Haifa

So this weekend I went up to Haifa to visit my mother's side of the family (My father's live in Jerusalem). My aunt (mother's sister) has been living in the same apartment for as long as I can remember in the neighborhood called Carmelia, (you can see it on the map below toward the southern end of the city). Haifa itself is an interesting city, it was built up from the port on the inner side and grew up the mountain, and then spread. It is a gorgeous city with views of the Mediterranean Sea from every point, and the beaches on the Western Side are fantastic, much better than the Tel Aviv beaches (which are pretty good to begin with). The other intersting aspect of Haifa is that it is culturally mixed Arab and Israeli. Jersualem and Tel Aviv also have Arabs, but the neighborhoods are fairly segregated. Haifa is the only large city in Israel where both Arabs and Israelis live in the same apartment complex and go to the same coffee shops. Haifa is also much more calm than either Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. I spent Friday night with my cousin, the son of my aunt, and his friends in their apartment in the area called Bat Galim, which is the most northern tip. Bat Galim is interesting because it has always been one of the shoddiest neighborhoods, and only now is beginning a process of growth, party from the gentrification of students looking for cheap housing (like the area of Southern Harlem went through 5 years ago). Bat Galim was also the area that was primarily targetted in Haifa by Hezbollah, and my cousin showed me some of the damaged buildings. Haifa is also where my father went to university, at the Technion, which is still one of the preeminent technical/engineeringg schools in the world. Below is the view from my aunts apartment looking west down the hill to the Mediterannean...