Meet Shuki. And yes he really is that, er, imposing. Shuki lives in the flat here and up to now has adopted a need-to-know attitude to me. When it's feeding time he'll give me a quick miouw. Otherwise he does his own stuff. Today we had a brief human/cat bonding moment, which was encouraging, but he'll definitely take his time.

More engaging is No Name (well that's what I have called him) a stray tabby kitten who Susan, my landlady, is feeding round the back of the building (below). I take him some food and pellets each day and he is always up for a play. Plus there's a third cat that needs some water topping up and some more food and which sometimes needs some attention too. Leaving here in the morning you can feel like Dr Doolittle.




















This is the flat I am staying in. It is very comfortable and has two balconies which allow a breeze to blow through the whole place, keeping it reasonably cool (ie about 27C). I usually spend the evenings on the back balcony (left, with washing hanging from it) which has a nice view out over some trees and a little alley and a good light to read in. You can see from the pics that the area is very leafy. It's also fairly quiet - you can hear some cars in the distance and children playing but that's about it. About 10 minutes away is Emek Refaim, a stretch of upmarket cafes and restaurants interspersed with little shops, rather like Upper Street without the estate agents.



















The yeshiva (college) starts off in the mornings with shul at 7.30am. Then, or so I thought, there's some breakfast in the sunny courtyard, but that turned out to be yesterday only so I had to scoot over to the supermarket to get some buns and chocolate milk before class starts. We do Modern Hebrew from 9 to 12.30 each morning. Then, after lunch, there's another short shul service, followed by two afternoon sessions which vary. I am signed up for chant/chazan stuff and some interesting theology sessions on the image of God, plus what looks like is going to be a very good set of seminars on the Psalms. A lot of people are not doing the afternoon sessions and I will probably be taking some afternoons off anyway as the weeks go on to go to Tel Aviv or the beach. On Thursdays I am doing some gardening as part of a volunteer project here. I very much like my fellow students. We are about 100 in all, ranging in age, almost literally from 18 to 80 and about two thirds women. Most of them are from the US and it's been interesting to discover the differences and similarities of our world views. A hundred Jews means about 800 opinions of course and discussions can get lively. But everyone makes time for everyone else (or at least we do on Day Two...) and I feel privileged to be able to spend time with such an insightful and interesting group of people.

Talking of debates, the conflict with the Palestinians and the occupation of Gaza and West Bank are of course always present in people's minds. And studying at a Jewish college, with the religion's deep love of human rights and dignity, throws it into even greater relief. We are well protected and safe here and, with help from the college, if I can I am hoping to learn more about both sides of this conflict. The head of the yeshiva is a member of Rabbis for Human Rights and I'm hoping to talk to him about that soon.

I finally made it to a supermarket today so I am going to sign off now and go and make some supper. (This last pic is the view I can see now.) And then I need to get an early night. With these hot evenings and 6.30am starts it's going to be too easy to burn the candle at both ends.

D

Jersualem

I've been here three days now and I'm starting to settle in.

My flat is in an area called Baka'a - very leafy and quiet but with some nice cafes and restaurants nearby. It reminds me of Leblon in Rio and I'm very pleased to have ended up here. I am about a half hour walk to college and the centre of Jerusalem, which is fine before the heat of the day really kicks in. Right now I am sitting on one of the two balconies with a glass of wine and some olives and listening to some sort of Brazilian/Israeli fusion CD - samba in Hebrew (yes really).

Today was our first day in college and it looks like it is going to be hard but good. Every morning we start at 7.30 with a shul (synagogue) service and then it's a little breakfast and Modern Hebrew till 12.30. After lunch and another shul service we split into different subjects. I am doing some very interesting stuff on the image of God and on synagogue chant. Or rather that was today. Can't remember what I have signed up for tomorrow but always nice to have a suprise. I know I am doing gardening as part of a volunteer programme on Thursday afternoons.

