“Shabbat shalom!” is how my mate, Jimmy, and I were greeted by staff at Ben Gurion airport in Tel-Aviv last Friday evening. Having been to Israel a couple of times before, I knew that we were in for a “quiet” next 24 hours, but Jimmy (who was completely unaware) was already thinking about which bus or train we could take to our hotel and where we could eat out for dinner that night…

Public transport does not run during Shabbat in Israel, so Jimmy and I had to take a taxi from the airport to our hotel in Raanana. There was, as expected, a price hike in taxi fares on the day… Now, a question I’ve only just begun to ask myself while writing this blog is, ‘how can anyone drive a taxi on Shabbat when the use of cars is forbidden?’. But, I assume that the taxi drivers that work on Shabbat are either; not Jewish; or not very religious. I think that answers that.

When we arrived at the hotel we encountered a phenomenon that I had witnessed on my previous visit to Israel but one that I had forgotten about – the existence of the ‘Shabbat elevator’. There are three elevators in our hotel, and two of them work just like any other lift you would find anywhere in the world, but one of them is special. The ‘Shabbat elevator’ is essentially a workaround for Jewish people that need to get to their rooms on high floors during Shabbat – it starts on the ground floor, arriving without the need to press the ‘call’ button, and immediately climbs to the top floor of the hotel before descending back down to the ground floor, stopping at every single floor along the way.

We learnt about this the hard way…

Once we had made it to our room it was around 7:30pm and as the Sun was setting, Shabbat was beginning. The next item on our agenda was to find some food after a long day of travel. Jimmy optimistically began trawling through nearby restaurants on Apple maps but was met with a sea of red text saying “Hours – Closed” on every place he clicked on. Having been in this situation in Israel before, I knew there was only one solution – Wolt.

Wolt is the Israeli (and other several other countries’) equivalent of Deliveroo or UberEats – it’s a food delivery app. And on Wolt I found our saviour – Landwer Cafe. Landwer is a pseudo-Italian restaurant that does large portions of great food, but more importantly, they are open for delivery on Shabbat. That’s another job sorted. 

With travel, shelter and food sorted, there was only one other thing that needed to be acquired – water. Whenever I travel abroad, 9 times out of 10 I won’t even attempt to drink the local tap water for fear of getting ill, which, for a professional athlete here for two weeks of competitions, would be an absolute disaster. So, we left our hotel room on a pilgrimage to find some bottled water, but luckily, I think it was the shortest pilgrimage of all time because the petrol station next to the hotel was open 24/7 and had a stockpile of bottled water…

Our first Shabbat of the trip was complete.

As we approached the one week mark of being in Israel, Shabbat was creeping up on us again but this time we were more prepared. We built up a stash of snacks and bottled water from the local supermarket on Thursday afternoon and we had discovered that Landwer Cafe was actually one of the only places open for dinner on Friday and Saturday nights.

In just one week we had become professional Shabbat-ers.

Pro travel tip: When travelling in Israel and Friday night is coming up, make sure to go to a supermarket on Thursday or Friday during the day to stockpile food and water!

A quick aside: during our first week in Israel we spent a lot of time hanging out with another player called Alex, who is the number 1 tennis player in Luxembourg, but more interestingly he had his coach with him – a guy called Gilles Muller.

Gilles is like a cult hero in the world of tennis – the equivalent of a ‘streets will never forget’ footballer. He beat Rafa Nadal in the fourth round at Wimbledon, 15-13 in the fifth set in 2017 and for someone with a CV as impressive as Gilles’, he was super unassuming and was full of stories about his time on tour. He even told us who the biggest tw*ts on tour were when he was playing. What a guy.

On our second Saturday night in Israel, we made the journey to Landwer Cafe along with the two Luxembourgers (what a great word) and it was surreal seeing just how empty the streets were. Not a single car or other human being crossed paths with us as we walked there and we could literally stroll through the middle of the roads to get there. Someone aptly described it as like being in a zombie apocalypse. See below for a 100% accurate representation of our walk to dinner.

During our two week trip to the outskirts of Tel-Aviv, Jimmy and I lived through three Shabbats, and amazingly we celebrated the two latter Shabbats by winning both doubles titles at the tournaments we played!

At the end of the trip, Jimmy confessed to me that his decision to travel to Israel and play doubles with me was “a very calculated move” from him😂

By winning two titles, we managed to cut Jimmy’s doubles ranking in half – from 1400 to 700!!

My ranking moved up 15 spots.