Return to Joppa

Back in February, some of you might recall, I blogged about the Biblical city of Joppa, better known in Hebrew as יפו (Yafo). Joppa is within walking distance of Tel Aviv, and I have returned to it several times on various occasions since my first visit.

Here I am with my friend and fellow sociologist B. in the narrow streets of Joppa.

I was delighted to discover that B., whose mother is a prominent Israeli sociologist and whose father is a prominent Israeli archaeologist, helped his father to excavate the remains of an ancient Egyptian arch in Joppa when B. was still a child. Upon learning this remarkable fact, A. and I promptly renamed it B.'s Arch. We hope that the guidebooks will soon follow suit.

B. brought us to an extraordinary restaurant in Joppa that evening called Blackout. What makes the restaurant extraordinary is that the chefs and the waiters are blind, and the diners sit in complete darkness. The idea, I suppose, is to demonstrate that the blind are more capable than one might think, and at the same time to allow diners to experience, even if only for one evening, what it's like to be blind. At first I thought I would find the experience annoying. Imagine how troublesome it is to have dinner without being able to see! Pouring a glass of wine becomes a real challenge, and more than once I discovered that my fork was empty when I lifted it to my mouth. At first, I found the darkness so disorienting that it was hard to concentrate on the dinner table conversation. In the end, however, I found the experience fascinating and -- if you will excuse the pun -- eye-opening. From a sociological perspective, it made me keenly aware just how much the simple act of having dinner with friends is in fact a highly complicated instance of collective action that requires a great deal of coordination to pull off successfully. (Howard Becker once suggested that this is the core problem of sociology: “How do [people] act together so as to get anything done without a great deal of trouble, without missteps and conflict?”) And, of course, it also reminded me of how much most of us rely on sight for such coordination. I wouldn't want to dine this way every night, but I was glad to have had the experience, and I would recommend the restaurant to anyone visiting Joppa. I can honestly say I've never had a dinner like that one.

A. discovered another unusual feature of Joppa: a tree suspended above the ground.

On another occasion we visited Joppa with our friend M.

On that occasion I finally found the house of Simon the Tanner, which I wasn't able to find the first time I visited Joppa. "Simon the Tanner formerly lived here," Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad. "We went to his house. All the pilgrims visit Simon the Tanner's house. Peter saw the vision of the beasts let down in a sheet when he lay upon the roof of Simon the Tanner's house." (Twain is referring here to Acts 10:9-47 -W.Y.). This is what the house looks like today.

But my favorite thing about Joppa is still the beautiful sunsets on the Mediterranean.