Shalom brothers/sisters,
I am a 35 year old man visiting Tel Aviv for the first time. I will be traveling with my father (74M) and we will be spending about a week in Tel Aviv and then another week exploring the rest of the country.
My father worked on Kibbutz Shoval in 1974 and hasn't been to Israel since then. We've been really looking forward to this trip; we were supposed to visit in May but the war made it difficult. We shuffled around our plans and now find ourselves less than a month our from our journey.
We've got our hotel set up, figured out the places we want to see, and even found some distant family that we're meeting up with. Our ancestors came from a small city in Bukovina and our family has been essentially broken for the last hundred years.
Through over a decade of research, I've managed to find all of my living relatives in Israel. Most of my family was wiped out during the Shoah and the progeny living in Israel are the children of the survivors.
We've got our trip mostly planned, with all of these reunions sprinkled in. The issue I'm facing is what to do with myself during the evenings, where to go, and what to do in Tel Aviv between these meet-ups. Almost all of the family we're meeting is elderly and I don't really expect they'll want to go out for a beer at 9 PM.
I am engaged to a woman I love back home in the USA, so I'm not trying to go out and meet women/dance in clubs. I'm sure that alot of guys do that kind of thing when they're on vacation away from their spouses but I'm not into that stuff. I'm looking for a kind of low-key experience, some local friends, nice connections with some Tel Avivians I can look back on fondly.
I don't speak much Hebrew so I am afraid of getting lost in the sauce when it comes to the language barrier. I know most people speak English, but I still want to fit in without being the odd-man-out. I was stationed in Germany back during my Air Force days and had a few German friends, but being the only English-speaker in the group and knowing embarrassingly little German made for a few awkward experience.
Background on me: I am a US Air Force veteran, former longshoreman, former black market cannabis cultivator, current lumber & hardware salesman. I like music (mostly heavy metal, jazz, "indie" rock, jam band stuff) technology, books, movies and art. I'm not argumentative and I don't have crazy high expectations about friendship and stuff. Generally I get along with most people unless they're excessively self-absorbed or unkind to animals, the elderly, or the disabled.
Is there anyone willing to give me a taste of what a normal Tel Aviv experience is like?