Random Day trip

So this past Friday my friend Katie called me up in the morning, actually while I was still in class, and said: I have a rental car from work till 2pm, lets go somewhere. After a brief consultation with ourselves, we decided that the only place that neither of us had ever explored which was close enough to return the car was the city of Ashdod, about 25 minutes south on the highway.
The city of Ashdod is interesting... It has the potential of being picturesque, with this gradually sloping hill that hits a great beachfront. Below is Katie on the walk through the city park toward the beach. The center of town is at the top of the hill. On the other hand, Ashdod is entirely an industrial city, where the whole infrastructure rests on the port, which is the main port of Israel (surpassing Haifa, which was the biggest port for years). The bizarre thing is, the port is right there on the beach (see photo below). Most of the huge industrial ports in the US and in Europe are located far from city centers, in industrial zones that can be seen from afar, but nobody goes to. (Think the port in Oakland, Long Beach, or Jersey, have you ever really gone there, rather than just looked at it from afar?) So in Ashdod it's a little bizarre that the beach just bumps into this massive port (the photo below is just the beginning of what was a massive structure, we drove past it on the way in)
The other bizarre thing about Ashdod is the actual residents. The city used to be Jewish European immigrants way back in the 50s and 60s, before the port. Katie started talking to this 85 year old man (in photo below), who actually survived the entire Holocaust, and only emigrated to Israel in 1949, after the state was created.
But the overwhelming bulk of the city residents today are immigrants. The children and grandchildren of the original Jewish residents have long ago moved, overwhelmingly to the Tel Aviv area. Now the city is Russian or Ethiopian immigrants, or illegal African or Thai immigrants, plus a small amount of new French and Argentinian immigrants. That Friday everybody was in the small city center sitting around the ratty little delis wasting time. The photo below is interesting because the deli workers were all Russians who spoke very little Hebrew, but the 4 people sitting in front were Ethiopian.
We spend about 4 hours there, and seriously did not hear A WORD of either English or Hebrew or Arabic. English I understand not hearing, I can go days without hearing it (depending on who calls me), but to be in Israel and not hear Hebrew or Arabic is actually a very surreal experience. It's basically like being in Los Angeles for 4 hours and not hearing either English or Spanish.

We had a great day nonetheless.