1. Yad Eliyahu skater park
For a decade we have been living in the attractive and cute Yad Eliyahu neighborhood which, if you didn’t know, is also a skater powerhouse. As taxi drivers always bother to remind me with nostalgic glee – “Galit Park” or as I prefer to call it “the skate park” near the Menorah-Mvathim Hall – there was once in the sixties a legendary municipal swimming pool with nightly movie screenings, water polo games and zamots. Today there is, as mentioned, a fancy skater park that is considered to be the largest and most sophisticated that was established in Israel – Mind U. At first I was skeptical about this park which in its peak hours is filled with nineties music, engine oil smells, youth sweat, oxy, first cigarettes and teenagers with what seemed to me at the time to be creative suicidal tendencies. However, since the generous park also has playgrounds, bike paths, a playground and ornamental gardens, I started spending time there with my nieces when they came to visit, and I quickly fell in love. Today I take female and male writing students to hangout, tight talk and writing exercises out there, and in general it is my favorite place in the neighborhood for reflection. I stare at the determined and cool stunts of the skaters and immediately forget about myself, and in the good moments, out of the holy void – inspiration also emerges.
Galit Park in Yad Eliyahu
2. Nona coffee
We’re in the middle of a long working holiday in Berlin right now – what’s called a Workation – and I envy Europeans for the urban history that drips by the pound from every building in the city. Starting with the more than 100-year-old palace-theatre aka “Friedrichstadt-Palast” which still maintains a glittering tradition of German cabaret, and ending with Berlin’s oldest water tower in the Prenslauer Berg neighborhood, whose construction was completed in 1877. For comparison, with us, when the brasserie closed after almost 20 years of activity, it was a day of municipal mourning. It’s not that I used to frequent the place every Monday and Thursday, absolutely not. And yet, it was a Tel Aviv institution that accompanied me over the years. We don’t have such masses in dynamic and frequently changing Tel Aviv, and maybe that’s why I remain faithful to the old and good Cafe Nona on Ibn Gvirol Street. It is not a sensational cafe by any means, but it is solid and reliable – you always know what to expect, in a simple, effective and stable section. When I was 17 and a half-18 years old, a friend and I would take a “walk” from her house in the L neighborhood to Nona and then sit down there and eat an egg baked in the oven, which in the early 2000s was super exciting for us. Later, after the first kiss with my lover almost 12 years ago, I ate a baked egg there with feta and spinach and he baked an egg with tomatoes and basil, as I thought. Later I lived on Rosenbaum Street in a rented apartment and that’s where I used to sit when I went through the proofreading of my first book and when I translated “Everything in Panucho” into Silverstein’s. To this day when I need some time to work, without too many literary barangays around, I often find myself going to Nona Instinct. The fact that these classic dishes are still available – although not exactly at the same price, but roughly – always makes me feel good.
3. Beit Ariela library
Now the motto of Beit Ariela, like their slogan, is “making a different culture” and last year it was “the house of the written word”. As far as I understand, the two slogans are a stamp in Poni and, one way or another, Beit Ariela is undoubtedly my literary-spiritual home in the city from the beginning of Dana to this day. On 8.11 I will conduct the writing workshop I created especially for them: “Poetic Confetti” there. This will be an eclectic writing workshop whose purpose is to break down barriers and stimulate a desire to create in language, and the fourth in a row that I am giving there. It’s always a pure pleasure! By the way, since their amazing upgrade and renovation, Beit Ariela has become more relevant than ever and has also become one of the most pleasant and chill places to perform in the city. One of the upcoming performances that I am most looking forward to will actually not take place in Tel Aviv but at the festival of poets and poets in Metula 2022 which will take place on September 8-10. As part of the festival, I will receive the “Spring Prize for Poetry” alongside and together with the poet, poetry critic, friend and literary editor (also mine) Eli Hirsch, and I am very excited.
They will not mess with slogans. Ariela House Library (Photo: Meir Shapira)
4. Frishman Beach in Wacha Gordon
2021 was the year I officially learned to enjoy the sea and became addicted. We’re probably not original about this, but last summer when we lay in the sea, ate mangoes, saw the sunset and walked the boardwalk at least once a week and Frishman Buache Gordon became our regular spot because of the perfect beach and the ideal location of the lockers for depositing the cell phone and wallet. What was new was the fact that in the evenings the boardwalk is bursting with young and intriguing musicians, and I even discovered two creators that way, whose music I’ve been following on Instagram ever since gigging on the boardwalk. In short, a very high score and dreamy weather. Nothing falls short of Arcadia beach in Odessa – a beach that was last year’s eve, before the bloody war in Ukraine – that we ran on, after I participated in an international poetry festival in Chernivtsi. A suggestion for improvement to the Tel Aviv municipality: just eliminate the last sex shop on Allenby in the entrances to the sea and then everything will be classy with zero effort!
Just a little clean up in Allenby and you’re all set. Frishman Beach (Photo: Uri Eshat)
5. Kiryat the craft
The studio of the artist Elad Rosen (my partner in life) is in Kiryat Malaka. It is about a bright studio full of greed, huge and expressive colorful paintings and tribal, dramatic and super style ceramic sculptures made by his own hands. This is my favorite refuge in the city and so is the whole area. Between Beit Binyamini and the Artport Art Center and the Rosenfeld Gallery and the Space for Art Gallery and the Bezalel Contemporary Art Gallery on Herzl Street where the graduate exhibitions of the master’s degree are also presented and between A La Rampa and Dede’s graffiti and the spray-sprayed poetry fragments of Nitzan Mintz I feel a voice like a cat.
This also happens in Kiryat Melacha. Work of Elad Rosen