"Your city - your story" from Marina and Nathan

Katrin's book is full!

Last week I invited my friend Nathan to meet in Tel Aviv and to try to fill our entries.

As we do some sketching projects together, Nathan and I meet very often, almost always in Tel Aviv, so my story of Tel Aviv naturally includes... Nathan ;)

We started our meeting with a good plate of humus, sitting at on of the corners of the HaCarmel Market in Tel Aviv.

 Here I captured one of the streets near the market, were you can still meet old professions, like this shoemaker, repairing shoes and bags on the street:

 Here are Nathan's entries, he sketched... me! eating the humus ;)

 and another character from the same street - the barber taking a rest and drinking some coffee.

The sketchbook is coming with me to Manchester, where I'm going to give it to Omar.

Flea market in Berlin

Yesterday I visited the flea market in Straße des 17. Juni in Berlin-Tiergarten. It was a hot sunday and I was glad to find a place in the shadow. The flea market is the largest and oldest one in Berlin and well known by tourists. So it's more expensive than the small markets. You can find some beautiful antiques here. When I was a child, here I have bought a small peacock of glass. I loved small animals of porcelain and glass.

"Your city - your story" Aurore in Jaffa

Here is my participation for Katrin Merle's sketchbook !

About specificity of city furnitures, one is the street lamps which design change according to the area of Tel Aviv… In North Tel Aviv street lamps look like snakes overlooking the people passing by…But I live in south Tel Aviv, in Jaffa : you may see different one in the port (first sketch) and in the old city… (second one). Here you'll find the old white stones they used to build with, coming from the Judea mountains around Jerusalem. Of course they don't use them anymore, but they try to respect the color when they renovate old building.

A bit of history about Jaffa (arabic) or Yafo (hebrew), meaning "The beauty" !
Jaffa was one of the main and oldest port in the history, more or less 3500 years old. This old lady was one of the main passage for business between the west and the East and Egyptian mentioned her in their papyrus. It's also present in the Old Testament telling the story of Jonas that takes place in Jaffa…

Many people passed by such as egyptians, vespasian, crusaders, ottoman empire, Napoleon's army, arabs, british… etc. and conquered Jaffa that has a long and bloody story that I'm not going to developp here more… The old city was destroyed few times (… earthquake, second world war) and rebuilt in the sixties, while the city hall of Tel Aviv planned to erase everything and came with buldozers (!) they just in time changed their mind and renovated this place that was the perfect location for dealers and all kind of "small business". Tel Aviv started being a neighboorhood of Jaffa and finally grew, grew grew… until Jaffa became the ancient part of Tel Aviv !!!

It's now beautiful again and tourists love this place almost as much as I do… I have my studio / gallery in the middle, I live nearby and this is one a the few places in Israel where Muslims arabs, Christian arabs and Jewish are living together, so it not rare to hear the calls for prayers at same time from churches, mosques and temples !

The port of Jaffa (sea behind my back)

Entry of the Old Jaffa part from the city, going in the direction of the port…
Behind my back the area of the flea market, you have discovered in my own sketchbook