Let’s Take a Tour, Shall We?

Here we have a lovely eight-bedroom – yes, eight-bedroom – home in the heart of Kiryat Shalom, a quiet, somewhat religious neighborhood in the south of Tel Aviv.

As we enter the apartment, you will see a hallway that leads to one bathroom, with two washing machines conveniently located on either side of the hallway, one facing the living room, so you never have to walk far to do laundry.

Turn to your left, and you will enter the living room.

The space may look plain, but it is easily renovated – the couches, for example, have recently been upgraded with matching covers, and the table has moved around the room several times.

Let’s cross the room and take a look out on the balcony.

Step out onto the balcony and you will get a lovely view of the surrounding neighborhood.

Now let’s turn and walk back across the living room to take a look into my room, shall we?

Don’t mind the mess, it’ll probably be like that until June.

The small size is untypical of the rest of the apartment, though it’s not a bomb-shelter, as one of the other rooms are, so it’s got that going for it. Actually, it’s really rather cozy, but the windows face the street, so every morning I am awakened at 6am by the sounds of the shop right beneath us opening up.

It only looks cluttered because I didn’t have enough places to put things – only a dresser and a shelf with hangers underneath – but I received another set of stacking shelves yesterday (there’s one guy who’s job it is to fix things in our apartment and get us furniture or dishes or whatever else if we need it) so the clutter should clear up a bit.

Let’s leave my room and go back through the living room

and check out the bathroom

Yes, that’s the shower next to the toilet. Because how many times have you been in the shower and suddenly thought, “man, I really need to use the toilet, but I don’t want to get out and walk all the way across the room”? Plenty, I’ll bet. Remember to squeegee the floors after showering!

Now we’ll take a walk past the door to nowhere

(because what apartment doesn’t need more doors?)

into the kitchen

There’s usually a lot more crap on the table – between nine people, a lot of stuff is generated. At some point I’ll take a picture of the fridge so you can understand why we had to ask for a second one.

Behind you

you’ll find more shelves packed with food, as well as two more bedrooms.

Next to the kitchen we have another bathroom

and then off to another bedroom/bomb shelter

On the plus side, it’s pretty sound-proof, which is good when you’re living with eight other people, and it’s also pretty big. On the down side, it’s a bomb shelter. No, really. Last week our power went out around midnight (“a power-cut in the neighborhood.” No idea if that’s typical or not) but this room’s light stayed on – and would not turn off until the rest of the power was back on, because the bomb shelter light needs to always be on. It seems like most houses and buildings around here are built with them; at some point we’ll take a tour of the Jaffa house, where other people from the group live, and you’ll see their bomb shelter which looks way more intense than ours.

Now let’s head upstairs. Mind the mattress!

At the top of the stairs you’ll find two more bedrooms and another kitchen and bathroom, none of which I’m going to show you because I’m lazy and this has taken me days to finish with my internet working so slowly (noticed I dropped the real estate agent routine a while back there? yeah, that got pretty old pretty fast)

No, we’re just going to skip to the best stuff now

The roof deck! The kick-ass roof deck that gets even better, you’ll see in a moment, as it wraps all the way around

Oh yes, it is that nice. It has some quirks, as does the rest of this house, like

the bathtub (we’re thinking of putting some dirt in there and trying to grow plants) and

the cow skull. No idea where it came from, but it’s there.

The views of the neighborhood and North Tel Aviv are fab

A view of the balcony from the roof

And here we end our tour. Watch your step on your way back down the stairs

Thanks for stopping by! Come by again and we’ll take a tour of the neighborhood and maybe the beach.

Later!