Tuesday, February 15, 2011

The Real Landlord

Tuesday, the 15th of Feb.

Today I was going to get up early and go to one of the museums, but I slept-in instead.  Turns out to be a real blessing because while I was bumming around the apartment there was a knock on my door.  I open it to find two men, one of whom I recognized as the building supervisor, standing there.  The other man, after learning I didn’t speak Hebrew, identifies himself as the building owner.  Turns out that the guy that’s subletting to me had told the landlord he would be subletting but never let the landlord know that I had actually moved in and he was just coming by to check.  (I suspect that the real purpose of the visit was to figure out how much they’re charging me, since there is a premium charged to foreigners for short term, furnished leases, and see if he could squeeze some of that from the original tenet.)

We had a really great chat and now I have his cell phone number in case anything breaks I can call him directly.  He’s another lawyer actually.  This is getting eerie how many I’m meeting.

After we had talked all about the apartment and the business side of things we just started chatting.  He asked where I was from and I told him Alabama in the United States.  His response was one of my all time favorite reactions: "Alabama!  Ah a real American!" Why yes sir, I do happen to think that Alabama is the real America.  Our state encapsulates everything that’s great about our great country thank you very much.  Haha it was awesome.

Today on my daily run I realized that one of the reasons the real estate is abandoned on the beach is it is the sight of the Dolphinarium bombing.  In fact, I finally found the memorial at the club.  It’s really unobtrusive and doesn’t say anything in English on the front, which is unusual, instead you have to go to the back of the memorial to find the explanation.

Speaking of my run.  It was absolutely brutal today.  I went jogging during a storm, which was not my best idea, but it came out of nowhere and I wasn’t about to quit.  I compounded that mistake by jogging the first four miles of an out-and-back with the wind.  This of course meant that the last four miles of the run were into a 20 MPH head-wind.  It was wild.  I had to put my sunglasses on (despite the fact it was cloudy and raining) because the sand was stinging my eyes so badly.  I hope I never, ever, run in a 20 MPH headwind again.  Then again, you know I was loving every second of it.  When else in my life am I going to get to run on a Mediterranean beach in a storm?  Haha it’s awesome.

[Update: I went back several days later to jog again and the eight foot wide path I had run on during the storm was in places completely covered by as much as 3 or 4 inches of sand.  You would not have even known there was a path at all.  Wild.] 

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