Sherutim (long distance version)

So I'm sitting on a bench in Tel Aviv Central bus station. It's 3am. I left Mike's Place at midnight because I needed to get home to Jerusalem fairly early, and if you daren't risk taxis (you have to speak fluent Hebrew in order to dissuade the cabbies here from charging you the Earth, Moon and planets to get from A to B) the only option after midnight is the sherutim.

The sherutim are a great plan that sometime gan awry. Some take 8 passengers, others take 12, but none of them take anyone anywhere until the minibus is full. And ours didn't fill.

At around 2am the sherut driver came by, canvassing. He wanted the six passengers already on board (I was counted as 'on board', having paid my 25 shekel fare already) to pay an extra 15 shekels to make up for the passengers we didn't have. I admitted to having a spare 15 shekels in my pocket, but pointed out that the rest of the passengers would (quite rightly) veto the whole idea - which, surely enough, they did.

By 2.30am there's a guy who used to be asleep on the bench, but has woken for long enough to share a cigarette with me and has now decided it's nicer to sleep with his head in my lap. There's a terribly obese guy (unusual in Israel) who has had to sit down and rest 3 times just walking from the local bus stop to the sherutim base - a matter of some 400 metres - and who dozes almost immediately he finds a real bench, knowing that his chances of reaching Haifa tonight are very slim indeedy. There's also a very young boy, a teenager, who is clutching a huge canvas under one arm. I asked to see the painting. It showed himself, screaming, and a dim effeminate ghost who was larger than he was. 'Who's the ghost?' 'My aunt.' 'I'm so sorry.' The intifada has a lot to answer for, whichever side you happen to be on and whatever way you view it.

By 3.30am the sherut driver had lost patience. He signalled me to join the rest of the passengers on the minibus and demanded that everyone on board pay whatever they could. I was totally bemused by this - it's a very un-Israeli attitude to take - but handed over an extra 20 sheks regardless. The yeshiva boys managed a few shekels above their fare, the Israeli Arabs in the back managed around the same, the American tourist feigned sleep. Then we drove around the corner and I found out what the problem was. There had never been any fuel in the sherut from the start; we sat in a filling station for a further 10 minutes while the driver counted out the price of a full tank of diesel in the single shekel coins given him by the yeshiva and the Arabs.

So - you get the picture. I'm not going to be someone who blogs PHP development. Sorry.