Last Day in Tel Aviv

Thursday, July 3: We had planned to sleep in, and sleep in we did, until the phone rang at 9:30am. It was Rowen, the mother of the bride, "Hey, do you guys want breakfast?" So we sat and talked about the wedding and she was clearly very pleased with how it went, and most of all - that it was over! We said our goodbyes, "See you in the States," and after hugs and kisses left for the Tel Aviv Art Museum.

The Tel Aviv Art Museum is an impressive building in the midst of a number of high-rise office buildings. The collections are fairly amazing. The first exhibition that we saw called, Conversations, was very contemporary and somewhat avant garde. 

It appears that as various benefactors left their personal collections to the museum, individual rooms were created to keep their donations together. Okay, room is probably not the right term, as each collection was housed in a full blown gallery, which in some cases was about 2000 square feet. We don't know what these people did in life to afford this kind of art, or how large their houses must have been, but visitors to the museum certainly benefitted from their wealth and charity. The artists names were straight from an art book, Picasso, Miro, Cezanne, Renoir, Leger, Pisarro, and some of the individual pieces were also. We thought that the Joan Miro paintings were actually better than the ones that we saw in the Miro Museum in Barcelona.

Another exhibit that we enjoyed was an interactive room based on Andy Warhol's paintings for children. We had never seen these before and the museum staff did a wonderful job of making the exhibit truly interactive for children and two sixtyish travelers from Arizona.

Late in the afternoon we went to the beach for one last visit. We found a couple of chairs and an umbrella and just sat there taking in the waves and the people. After about an hour or so, the chair rental guy came by and asked for 30 Sheckels for the right to use his chairs. "Sorry, time to go!" And we left. After dinner we packed for our flight to Istanbul in the morning.