Week 2 - Ordinary life and a touch of magic

I didn't make it to the Dead Sea (buses there only leave at weird times) but I did make it to Tel Aviv for a little bit of sun and sea on Friday afternoon. After Jerusalem it felt noisy and hard-edged and for the first time this whole trip I had the feeling I was being ripped off - by a cab driver on the way back to the bus station. Of course I am not comparing like for like and Tel Aviv is in so many ways a great city but it was lovely to come back to the tranquility of Jerusalem.

Pedro, in a comment a while ago, posted a lovely passage from Margaret Atwood about travelling slowly, so I thought I would repost it here.

Walking was not fast enough, so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.
Flying isn't fast enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.

from The Tent

I finally made it to the supermarket and at last I am cooking at home rather than scoffing yet another kebab/shwarma with chips (they're delicious though), washed down with a non-Diet Coke. And, in a related move, I went to Jerusalem's public swimming pool, which is five minutes from my flat. It's expensive (50 shekels, about £8) and pretty run down but fun to go to. There are two pools: an Olympic-sized lanes pool, half undercover and half in the open air, where people plod/power up and down; and a kids' pool out in the sun with a huge water slide, that I would love to have a go on. And then there's lots of grass and plastic chairs and people lounging around sunbathing, reading and chatting on their mobiles.

The changing rooms are pretty poor and there's no way you can get a locker (they are all padlocked), so you either you trust that no one will steal your clothes or you take everything with you. For some reason I did a bit of both, but it's actually it's actually quite safe. You're probably more at risk from athlete's foot than theft and I had my flip flops. The swim was nice and I'll go again despite the price. It's all very local authority but it's a slice of real Jerusalem life and the hotel (and YMCA) pools are even more expensive.

Someone I met in Damascus is now in town. He also came into Israel via the Allenby Bridge border and had a lot of trouble getting in. While my letter from the yeshiva (and the fact that I said I was Jewish) helped cancel out the fact that I had been to Syria in the eyes of the border guards, he had no such luck and was detained there for five or six hours in a freezing waiting area (the air con was on high) with nothing to eat or drink. When he finally got through, he complained to one of the border guards about the way they were treating people and in return got a tirade about the Palestinians: "You don't know what I know about these people. I hate Palestinians. I kill Palestinians." A horrible welcome to Israel and one this country should be ashamed of.

He was the last person to be cleared that day and when he finally made it out through customs the public transport to Jerusalem had gone all that was left was a single cab driver who charged him 300 shekels to take him there. The fair should probably have been about 100. "You're lucky I'm not charging you 600," said the driver.

On Friday evening I went to a great July 4/start of shabbat dinner at the house of some friends from my Hebrew class - after a particularly happy clappy Friday evening service at a synagogue nearby. And then on Saturday evening, I went for a walk through a park near my flat and bumped into them again, something that seems to happen quite a lot here. We walked for an hour or so along a long promenade that looks back to the Old City and down across the Valley of Hinnon (Gehenna, or hell, in the Bible) to the Garden of Gethsemane and the (mainly Arab) districts of east Jerusalem. It was sunset and the golden Dome of the Rock was glowing pink and orange and we had that magical moment when the sun is still on the horizon and the electric lights start to come on.

Dotted among the streetlamps where dots of green which marked the minarets of mosques (or maybe pharmacies, but I am pretty sure they were mosques) and after a while we could hear the muezzins' call to prayer. It was touching moment to realise that, for all the problems and privations caused by the conflict here, Muslims are still praying in Jerusalem. In Damascus, all the synagogues are closed.