(Dawn view from our balcony. Sunset and sunrise the whole place has a translucent glow)
I realised a while ago that this blog is more about the meanderings of my mind than my meanderings through this holy city. That's because, as English Justine yelled at me on the phone last week, 'There's NOTHING more boring than Middle Eastern Politics' and also because a city is a city is a city and the convolutions of my head follow me wherever I go. That said, perhaps living in Jerusalem may well be interesting to someone who's never been to Israel and wonders what Jerusalem is really like.
Well...let's see. Jerusalem lies almost a thousand meters above sea level (which results in two exciting days of snow in winter, a hot but cooler than the sweaty swamp of Tel Aviv summer) and is mountainous. This rules out one of my crucial criterion of utopian living, which is to inhabit a place where I can cruise around on a mountain bike. Obviously mountain bikes were designed for precisely such terrains, but bearing in mind the gradient and size of the summit leading up to my house, even friends with bikes don't bother risking the future of their knees.
A law in Jerusalem means all buildings, from the new Waldorf Astoria ('The Palace') under construction near the family shop all the way down to local apartment blocks have to be covered with Jerusalem stone, which is a dusty yellow colour. This makes Jerusalem far, far more attractive than almost any other city in the world although, presumably, this applies to the buildings that were built after the law, as there are some monstrosities below my house that are square and diarrhoea red, and man, they really spoil the view.
The roads are narrow and poky, there are too many cars, the people drive like their wife's waters have just broken on their cream leather seats and they're really not happy about it and if you don't let them ram in front of you, they'll shoot you in the head and run you off the road. And that's every single time you get in the car. In fact, that would be a valid enough reason: what makes it worse is that there IS no reason to behave or drive like that - as though they own this road so just move over. I hate the pervasive 'Who are you, anyway?' (Mi ata bichlal?) attitude, which said in the correct way with a hand turned offensively upwards in your face, means don't go thinking you're something because you're a lowly piece of sh** and you need to know it.
The majority (I'm estimating wildly here) of residents are religious: mostly Orthodox Jews, but there are Arab towns sitting snugly in every valley (there's one below our house) and so there are many Muslims, plus Christian nuns and monks living in retreats and monastaries, Armenian and Ethipoian dudes with groovy beards plus coachloads of tourists wearing crucifixes and brighter trousers than they'd ever wear at home. Most religious Jews don't keep domestic pets and so all of them, from father and mother to children, are ridiculously and hysterically terrified of small, cute dogs. The good thing is, religious neighbourhoods may house families each with ten to twelve kids squished into three room apartments, block after block, but there isn't dog mess on the street. Litter, yes. But no doggy doo doo, and that's nice. Don't get me started on litter, though: the shores of the Sea of Galilee look like a dumping ground. Environmental awareness is as rare as good customer service.
I saw this dustsleeve of Infidels when I was about eighteen and asked Dad where this dusty, ancient-looking city was. I stared at it for ages and vowed to one day go there. Serves me right, really
Being a new country means the landscape and the infrastructure change in the blink of an eye. Cranes poke into the skyline everywhere you look; dust is ubiquitous, ditto rubble, ditto killer tractors and rumbling noises. We used to look at tractors and say, 'ahh, lookee the big yellow digger!' -they were friendly over-sized toys and farmish looking - but after the two Arab drivers of huge diggers turned them on buses and upturned cars, killing people downtown a couple of months ago, when we see a tractor, deathly fear ripples over our spines and the kids shout, 'Mum! Get out of its way, quick!' Sad, really.
My other criteria for a perfect location to settle down were:
1) It had to be cold in winter; cold enough for real fires and big jumpers. Tick.
2) Hot in summer, tick.
3) Nice friendly people would smile and say 'Good morning', cross.
4) A sea or lake nearby, cross.
5) A proper autumn with a blaze of orange and red leaves, cross.
6) Good healthy air and a clean, pure atmosphere to feel alive in. Big cross.
On the plus side, you can buy kosher food without it being limited to one small section of the supermarket with an insulting display of pickled cucumbers and Passover matzos. Shabbat is something special here, not another shopping day. There are lots of other Jews so you don't need to explain why you need Friday afternoon off or why you can't even GET in a car, let alone drive, on a Friday night.
I'm off to London in two weeks, so I can happily see the benefits of being here as the excitement taints my lenses and everything appears groovy. Let's see what dark substance unravels after I get back.
Or maybe not.
Next time I intend to visit sites of interest and somehow interweave pictures of them into my dissecting of life with a scalpel. I feel much better now, knowing the problems I have in life are justifiable and normal. Dealing with them, however - doing something about them - is another matter entirely.
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a poem by Jemma Leech aged 11 who has physical disabilities stemming from cerebral palsy.....
Waiting for Ike
My mom is rattled.