There is a ferociously strong sense of patriotism here, which I think for my American colleagues is quite natural but seems strange to me. I have had one or two conversations about Palestine but in an odd way the war and the occupation seem to be much further away than they are to us in the UK - and yet at same time they are totally in your face. Everyone is in the army of course and you see soldiers everywhere. Some people are naive or simplistic about the situation (as many Brits are about something like immigration) but most are very thoughtful. The difference is that, while at home I would say our first thoughts are to the situation of the people in Gaza, here people's first thoughts are about the future of the state of Israel. And it is easy to see why. It is early days for me of course but this does seem a wonderful, well run, hospitable and liberal country. And it inspires you: right now I am feeling so energised by the place that I could probably join the army myself. That will settle, of course, but the sensation is a useful reminder that I promised myself I would come here with an open mind.

Crossing Europe, I noticed a pretty constant deterioration in the way people cross the roads. In London we zip across wherever and whenever we can but on the continent things were different. In Cologne 10 or us were standing at the side of the road waiting to cross, with the lights on the red man. There was no traffic in either direction so I strolled across. I had only got as far as the island in the middle when I looked back and found nine jaws hitting the ground in astonishment.

After that, though, road-crossing standards really started to fall, with the Damascus taking the (crumpled, motorway pile-up) biscuit for an almost Saigon-like mixture of cars and pedestrians. There, you stride out into the traffic, try to make eye contact with the driver and just keep going. I had expected the same in Jerusalem, but in fact it is just like Cologne and the drivers are pussy cats compared to somewhere like Rio. They sounds their horns because it's macho but you can tell their hearts aren't in it.

I'll need to go and do my homework now but I'll write more about Jerusalem soon and put some pics up. It was a bit cloudy today so not a great day to take photos. In the meantime my Israel mobile number is +972 54 355 9942 if you want to send a text or get in touch. Or drop me a line by email. It would be great to hear from you.

Dx

Damascus to Jerusalem

On Thursday I made the final trek out of Syria and into Israel. It seemed so easy in the Lonely Planet. The buses were at awkward times but there were plenty of shared taxis that would take you all the way from Damascus to Amman from where another shared taxi would drop you at the Allenby Bridge border crossing with the West Bank. I set off at 7am confident of being settled in Jerusalem by mid afternoon.

In fact things were a bit tougher. We set off OK, having done ritually haggled my fare from Damascus to Amman down from £7 to £5, but I hadn't counted on border checks, customs officers, my fellow passengers love of the Duty Free shops (there's one as you leave Syria and another 500m later when you enter Jordan) and the fact that you get dropped in the "wrong" bus station in Amman for your connection to the Allenby Bridge. That would have been fine except that, meanly, I had exactly 5 Jordanian dinars in my pocket, which was going to be the cost of a shared taxi to the border and I didn't want to change any more. Unfortunately I needed 1 dinar more to make the quick hop to the right bus station. I was almost resigned to trudging off to find an ATM - or even walking it, but the temperature was nearly 40C by now and my rucksack was heavy - when a guy in a travel agent's reached in his pocket and gave me a 1 dinar note for the trip. It was a small gesture in once sense - a dinar is about 70p - but at the same time very touching and typical of the hospitality I'd enjoyed all through this trip. I was a bit humbled by my meanness and I'm not sure many travel agents in London would subsidise a Jordanian tourist's shortfall on the Heathrow Express - but maybe I am wrong.

The border crossing itself was a marvel of Arab insouciance mixed with Israeli franticness. At one side of the bridge, a selection of slightly bored Jordanian officials checked your passport, x-rayed luggage (one of the machines was broken, which meant half of it went unscanned I reckon) and pointed you in the direction of a bus that would leave at some time or other. Nothing is signposted, there's a sense of drifting about before everyone realises which bus is leaving and you are on the way. I had imagined the Allenby Bridge would be some sort of noble, sweeping structure crossing into Israel and two of us asked a man if we could walk across. We soon discovered why he laughed so loudly: the bus shuttles you about 5km through hot, scrubby desert until, utterly unnoticed, you cross a tiny two-span concrete bridge - the sort that would go across the A368 - and you are in Israel/Palestine.

