Sometimes it’s just nice to have a day off. Enough of the politics and looking behind the curtain and talking to people about what they really think about life here. Let’s just have a day off. So, we do.
Lovely Ruth and her house guest (that’s me) headed off for a day playing tourist in Acre. Or Akko. Same place, just depends what map you look at.
Right up the coast, past Haifa, Akko is a historic port, all old city and fortified walls. It’s probably full of churches we should go to and ancient monuments we should see and there are probably pages and pages of “Things to do and see” in that nice Lonely Planet book My Fine Wife gave me just before I left home.
Well, the things to do that we did included sitting in a waterfront café, sitting in a waterfront restaurant where they did some great hummus with za’atar, sitting in another waterfront café and getting a speedboat ride around the bay. I can’t remember if we then found another waterfront café. To be honest, it’s entirely possible.
Akko was lovely.
Later that night, we took a ride to the beach at Netanya – a place name I remembered because my parents went on holiday there a couple of times. A beach resort near Ruth’s, just up the coast from Tel Aviv, there’s not a lot to see apart from Ruth’s hairdressers and a jumping beachfront bar. We swerved the hairdressers and spent the night at the bar. The air was warm, the sea looked lovely, the music was bought-by-the-yard bar techno. Lots of boxes ticked. And they served cold beer, red wine and hummus.
As they say in the old country, what’s not to like?