Elad’s blog

Mix a bit of Ramalla with the main street of Nazareth. add a touch of Gaza City and some Lebanese styling. What have you got? You’ve got Sydney’s unfamous suburb Lakemba.

Australians are really keen to help. I told yesterday one Aussie guy at the hostel that I was looking for a car, and he bought me a local trade newspaper (www.tradingpost.com.au), and didn’t even ask for money.
The trade newspaper has many advertisements, and some of them where to vehicle parkings at Lakemba. Together with Arik’s advice, I took this morning a train to this suburb, to see what’s there.
The minute I went off the train I figured out I’m back in the middle east. The main street is Haldoon Street; there are shops like “Hamze’s hair-dressing” (specializing with men’s hair, of course. Did you ever see the hair of a decent Arab woman? You won’t get the chance to see it in Lakemba, where Iranian fashion is the high moda). There are also some Islamic bookshops there, where they have in the front windows books in Arabic with the face of our late friend Yassin on the cover, and the memories of the Bosnian former muslim president what’s-his-name (Leon, you probably know this).
Haldoon street also has Lebanese restaurants, middle-eastern butchers, and so forth. Of course, it also has plenty of car garages over there - what do Arabs all over the world have with old cars???
I went there for some time, didn’t find anything usefull, and felt really uncomfortable with all this Arabic around me - so I took the next train back to the city without buying anything (The suburbian train network here is really efficient. I wish we had a public transportation network - both busses and trains - close to their standards).

I finally reached a decision: I don’t like Sydney. At least, not in the winter.

I found there’s a backpackers car-market at the city here. It’s good, because you get the car full of hiking stuff (tents, gas, chairs, everything you need for hiking); and the people need to sell the cars because they have flights, so they can be bargained. I’ve seen there a very nice Falcon (12 month rego, not a scratch on it, and it is owned by two English engineers who came to travel but ended up working here, so there are receipts that it made all the treatments and oil replacements on time - it looks really good). The only problem is that it has very high milage (400,000km for a car from 1987), but I think I will buy it tomorrow, if I can bargain their price and if nothing else comes up in the market.

Apart from this I moved again. I now live in a studio appartment, with no other persons. It’s a really nice place, in an Israeli building, and the appartment is really good - I could even consider hiring such an appartment in Israel.

All the other pieces also begin to fall: The bank got me my ATM card; I went to N.R.S.A. (The local car club - like MEMSI in Israel) and they gave me free road maps of all Australia - because I’m a MEMSI member; and I got the books Oded sent me - Thanks Oded!

I even started publishing that I’m looking for Lifters, I hope something will come out of it.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2005 at 10:50 and is filed under Travels, Australia East Coast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.