Then things get a bit more crazy. The Palestine/Israeli side of things is a mass of people pushing against a well-founded Israeli obsession with security. There's not really a queue, just a mass of people trying to get to the front. First your luggage (and everyone else's) is taken off you and fed into the maw of a couple of huge x-ray machines that emerge on the other side of a big wall. Then you queue up to go through metal detectors and (by the looks of it reserved for foreigners) one of those cool machines that blow air at you to sniff out explosives.

Then come the passport checks. The queues for Palestinians and Israelis move fairly fast but the one for foreigners crawl along as Israeli teenagers on military service ask you what you are doing in Israel and (unspoken) why you didn't come in via Ben Gurion airport like a normal person. Every so often someone is sent off to complete a form and join the queue again from the back. It's noisy, everyone is crowding round the windows and you can't really hear what the officials are asking you. I got through OK. A Peruvian I had sat next to on the bus, who was just behind me in the queue, hadn't appeared two hours later.

After that, there's yet another queue for another passport check and then you find what happened to your luggage: there's a big random pile of bags where the x-ray machines have spat them out and you have to wade in to find yours. I (dumbly) had left my laptop in mine and I just found it in time before someone almost trod on it to get to his suitcase behind.

From then it's straightforward. You take a little minibus through the West Bank (scrubby, desert, saw settlements, didn't see the separation "fence") and very quickly you are in Jerusalem. It was almost 6pm but I had arrived.

Damascus

While Aleppo was enchanting Damascus blows you away. This certainly the highlight of my trip so far. I booked into a dorm room in a nice, quiet relaxed hostel north of the old city and last night three of us went exploring the souks and then sat the evening out at a small pavement cafe on a pedestrianised street, drinking beer and tea and with people around us playing backgammon or chatting into the night. The temperatures are ferocious during the day time (though it's amazing how quickly you get used to them) but after sunset there's a just a warm breeze and an almost perfect Mediterranean climate.

Today two of us went exploring the old town. The jewel of the city is the Ummayad Mosque, famous for its green and gold mosaics that line the inner courtyard (described by the guide leaflet as "deemed to be the most beautiful mosaics in the world"). But the whole of the old town is a treat, with little alleyways leading to tiny courtyard gardens or to a row of pavement cafes where you can sit and have a fresh juice or some sweet tea. It is also, of course, where St Paul settled after his life-changing moment on the road to, and indeed we found the "Street that is called Straight", where he lived, and the house where he was lowered down from a window outside the city walls to escape the Romans.

There's a big Jewish quarter here too but not much evidence of a synagogue or anything. A man we started talking to (who for 100 Syrian Pound fee unexpectedly took us on a short cut to Paul's house through an old lady's kitchen and over some scrubland) said that there were loads of Jews still living in Damascus and that they were "very nice. I have my shirts repaired by one of them." But I could see any evidence of them anywhere. The Christian quarter you can tell straight away as women aren't wearing scarves and there are shops selling spirits.

Tonight I am going to sleep on the roof of our hostel. Last night I didn't sleep well as my bed squeaked and groaned every time I moved and I had to go up to the roof (where there are lots of people sleeping) in the end to have a proper sleep. It will be nice to be under the stars (well, under the stars under a kind of canopy). Very Pauline, I think. And I have just discovered that today is Wednesday and not Tuesday, which means tomorrow is my trip to Amman, across the Allenby Bridge and into Jerusalem.

Hope all is well at home. It's nice you're reading this. Do drop me a line if you get the chance. And have a great day.

Dx

Week 0 - Aleppo, Syria

Syria is proving wonderful, with plenty of unexpected treasures. I took the bus all the way from Istanbul to Aleppo, via Ankara and Adana and, finally, Antioch, my first taste of a Biblical destination. There was a slight scam at regarding he onward connection to Syria: the bus I had booked on to had mysteriously "disappeared". I could wait five hours for the next one or pay 10 Turkish Lira (about $5) to get on another bus that was leaving straight away. Of course I forked up and we were soon on our way.

The border was fine, the only delay being the incoming Syrians on the bus stocking up with cartons and cartons of Duty Free cigs and soon we were in Aleppo and Syria proper.

