Israeli anecdote.

Anyone who knows me will know my Hebrew's approximate, I need people to articulate and speak slowly to me if they want to be some hope that I will understand. But people who don't know me like for example complete strangers in the streets, don't. So every time I start what I think is gonna be a fairly easy conversation like ask for direction in Hebrew or basic info, it often results in me getting the first couple of sentences and then wondering what that huge monologue is for.

So I was coming back from Efrat, a settlement in the West Bank where I did an interview. First I had to go back to Jerusalem and take a bus Tel Aviv as there were no more directs to Holon at this time of the night. I arrive in Tel Aviv at the Central Bus Station and get out on Levinsky street where my next bus' stop is. Of course Levinsky is a big street so I ask a man where the 89 to Holon stops. He tells me that it's not here and that I need to go back inside the station and that he will take me. Then of course he continues talking to me whle he gently takes my arm and walks me inside the station, back to the top floor, back to the info stand. Meanwhile the only thing I understand and that I'm able to respond to with a shy "Todah" (Thanks) is that I'm a nice sweet girl -of course how that man knows this I don't know because he has barely met me and I'm not nice, I'm very mean.

We're back at the info stand on the top floor and he explains to the very annoyed looking woman that this young girl here needs to go to Holon. She begins saying that I have to go back outside but her answer isn't satisfying for him so he insists and she writes down that I have to take the 201 leaving from platform 636 and then at the entrance of the city change for another bus.

I'm half panicking by then because I know my bus stops right outside the bus station and all I wanted to know was what level of the street I needed to go to... So we leave that lady and we arrive at platform 636 and he drags me in the bus and asks the driver if he's going to Holon to which the driver replies that he's only stopping at the entrance of the city but isn't going in. So unnamed man sits me down and before I have time to think about what is going on, I take out my purse and a person on the bus tells me the man has already paid for me. I want to pay him back, I insist but he leaves me there.

So at the second stop when I see "89" written on the bus stop I immediately jumped out. But this was so sweet of this man, completely out of the blue and even if it was the wrong bus I completely appreciate the gesture.

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