This place never ceases to surprise, a quick walk to the Israel museum today offered the melodic tunes of a dreadlocked hippie wielding an oboe and content busking in the eerie darkness of graffiti stained street tunnel. Further into the park separating my apartment from the museum a folk group are pitched in a circle and strum out some Hebrew tunes before breaking into some La bamba complete with skipping and clapping. As a jogger runs past I find myself holding back a shudder as all this is entirely too wholesome for me.

Haha na it's a great place to be living and really is a world away from what you see in the media back home. This park has some diversity though. There's a skin headed guy in dark sun glasses who stays in a tent and practices some kind of martial arts within the space of three closely spaced pine trees. He goes at them with some kind of wooden batons like Bruce Lee on one of those wooden Kung fu mannequins and has worn big grooves in the trunks but for some reason no one seems to move him on… There are crowds of non descript park goers too, all out for a good time. Reading books, cycling, walking the dogs, playing instruments, picnicking, strange to say but more civil and utilized than Adelaide's parks, due to the scarcity of greenspace here I guess.

Anyway I got to the museum and found out it's the 50 year anniversary next week with free admission so I thought I'd b***** it off for today and save some dollars. Instead I tracked down the nearby Jerusalem Bible Lands Museum which thankfully, rather than having any particular religious affiliation contains an awesome collection of artifacts and factual information from across the regions covered in the bible and other religious texts. From early man moving from the hunter gatherer period to early agrarian into the various empires and occupations of the bible era up until around a thousand years ago. With explainations on the rises, falls and overlaps in geography from the Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Anatolia, mesopotamia, Isreal region, Sinai, Arabia, Iran and a special exhibition of rarely displayed artifacts from the Babylonian era.

Really interesting stuff and I have to get a replica of one of the Neolithic cylinder seals (checkout the photo) used for identification and record keeping in those early years. One of these on display within the museum, is a cleverly carved bird of prey that when pressed into clay or wax leaves a completely different image of two centipedes and a snake, M.C Escher would have loved it.

I am heading off to see a Hydroponic farm on a large inner city shopping centre rooftop tomorrow (the conceptual stuff I used to cover with my students now in the flesh).

So I'll double it up with my last trip and next time I'll fill you in about the one and only Tel Aviv.