Back in Town

The month-long absence stops here - although it was for a good reason. I went to South Africa for a family emergency in mid-June and am only now getting over the jetlag.

I hadn't been to South Africa, where my mother grew up, for six years. Returning as a 23-year-old was interesting because I felt like for the first time I was actually going to remember what I took in as I drove around Cape Town and its surrounding fishing villages and wine estates. It was also the first time I have ever seen my mother with all 3 of her brothers and sisters. It's interesting how different your parents can be when they are around the people they spent their childhoods with.

Anyways, as on the other two trips I have taken this year, I found myself missing Tel Aviv and Israel with a vengeance. Getting the flu from the rain in wintry Cape Town was probably a factor. I also enjoyed the cameraderie on the El Al flights between Tel Aviv and Johannesburg; on the way over, I forgot my phone in the airport and the guy sitting in front of me called it until someone picked it up and brought it to our gate, and on our way back I let my seatmate listen to David Rakoff hilariously describe a traumatic summer as a Canadian Jewish high schooler volunteering on a kibbutz in Israel and discover that he did not like chickens, he liked men. The Israelis on line in passport control in both directions in Johannesburg also helped me cut the line.

And yet, as I stepped out of Ben Gurion Airport at 7 AM last Friday morning, my goodwill evaporated. The hot air was so stifling it was like standing with my face over a pot of boiling soup. The train took its time arriving, ten minutes behind schedule. The bus home from the train station did the same, and by the time I staggered up the 48 steps to my apartment, laden with my bags, I was drenched and exhausted. Our apartment, which was freezing in winter, is so hot and humid my posters are falling off he walls. For the last few nights I have had to decide between sleeping in a sweatbox with the window closed, or being woken up by mosquitoes as they bite me at 5 AM.

I have heard the city is a nonstop party in the summer; if I play my cards right and go out until sunrise on weekends, then sleep during the hottest hours of the day, it could be tolerable. But for now the city is a snarling, humid, tourist-mobbed mess.