It was mid morning by then and the temperature was baking so it was nice just to check into a hostel and have a cold shower. I was staying in what the Lonely Planet calls the best backpacker place in town. It was clean and perfectly pleasant but if that's the best place the room for some competition. Then again, there were hardly any backpackers so maybe there isn't. I kipped for a while (the bus journey was mostly accompanied by loud Turkish soaps and then the football on the TV screens) and went out to explore.

Aleppo is souk central and has wonderful warrens of covered markets running through the old town. I spent the afternoon there wandering among the cloths, spices, saucepans, electrical goods and little cafes. No one hassles
you. Everyone is very welcoming and friendly. I like Syria.

In the souk I came across a little hammam and decided laze there for the rest of the afternoon. In contrast to my Istanbul experience this was the real thing. Again, very friendly people (staff and customers), a good steam, a scrub down with a brillo pad, a lather up with a soft sponge and lots of soap, a real massage and then lots of cups of sweet tea as I lazed in my own little booth like a sultan, wrapped up in towels and reading my book. Total cost 600 Syrian Pounds ($12). Worth ten time that.

The souk mentality has seeped out into the rest of Aleppo and shops selling the same sort of goods congregate together. So yet get the tyre area, fruit juice zone, sportswear street etc. My hostel seemed to be in the wholesale soft drink and detergent district. It made finding your way around a lot easier than remembering (and pronouncing) street names.

I spent some time in the Christian area of town, north of the old city and quiet and cobbled (with some beautiful Armenian and Greek Orthodox churches) and with cold beer on sale. And then I explored around the citadel, lovely at sunset, the pink light all over its golden stone, popped into the big mosque, had a(nother) kebab and got an early night as the next day would be on to Damascus.

Istanbul Day 2

I ended up walking around yesterday and as I had my shorts on I didn't go into the Blue Mosque. I was hoping to go to shul for the Shabat Friday evening service but since the bombing at Neve Shalom security is pretty tight and you have to book in with the Chief Rabbi's office first, which of course was closed by the time I worked this out.

So instead I went to the Cagaloglu hamam for what I was hoping to be an authentic Turkish bath, strongarm massage and all. Here I learnt a lesson though. The place is beautiful but it is nowhere near the experience it should be and I think the problem is that it now appears in all those underresearched 100 Best Turkish Baths in the World lists that I am as guilty of as anyone else. It was nowhere near hot enough, the massage was vague and cursory, it was expensive and the attendant asked me for a tip and then asked how much it was going to be. I had a nice scrub down, though, and came out all smooth and shiny but that was that. Really disappointing. In Aleppo I am going to look for something a little more local. (For what a Turkish bath is meant to be like see here, which is a description of the same place ten years ago. )

At dinner time, Turkey were playing Croatia in the Euro 2008 quarter finals, which meant that every bar and restaurant in the city had the match on a big screen. I kind of avoided it until the last 10 minutes and then I ended up watching the penalties in one of those all-male Turkish private social clubs you see down Green Lanes, that was at the end of the road to my hotel. It looked OK and I just wandered in and sat down. No one paid me much attention and I didn't understand anything anyone said but that was fine. In fact it wasn't a very expressive place. When Turkey finally won the man next to me turned and cracked about 1/16th of a smile, which I guess was euphoria for a place like that. Later the streets filled with people sounding their car horns and celebrating but after about half an hour everyone had gone home to bed.

Today I went and had a look at Aya Sofia, the Blue Mosque and the Cistern - more so I could tick them off on my list. I wasn't really in the mood for cultural highlights. Then I idled round the Grand Bazaar and found a whole block dedicated to things you would need to make fake designer jeans. You could buy authentic looking labels and buttons and there was a whole stall (left) dedicated to belts.

After than I walked down to the river. There are lots of ferries crossing the Bosphorus for about 50p and I decided to get one one randomly and see where it went. I had a nice 15 minutes' sail (you can sit outside and the views were great) and ended up at the bus station. The surrounding bit of the city looked pretty dull and anyway it was up a steep hill, two reasons not to bother. So I had an ice cream, sat by the water for a bit and caught the next ferry back.

On the way home I came across this young man all dressed up with his mum and dad. He actually looked happier than that but maybe he does know what's going on. According to the guys behind the desk at my hotel, today he gets a party and lots of presents. And tomorrow he is circumcised. Ah, religion...

