Tel Aviv has been a city of settling in, both into the backpacking lifestyle and the Israeli one.. I truly became a backpacker when I checked out of my private room with Zac and into Ha'yarkon 48, the backpacking lodge right on the beach where everyone stays, and everyone gets robbed. We watched our valuable goodies like a hawk, and managed to leave with all our possessions intact, which kind of made me feel like less of a backpacker, but anyways. On a side note, I was feeling a bit down when we checked in, I was confusing feeling jetlagged with feeling that I wasn't having fun. So I shaved my hair off. As you do. And then I felt much better :) There were some crazy characters at Ha'yarkon 48, my favorite of which was the Dutchman George, who asked us "what room are you staying in? I'm going to rape you tonight. Haha!" in a way which left us unsure whether he was serious or joking. There were also our American roommates who went out with us for the 4th of July. The American bar was lame, and we ended up roaming the streets. We passed this British pub, which Zac and I had wanted to enter, but which has a sign saying "over 21s or see Scott". Needless to say, we saw Scott, and enjoyed a good game of pool with the only Russian guy, nay, the only guy, in the pub. Another aspect of backpacking lifestyle I had to acclimatise to was budgeting my food. We soon discovered that as cheap as shwarma is, vegetables and hummus is cheaper, and for $2.74 a person we were fed like vegetarian kings! To top off my descent into bohemian backpacking lifestyle, my feet began to deteriorate from uncomfortable sandals and way too much walking (hence the cover photo). Tel aviv was also my introduction to Israeli culture, and led to a personal game I call 'Wah': as I was walking down the street my first morning in tel aviv a oldish man was walking the other way. I didn't notice him. As he passed me he turns to me, and shouts "wah!!!" in my ear sharply and then keeps walking. It gave me the most gigantic fright but was a lovely experience which I then bestowed to the rest of the tel aviv population during my time there. There was also a bit of a language barrier. I often angered the volatile Israelis without knowing why, leading to a pile of angry Hebrew. Saying "no hebrew" got a bit old though, so I decided to just reply "Ananas" (hebrew for pineapple) to confuse them into silence, and keep walking. For me Israeli culture came to mean the gentle plink plonk of beach bats in the morning, and the not so gentle "bwooow chikachikachikachikachika" of the filthy dubstep (a genre of music for my more senior readers) at night. It came to mean the dude in Jaffa who sold random car keys that don't open anything (or do they?) and bits of string and unusable undecipherable coins. He turned out to speak 12 languages. So yeh. Pretty funky place. On a sidenote, I finally found something to collect - the boys I'm traveling with are collecting something in every country, shotglasses, magnets, stuff like that. It wasn't until 2 days after I purchased a week membership at Holmes Place gym that it hit me. Gym membership cards!! So we'll see how I go. Wah!!