyptian advance in 1967, Erez had been founded shortly after 1948 by a group of pioneers who had broken away from the control of one of the other neighbouring Kibbutzim. Back then in the days before the first intifada started, we had to ask directions.
“Take the Number 300 bus to Ashkelon from the Central Bus station and change to a local bus when you get there.”
Fine, we said, anybody, know the Hebrew for ‘Central Bus Station’?  Someone uttered something that sounded like “Tahane Meer Ha Kazit.” We had to write that down as we would never remember it, and at this point, we were unaware of the fact that most signs at bus stops are in Hebrew which we couldn’t read on the one side and in English on the other.  Guess what the sign on the bus stop outside the Kibbutz reps office said, Yep, “Central Bus Station”.
The Airport Bus we had caught into downtown also serves all the major hotels which line up along the seafront to the north of where the kibbutz reps’ office was situated so on the way in we had avoided the chaos of the Central Bus Station.
We were in for a shock.