[Steve Winwood, "Still in the Game"]

It seldom rains in Tel Aviv, but there were some drops I didn't quite dodge on the short walk I took after seeing the BYM off to TLV. On my way back to the hotel, I passed a wall covered in barbed wire on a block just east of Ben Yehuda and Trumpledor. Someone had taken the time to weave into the wire a number of candy-cane-striped plastic bags to form foot-high letters that spelled out, "All I want is to be loved."

Further west, facing the Mediterranean sea, on the corner of a beige stone building, someone had scrawled, "Shame on maniacs," with a Star of David dangling off the lower right corner of their message.

A hotel near where I'm staying has part of its pink facade covered in a glittery glaze. My camera is not capable of capturing the happy sparkliness that lights up its corner of the mellow city night (it's on one of the quieter streets of Tel Aviv - quieter, that is, in comparison with thoroughfares such as Dizengoff and Allenbi and Hamelekh George. In Israel, the work week runs Sunday to Thursday, so tonight is the equivalent of Friday night in the US, and quiet a few young'uns flock to Tel Aviv for their fun - one of the bars I might stop in later tonight has themes for weekday nights (Eurovision, drag, etc.) but Thursdays and Fridays apparently "have enough going on" sans gimmicks. (On the other hand, here at the hotel, I have free tea, damp laundry, and a freakload of writing I want to get done. On the back right paw, I didn't eat much earlier, and the notion of wandering back out for a hardboiled egg and a mushroom boureka is starting to gain in appeal. I'm going to make myself hammer out a fistful of lines while I finish my tea, and then we'll see.)

We spent the bulk of the day in Rehovot, a suburb south of Tel Aviv with many scientists living/residing there. We first visited a legendary secret bullet factory (referred to by a local employee as "the old place?" when we asked for directions), and later arrived at Clore Garden of Science (via an extremely roundabout shlep around the Weizmann Institute campus, which smells fantastic and has nifty sculptures, but was sufficiently large and confusingly-signed that the BYM threatened to abandon me to coyotes for leading him on such a wild-garden chase), which was good fun (soap film and musical rocks = win), and within the Science Park (i.e., ab and office complexes), we passed by utility switchboxes brightly stencil-painted with the faces of Newton, Galileo, and Einstein (the last with his tongue sticking out. (Didn't actually translate well into a orange-white-red image, but it was part of the overall "yay, science!" + "yay, flowers!" vibe of the place that I really liked.)