She walks a worn path
From computer to kitchen to TV to computer
Checking each update
On storm surge and storm watch and storm track.
She pockets scribbled lists:
Raisins
Cereal
Flashlights
Milk
She talks a new language
Of dirty sides and uncertainty cones
And has new acquaintances to gossip about to her friends-
Gustav, Carla, Alison, Rita and now Ike,
(but no gossip about Katrina, just low-voiced awe)
She sends texts of concern
And makes reassuring phone calls
To family in non-tropical waters
Playing down the danger
While losing sleep herself.
Outside the air is hot and still.
The clouds are light and high
In the clean blue canopy
But Ike is coming
And we are waiting.
Listening to Ike
From inside my ply-pillowed place,
I listen.
The horns of thunder blaze in furious fanfare,
The lightning shrieks in sharp discordance,
The complex percussion of rain and wind,
Branch, pole and rocking fence
Beats the rhythm of the storm
In a different universe,
Out there, beyond.
The bayous surge in counterpoint
To the rumbling current,
They break their banks
In the sliding slippage of tacit destruction,
And the movement seeps to silence by daybreak
In a different universe,
Out there, beyond.
From inside my quiet-quilted sanctuary,
I listen.
After Ike
Far out in the Gulf under cloudless blue skies
The turtle soars free on warm currents
Flying beneath sea-clouds of flotsam and jetsam,
Debris of shattered lives unknown.
As she reaches the shallows
Where frothing waters lap on the shore of hell,
Her carapace catches the silver fire
As she drags herself up the moon-soaked sand.
This beach has been her birthright
Since the dawn of the turtlesAs it will be for her daughters
In millennia to come.
For the island's sweet song'
Not quenched, but softened,
Calls again to her children
And they will come home,
Like the turtles,
To Galveston's heavenly shore.
Jemma Leech.
A sample of life in Houston Texas
Hurricane Ike hit Galveston Island and the Southeast Texas coast in the early hours of September 13, 2008, before moving inland over Houston and surrounding counties, causing widespread devastation, destruction and full-scale power outages as it went.
I've been busy with other things too. As you know, the American holiday of Thanksgiving and its appended Black Friday, which holds deep religious (http://www.blackfriday.info/sales/)
meaning for me, are today and tomorrow.
For some reason, Canadians do these too. For although we don't have a Mayflower in our national bloodline, we do know some recipes for turkey. I guess you Brits should celebrate it too. Part of the rhetoric taught in preschools about the pilgrims coming to America (imagine? A pilgrimage to America!) is that the Quakers fled England to escape religious prejudice, which in those days was called 'persecution.' The reason it has a different word now than it did then is, as you know if you've ever taken a tour of the London Towers' torture wing, because of silly semantic considerations. I wouldn't worry about it. But the point is that Thanksgiving can celebrate England's purging of Calvinist fanaticism. What's wrong with that?
On a more serious note, though, perhaps abandoning Britain for an ameliorated (Ariel thinks that means to make easy. Clearly Ariel is insane - ameliorate is way toward the beginning of the Dictionary, which is a highly recommendable read) religious experience and freedom can still be a relevant theme for some of us.
This won't do at all. I must write an anti-blog about Jerusalem The Beautiful so that the locals don't lose all hope.
Let's start by focuseing on...
wait for it...
***HAMSHUSHALAIM!***
http://www.jerusalem.muni.il/jer_main/defaultnew.asp?lng=2
Don't feel threatened. If I was really up to the task I'd be a genuine blogger, not a mere anti-blogger. It's just that I was in Benei Braq yesterday and in spite of the 5 shekel ticket for a falafel, I missed Jerusalem deeply. THe official motto is, "Benei Beraq: no place for the religious soul."
Jerusalem, on the other, hand... Ah, Jerusalem.
I'm not dissing the ancient Holy City - I like this city as cities go. I don't think it has the buzz London has but it has an awe-inspiring depth and hum London hasn't. The writer Tom (not to be confused with Harold) Robbins wrote in 'Skinny Legs and All' that every other city in the world was about money, but Jerusalem was about something other else. That's pretty cool for a non-materialist who'd like a Mercedes anyway like me. It's the people who live here that get me down. Not all of them -just the Israelis (joke). If I lived in Tel Aviv it'd sound like I was dissing Tel Aviv because it's what I encounter in my day that grieves me, and my days are spent here. Mind you, I do like going down to Tel Aviv. But I like when I round the last bend in the 443 and there is Ramot, hanging like a backdrop in the sky and beyond it Jerusalem awaits.
The fact that you read the Jerusalem Municipality website means you must be very very bored or perhaps you think you'll find what a religious soul needs among the school registration forms and the projected targets for improving garbage collection by 2010.
Give me Bnei Brak any day.
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