Our apartment is located on a tree-lined street less than 50 yards off a main thoroughfare. From our front and back balconies we see buildings of all types. This is typical of Tel Aviv, old and new. Israelis have not traditionally invested as much effort in maintaining building exteriors. You often find luxurious apartments inside of shabby looking buildings with peeling stuco and water stains from air-conditioning condensate. Our building, with its five apartments, is renovated and more appealing than some of the neighbors'.
We live in about 900 square feet, including the two small balconies. It’s small but adequate, and we’re in a part of the city that we love. We have a ten minute walk to the beach, and we can walk to almost anything, including supermarkets (nothing like American style Safeway or Kroger stores), green grocers, bakeries, cafes, bike shops, and a shopping mall. One of our three bedrooms is a reinforced shelter called a mamad. More on that in a future post.
A Modern Western-style Country
From the media coverage of Israel, some may assume the country is still a developing country, dotted with ramshackle villages and ancient ruins. Yes, there are villages, and there are many interesting archaeological sites, but Israel’s cities are modern metropolises, including its three major urban centers, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. We live in Tel Aviv, which combines a modern skyline of tall high rises with neighborhood streets lined with stockier four to six story apartment buildings, some of which house cafes, grocery stores, clothing boutiques, electronics outlets, optometrists, and all kinds of other businesses at street level.
Arrival in Israel
We arrived in Israel on July 8th, 2025. It had taken a year of paperwork to complete our application to immigrate. We arrived on a flight with about 50 other new immigrants and completed most of our processing at Ben Gurion Airport (TLV), just outside Tel Aviv.
We thought that Nancy’s Israeli citizenship was still valid from when she made Aliyah in the 1980s, but the Ministry of Immigration disagreed and decided to classify her not as a returning citizen, but as a new citizen due to her nearly 40 year absence – other than many vacation visits. Fortunately, after navigating the bureaucracy for several months that’s all straightened out, and Nancy and I are now both dual citizens of the United States and Israel.
