(TBT Throw Back Thursday). In 1973 I rented a room at Rehov Melchett in Tel Aviv at Margalits flat (Margalit is in the picture above). The flat was situated real centrally in Tel Aviv, on the fourth floor, no elevator. Her room had green walls and darkblue ceiling. (If you can read Hebrew, disregard what the paper says, she was not).
This is the hallway when you entered the flat. My room was inside where the sliding door is. The walls in the hallway were orange on one side and yellow on the other three sides. My room thankfully had white walls. The poster on the wall with all the fruit was mine, and the handmade thing in the doorway (which led to the kitchen and the bathroom) was made by me of ropes once when I was bored.
Inside my room. It was tiny. The width was the length of the bed (which was very narrow). It also contained that small bookcase and a wardrobe for my cloths. It had a small window rather high up on the wall. That was it. I think I had a tiny pallet beside the bed as a nighttable too. The curtain in blue and white to the right covered the sliding door which had glass-windows.
This is part of the kitchen. Orange and yellow… Marble worktops. It had a tiny balcony where you put your gas-containers. It had a fridge which we shared. The tray in the picture was mine (from Marimekko).
This is where I worked, at Albany Travel, a then South African owned travel agency that is no more (it later became British owned). I was upstairs in the office managing bookings for our scandinavian clients. Don’t remember the name of the girl there but she worked in the shop. I worked there from September 1971 until August 1974.
Renting a room or sharing a flat were the only options with the low salaries we had. I lived in this flat during the October war/Yom Kippur War. Remember vividly the outbreak of the war (I was on the balcony of the kitchen when the sirens went off and Margalit was in Ashquelon at her parents for the holiday), the huge US planes (B-something) that flew right over us at nights bringing all kinds of stuff, the sirens in the middle of the night and running downstairs until signal was that it was nothing to fear any longer (we did not have a bomb shelter in the house), the blackouts.
I lived in Margalits flat for about a year, then moved to another shared flat. I have no idea what the life of Margalit turned into. We didn’t have all that much in common so we didn’t keep in touch. She had no phone. There were no computers. And there definitely was no FaceBook. Keeping in touch is much easier today.
All the photos are mine and were scanned from slides in really bad condition.
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