Oh Florentin, my beautiful adopted neighbourhood! I love your scummy streets and the late night bars. I’ve only just returned here on Sunday, after having sublet a place off a friend in a different area, I returned on Sunday to a new temporary abode.
Today I go to unchain my bicycle and there is a note on it saying “this bike was stolen from me 3 months ago, call me”. There is a name and a mobile number. There is also a lock that isn’t mine chaining my bike to the railing.
So I call my Spanish teacher to tell her I’m gonna be late, call the guy who left the note. We argue. I tell him I’d bought the bike from a German tourist when I got to Tel Aviv (which is true). The timing of the sale fits with his story, but the German girl had supposedluy been riding the bike for a while before selling it, so who knows. I’m not convinced.
He says he won’t be back for at least two hours. I threaten to call the police. He says he has a receipt showing where he’d bought the bike but I am undeterred.
Apparently, the guy lives 2 doors down from me. His stolen bike just magically appeared in front of his house so he had to do something. I only moved here on Sunday completely by chance, having found this last minute sublet.
I call the police. They send a car. While I’m waiting for the car the police call me back to ask if I have a receipt for the bike. I don’t. The woman asks me “so how do we know it’s yours then?”
I say “because I just told you it’s mine”. She says they might not be able to help me. I say I’ll take a cutter to the lock and reclaim my bike. Apparently doing that would be a criminal offence. She tells me to wait for the car.
When the car gets there, a short, fat, stupid-looking policewoman and a tall, stupid-looking policeman come out.
The policeman tells me the guy who locked my bike doesn’t have a receipt. They can’t prove whose bike it is. Apparently I can go and file a complaint at the station, but without proof the police will probably confiscate the bicycle.
After they leave, I call the guy again and tell him this. I say if he’s going to be an asshole about it, I’m gonna file the complaint and he won’t get the bike. We argue.
In the end he says to wait for him and he’ll come and meet me and we’ll talk.
It’s been two hours of stress by now and I keep getting phone calls from my hysterical mom trying to be helpful and stressing me out even more.
I tell her to stop calling me.
So how did it end? The guy turned up, told me “well, it’s a shit bike so I’m not going to fight you over it. You can have it. I just want you to know that I locked it cause I was angry it was stolen from me. I’d bought this lock especially just in case I ever find it”.
I told him I understood and was grateful and that I’d have done the same. That I’d had stuff stolen here too (see previous post). By the time I’d met up with him, I was sort of resigned to having to come to some sort of compromise about things, cause were basically at an impasse. I was going to ask him to let me keep the bike till I go back to London and then take it back.
I actually want to give my bike to a friend, but I figured, if it really is this guy’s bike then he should have it if he’s not gotten a better one.
Apparently he does have a better one, so I got to have a joyful victory ride across town to class.
Even in a small city like Tel Aviv, what are the odds that a stolen bike would be sold onto a German girl, then onto me who’d end up moving two doors down from the original owner of the bike and park them right under his nose?
I love this city.
😀
Well, I had a bike stolen in Florentin too, just a few meters away from the place in your photo…
And I saw the bike again (it was a crap bike, and unmistakably the one I had stolen) chained somewhere else in Florentin…
I bought said crap bike from a second hand bike shop in Jaffa, and basically when I bought it, it had a U-lock on the wheel and the bike shop dude said “it was like that when I bought it from a German tourist” (no kidding). He had a friend in a workshop next door with a tool that could saw off the U-lock.
I’m a fresh faced innocent so it was only later I realized… the bike shop dude probably sold me a stolen bike 🙁
Anyway, seems there is a little network of stealing and re-stealing bikes. Like mine, yours was not “pre-owned” but “pre-stolen”.
The general opinion is that all the secondhand bikes you see in Yafo / Jaffa are stolen. With or without the lock!
So if you are looking to purchase a second hand bike, and would rather it not be “pre-stolen”, where do you recommend going?
If you want to be as close to 100% sure as possible, I’d say get them from a good shop. I listed a bunch of shops that sell secondhand bikes in the guide. It all depends on how good a bike you want and how much money you want to spend. Also, obviously, on what bikes the shop happen to have in at the moment. If you want dirt cheap but usable, you can see if Shahaf or My Bike have any OK used ones. If you’re thinking of spending 300NIS and up, you can get a good deal on a new bike for that in one of the shops on Levinsky.
If you buy it off a person, you’ll need to ask where they got it and whether it was secondhand. Anything secondhand bought south of Levinsky St. has a big question mark on it.