Whenever a city becomes a mainstay on travel magazines' lists of "cool destinations" or "insider hot spots," you can usually bet that its glory days are numbered. Hip-city buzz and glowing feature articles have a way of leading to low-cost flights and bachelorette party tours; today's Ljubljana can very quickly becomes tomorrow's Prague, a stage set of prepackaged tourist delights.
For a couple of years now, Tel Aviv has been lauded as the Middle East's undiscovered nexus of cool, so you might assume that it's already too late to go. But the good-bad news is that the city has enough shortcomings to keep the masses away for a while longer. Aside from its location in one of the world's perpetual war wones-a deterrent for many travelers, even if the city itself is quite safe these days-Tel Aviv is not particularly beautiful or particularly clean; barely 100 years old, it has few of the historic or religious sites that draw hordes of pilgrims to its much more pious neighbor, Jerusalem, 40 miles insland. What is does have is a prime setting on the Mediterranean, an uncommonly young and creative population and a surpring array of world-class restaurants, galleries and clubs. Factor in the year-round warm weather, and it all makes for a kind fo complicated, gritty vitality that's hard to find anywhere else.
Read the entire article in the March 2010 issue of W Magazine.