Always had a thing for seaside towns. Don't know why or what it is about them. They all have the sea. That must have something to do with it. Even when you can't see it, it's always there. Vast, deep salt water force, constant, changing, always..
little fishing boats, huge container ships, yachts, sailors, pirates...
Sun came up this morning and cast a different light on the scene that left me feeling so bleak last night. Towering rocky mountains all lit up in red. Wind howling down 500 miles of the Jordan valley, north to south and out over the Red Sea, cares nothing for the lives of man, fish, bird, tree, rock or sand. Hard buildings stand defiant, rigid in the gale while palm trees bend to its merciless onslaught. Everything will succumb eventually to the wind and the sea. All will turn to dust eventually.
The people who live here know it too. Even if they don't know it, they know it. You can't not know it in a place like this. Faced with the wind and the sea. Surrounded by bare mountains and miles and miles of desert.
Visit the underwater observatory. Stairs take you down to a place where windows look out onto the silent blue world of coral and brightly coloured fish, all going about their lives unconcerned and unaware of another life on dry land. A world of people and wars and money, desert winds, dust, gravity. They're looking for food while trying to avoid being food for some other bigger fish. Simple life and very colourful. A bit like the life in this city.
Later on the beach, children build sandcastles and collect crystals, shells and bits of coral. Tourists from Scandinavia, Germany, France, sun themselves and pose in the January heat, admiring their bodies, admiring the sea, admiring each other, careless for the day.
Bearded Jews and their headscarf wives talk in Hebrew, walking along side by side with bearded men talking Arabic with their headscarf wives. African, Moroccan, Yemeni, Bedouin, Polish, Russian, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Atheist, man, woman, young, old, poor, rich, thin, fat... Everyone in the world is here in Eilat.
(That is a picture of a shark's egg, in case you are wondering - having never seen one before, as I hadn't until today)