Car Trouble

I moved into my new apartment as mentioned below, and in the 24 hours that I have been there I've learned what trouble it is to own a car in Tel Aviv.

Parking here is HORRENDOUS.

First of all, if you don;t have a resident-sticker on your car, you are nothing. Less than nothing.

But to get one, I have to go to the ministry of the interior and change my home address in my ID card. Since they work about 3 days a week, 3 hours at a time, it's no easy feat.

In the meantime, I can;t really park anywhere, a lesson I learned the hard way, becuase in the 24 hours since I moved in, my car has been:

1. Towed
2. Ticketed for illegal parking (after I returned it from the tow-yard)
3. hit by a moving car while parked in the street, thereby denting the back bumper (sometime between the time I released it from towing and the time I discovered the parking ticket).

Lucky it's a rental from the leasing office. All of this didn;t phase, however, and I marched on like a trooper.
So this morning I decided to move the car to a free parking lot outside of town (actually about a 30 minute walk from my house) and leave it there for the day until I decide what to do, and it wasn;t until I realized that I had just locked myself out of the apartment that I started feeling things could be going a little easier.
Anyway, a few frantic phonecalls and a new lock later, I am ready to head to the beach for a Friday Afternoon swim.
I leave you with a few new pics of Tel Aviv: This is the Reading power plant in North Tel Aviv, where the Sea Port is. In the foreground is the Yarkon River. This is a really beautiful area thats been developed in the last few years.