How can I be in my late twenties and never have used an ATM?
I’m not sure what this says about my spending habits—good things I hope. But I had blithely read in all the tourist manuals when they told me to skip the airport currency exchange. They said you could get better rates at Tel Aviv ATMS and that ATMS were everywhere.
Just one problem. I’d never used an ATM. I didn’t even know where to look.
We started on the edge where smoky train stops and distant skyscrapers give way to trees, banyan and palm, fir and twenty other kinds I can‘t name. I’d booked my Airbnb on the edges to get a view so after dropping off our suitcases, we started walking through the city looking for the promised ATM. The center barriers on all the roads are planted with orange trees, the in-season fruit brightly clustered on the top branches. Glowing in the evening sun, the citrus is so tempting I am contemplating the risk of death by traffic to go pluck them until I walk another block and find that the streets stalls are pilled high with oranges, pomegranate and every other kind of fruit.
Every tiny storefront is filled with whole ingredients, eggplant and peppers, not things to eat but things to cook. Only the two or three tiny gas stations sell things in wrappers, mostly cigarettes. The curbs are pen stripped alternating pink and yellow and the air is alternating zones of overwhelming car exhaust and fresh bread.
People on the street flow around me like I am a cement marker, women with waterfalls of hair and shining leather boots, men with jawlines so sharp they could cut an orange. The angular buildings and angular coats over angular silhouettes. Everyone seems to wear full Tel Aviv fashion and I — wearing multi-purpose clothing carefully chosen for hiking in Negev deserts and Galilee shores—feel like a badly packed duffel bag with legs.
I head toward the business district passing middle aged bikers with grooved faces the soldiers ever present kaki uniforms that ride an indefinable line between not quite green and not quite brown. They stand listening to earphones, hauling backpacks, occasionally automatic guns more than half their height. There are skinny girls in tight leggings, stout girls in the IDF knitted sweaters. I do see one advantage to Israels’ mandatory draft including women—at least army uniforms have decent size pockets! And for what you can’t fit in a pocket, an ancient security guard stands inside every mall door to pat down your backpack. His shirt the only really white thing I have yet seen. Insisting that he speaks no English, he vividly pantomimes to me that I should stop in the music store next door.
Beautiful instruments. No ATM.
The Bauhaus style of mostly apartment buildings pop out of the greenery, plaster stacks of flapjacks. In geometrically ovaled balconies; I recognize the patterns from my history books. Flush with architects expelled from Europe, heady on the modern construction techniques that replaced stone with cement and arches with rebar, Tel Aviv sprung straight out of sand and swamps in swathes of angles, curves and flat jointless faces now chipping paint in a constant construction dandruff. I wonder if it is the sun or salt or the wind that causes the constant peeling.
Looking down at those balconies the flat faces burst into a hodgepodge texture of solar panels and gas tanks on every roof. Vines, grass and graffiti in three languages grow up the off sides of the buildings. Fading blue and white flags with torn hems drape against rusting window grills above piles of leaves and recycling in plastic bags barely pushed off the street.
We head over a crosswalk into the glass valleys of the banking district where yellow construction cranes nest on top. Actually, we cross this same crosswalk three times, trying to find the right side of the street. All around us, eight-wheeled busses clatter and four-wheeled cars bleat as drivers talk to each other with their horns. There is whiz of two wheels on motorcycles, bikes and new-to-me powered scooters, lime green with single white lights like luminous lures in front and tiny red flashers like lightening bug tails on the back. Occasionally men swoop by on strange single wheeled skateboards. And everything is fast—I keep praying my obituary will not read “flattened by Tel Aviv bicycle.”
Between the larger buildings flat squares separated by layers of steps finally open up to ATM. After far longer than I would care to admit, I figure out the mix of button pushing to release a color palette of Israeli cash.
We walk back to bird song—yellow beaks and black backs and green tails (my description not the technical terminology). And there are parakeets! Vivid greens that flash around and signal me to go go go.