Bucharest and Istanbul
Well, I should have said a language that turned out to be oddly familiar. Romanian (and I guess there is a clue in the name) is of course just like all those Romance languages we learnt at school, just mixed up. When I arrived in Bucharest I needed to find out if there was a restaurant car on my next train, which would be be taking 18 hours to Istanbul. No one spoke English but the beauty of Romanian meant that "Se pode mangiare em train?" worked a treat. (Actually it half worked a treat. There was a restaurant car but it disappeared when the train split in two, half heading south west to Thessaloniki, the restaurant car with it.)



Bucharest itself is no picture- postcard destination. Soviet would be too mean a word for it but it comes pretty close. I wandered for a couple of hours looking for highlights but basically the city is one or two Roman Orthodox churches (with lots of nice icons) tucked in between blocks and flats that would make the Elephant & Castle blush. Oh and there is an enormous military museum. While there are certainly plenty of modern goods for sale in the supermarkets, furniture and clothes shops are still stuck somewhere in the 1970s. Clothes tend to have lots of sparkly bits on them, preferably in manmade fibres and this is not a retro lighting shop though its contents would make any self-respecting Hoxtonite quiver with desire.

It took me a while to work out the money and trying to buy a doughnut for breakfast I ended up with 12 for the price of 10. Having eaten about four of them (they tasted strangely acrid, though not bad), I gave the rest to a homeless man outside the station which caused a little commotion among his fellow rough sleepers who indicated people they thought were more deserving causes. I tried to say that they could all share them but even Romanian-garble-plus-sign language didn't really get through. (How do you do "share" in sign language anyway?)

On the train I again found that I had a compartment to myself - with a basin! - which was a wonderful luxury. I made friends with the guy who ran the carriage and he happily took my remaining Romanian lei off me in return for ultra sweet cups of Nescafe.

For the first few hours we passed through lush countryside, all ploughed fields and tractors going up and down interspersed with little green copses and every so often a wild meadow in vibrant blues and purples and yellows. We got to the Bulgarian border at 2.15pm. The Romanian guards got on the train and took a quick look at my passport, then came the Bulgarian guard, who had more of a problem with my too-new passport (it did look rather fake). He asked me if I had a driving licence with me but was very happy with my NHS E111 card instead, which he didn't even look at.

As we carried on east, the landscape got hillier and greener and soon we were travelling through cool, green woods, following the route of a rocky stream with wonderfully clear water. Even this late in the day (it was late afternoon) it was 32C and the breeze from the forest was a treat.

After dark there wasn't much to do - the restaurant/bar car having set off for Greece - but at about 10, we had a spectacular lightning storm. The land was flat again and you could see great forks of lightning in the far distance arcing down and making the whole sky light up like daylight. I turned off my light and watched them until I fell asleep.

We reached the Turkish border at about 2am. This time the Bulgarian guards were more thorough. This is the edge of the EU, after all, and they probably wanted to make sure no one escaped. We were shunted into a floodlit marshalling yard and a whole gang of variously-uniformed people got on the train to glare at our passports.

We then sat in the siding for an hour and a half. At one point I tried to get off to stretch my legs but I was shooed back on board by a guard who was patrolling up and down the side of the train. He was armed and his presence, along with the dark night and the floodlights, gave the whole scene a very Le Carré air and I found myself thinking of times when these borders were a lot more strictly policed and people got off these trains never to get on them again. When I was last here, in 1984 and also travelling by train, the person I was travelling with made the mistake of arguing with the border guards (I think it was on the Czechoslovak border) who then cleared the train of everyone except us. It was about midnight and snowing and the other passengers were made to wait an hour on the platform until someone arrived who managed to calm the situation. They spent the time glaring in our window and shivering. We were not popular after that.

By 4am we had got to the Turkish border for a happily inefficient session of queuing for a visa, queuing for a stamp, discovering we were in the wrong queue, requeuing, finally getting a stamp and then getting back on the train. As well as the 100 or so of us from the Istanbul Express, there were two or three coachloads of backpackers trying to do the same thing and what appeared to be the Romanian under-14 athletics team. Nothing was signposted, no one really knew where to go and although there were 10 or so passport control people milling around, only one of them was actually checking passports. The rest were smoking. Unsurprisingly we were a couple of hours late arriving in Istanbul.

