Rubbish

Last week when I was in Israel, I noticed the rubbish. I drove from Raanana to Haifa one morning and was surprised to see all the junk collecting alongside the Coastal Road. My favourite part of this road is a little north of Atlit, one one side you have the blue, blue Mediterranean and on the other, in the distance is the Carmel range. I could not help but notice all the broken bottles, cans, plastic bags and general junk lining the road on both sides. It seems I must have become used to this after many years in Israel - I remember it used to bother me when I first arrived from SA all those years back. So much mess. Everywhere.

My eyes have grown accustomed to the English countryside. It's surprisingly clean here. People don't throw stuff out of the car windows, and tend to pick up after themselves. Since arriving I have been amazed at the lack of dustbins in the UK. There are only two on the long walk between my house and Teddington Lock, which meant I had to carry Roxy's poop in the little sacky-kaky for around an hour yesterday. There are no public dustbins anywhere near the house and when I asked the UK squints about this, they claimed it's left over from "the troubles". But, they have not had an IRA bomb go off in the UK for a while (looks like 2001 according to Wikipedia). Still there are very few bins around. Even at the station they have these suspended plastic bags, two for the whole platform.

Even with this surprising lack of places to turf your rubbish, the UK is very clean. In the fields around our house, there are some discarded beer cans and left over boxes of fireworks from Guy Fawkes, but in general, the woods are full of trees and leaves. I have occasionally noticed some of the old people in the neighbourhood walking around with garbage bags picking up trash. I have never seen anything like that in Israel. Visual pollution - it really bothers me.