Hey travelers!!
After turning in my thesis, I was so psychically so frustrated that I had to go somewhere to switch my brain off for a few days. To tell the truth, I was frustrated a week before I turned in the thesis, so at that time, I bought flight tickets for myself and my loyal travel partner – my mom – to Israel. We were supposed to leave two days after turning in that damn thing. On the day of our departure, we didn’t have a clue what we were gonna do because of the current safety situation in the country, so we booked just one night in Tel Aviv, where we were supposed to arrive. You can imagine how chaotic everything was.
Eventually, it turned out to be something incredible. I actually have the impression that the trips, which are 100% spontaneous and not planned at all, are the best ones because you don’t have time to make any idea of how everything will look like so you don’t have any prejudices.
Let’s start from the beginning. Our flight was from Wroclaw, Poland, with Ryanair, which was so much cheaper than from Prague. A ticket from Prague was around 9000 CZK, and from Poland about 2000 CZK. It’s a pain in the ass to get from Prague to Wroclaw, but I can use the difference in the price to buy two pairs of shoes, so there was nothing to discuss, haha:)
We arrived in Tel Aviv on Saturday, which was the first mistake. We knew about Shabbat but we didn’t know to which extent they stuck to it in Tel Aviv. Well, we found out pretty soon after our arrival. On Shabbat, there is no public transport and pretty much everything is closed. The only way how to move around Israel is the overpriced taxi. There was nothing else to do but to get a cab for about 1000 CZK (the hotel was about 10 km from the airport, nothing crazy, but the cab rates are higher during Shabbat and they also charge for suitcases and the number of people in it – I mean in the cab, not in the suitcase, haha.
The hotel was named Golden Beach and was right on the beach (the first and second photo is taken from the balcony, awesome view, right?). This hotel doesn’t have a good rating on booking.com, but has probably been recently renovated, so it was actually really great. I mean, it’s not Sheraton obviously, but we always leave the room in the morning and get back when it’s already dark, so a fancy hotel with five-star wellness is a waste of money for us. What is important for us is a good location, from where you can go anywhere. We don’t usually use any public transport, we always walk wherever we can. Great cardio, by the way.
Anyways, when we got to our hotel, we just changed and hit the beach. It was too hot to explore the city. I mean, it was about 40°C. So in the afternoon, we checked out Jaffa, the old town of Tel Aviv and made it all the way to a hill with gardens called Gan HaPisga from which you could see the whole city.
After sunset, we turned around and when we got to the hotel, we started to plan the rest of the trip. We thought we’d rent a car the next day and drive to the North of Israel. But we found out that there was another public holiday on Sunday and that all car rentals were closed again. So we didn’t have another option than to spend another day in Tel Aviv, this time exploring the new city. We checked out the White City, which is full of “bauhaus” architecture; skyscraper area and also the Opera and museum of Arts.
On Monday morning we finally managed to rent a car, so a few minutes after 8AM, we were already on our way to the North, but more about that next time! 🙂
E.