Now I'm here and checked into a nice little hotel in Sultanahmet. It's a beautiful day, not too hot. I've had a shower and I am going to be a tourist for two days. This afternoon I'll go to Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque and then to a hammam for a massage.

If you have read this far, thanks, but don't you have better things to do with your time? Enjoy the day and catch you soon.

London to Budapest



The trains have been great. Eurostar to Brussels was unusually empty and I had a carriage to myself apart from a group of four Irish church biddies who spent the journey comparing notes on ecclesiastical architecture ("Franciscan far better than the Jesuits") and ladies loos in London ("The Barbican is the best. You can really sit and contemplate."). I had a couple of hours to kill in Brussels so went to see the Grand Place and the Manneken Pis before ending up, in an unexpected little preview of the Middle East, in an Arab area round the station eating flatbread and hummous and drinking mint tea.

I have been reading a wonderful book that Pedro gave me called Parallels and Paradoxes, made up of conversations between Daniel Barrenboim and Edward Said, ostensibly on music but, inevitably, given their backgrounds and engagement with the world, touching on politics, philosophy and, of course, the Arab-Israeli conflict. Barrenboim has famously tackled the longstanding ban on Wagner in Israel and their dialogue about Germany and the long shadow of Holocaust made timely reading as I pulled into Cologne. Whatever your personal history - and my family was spared the Holocaust - being a Jew on a railway line travelling east through Germany is always going to have resonances and I have never really felt comfortable in that country. Barrenboim, however, an Israeli Jew who lives in Berlin, makes a strong plea for a kind of mindful mourning of the past. And, unexpectedly for someone who had such a bad press in certain sections of the Jewish world, Said is less forgiving. It would be too simple to say their thoughts are full of hope, but both argue strongly for reconciliation. An excellent book and one I'd recommend to anyone with the slightest interest in how peoples can move on after conflict. Their discussion of the idea of musical tempo and the Oslo Accord (the book was published in 2001) alone makes powerful reading.



German trains are smoother than the sleepers that rattle through France into Spain or Italy and I got an very good night's sleep on the way to Vienna. I had images of pastries and creamy coffee for breakfast when I arrived but my connection was too tight to leave the station so, ironically, I ended up with a cappucino from a machine. But the consolation prize was finding this, a roll dedicated to Euro 2008.

This afternoon I have spent catching up on email and stuff in Budapest. I had hoped to get to the Gellert Baths for a scrub down and massage but these are just fleeting visits to cities on the way and I couldn't resist some real coffee and a proper lunch at a Wi-Fi cafe I found on the way. Now it's time to stroll back to the station for the 1745 overnight train to Bucharest and, in the morning, another, country, another currency and another language I am simply clueless about.

Viszlat! as apparently they say here. Till then.

Week -1 The day before

This summer I'm going to be spending six weeks in Jerusalem, at a summer school run by the Conservative Yeshiva, a Reform Jewish rabbinical college just outside the old city. I'll be studying modern Hebrew in the morning and some aspects of Judaism in the afternoon. But just as important, I think, will be a chance to live for six weeks in a place that for millennia has been the focus of so much attention.

I'm not at all sure what to expect but that's part of the adventure. The other part, as many of you will know, is the fact that I am doing my best not to fly this year. So, as of tomorrow morning, I'll be setting off from St Pancras on a ten-day journey through Europe, Turkey and into the Middle East by train and bus. I arrive in Istanbul on Friday morning, where I'll stay for a couple of days. And after that it will be across Turkey, into Syria and down via Damascus and Amman to the border crossing into Jerusalem. All being well I'll be arriving in Jerusalem on June 26.

I like writing blogs of my travel and it seems a good way of staying in touch with my friends at home. I'll be updating this when I can, maybe once a day or so if there's stuff to tell. And I'll put some photos up too. And in the meantime, have a great summer, stay in touch, feel free to add comments and catch you soon.

David