SIX WEEKS IN JERUSALEM

2008-09-01T10:45:00.006+01:00

The last leg

I don't know what I was expecting from the ferry from Patra to Bari, but I certainly wasn't expecting the Superfast IV. After the little Notos (and before that a ferry career that has basically being confined to the North Sea) the Superfast felt like the Trocodero Centre on water. Ten decks high and who knows how long, it had mirrored escalators that took you up to the reception area, comfy sofas everywhere, three (or was it four?) bars, a pool, two restaurants and a disco. It was only going to be 14 hours from Greece to Italy but I reckon that if even 10 minutes passed without your being offered the chance to drink, eat, shop, dance, swim or play fruit machines, the company would have considered it had failed.

I had gone not for a cabin - they looked nice but were expensive - but for what the Superfast called 'Air Seats', which were one up from sleeping on the deck and anyway I didn't have a sleeping bag. This was a mistake really. What you got was a place in a grim, hermetically sealed box of a room where a few rows of airline-style seats were lined up in front of a giant video screen that, on our sailing, showed 'Troy' at least twice and then some sci-fi film with Will Smith in it until we managed to get them to switch it off at 2am. What they wouldn't switch off - or even turn down - were the overhead lights, which stayed on all night ('for emergency reasons') pumping out a good megawatt of icy white glare each. Add to that the ridiculously uncomfortable 'air seats' and sleep was pretty much miraculous. I managed to get some by putting in my ear plugs - easily the best thing I packed this whole trip - and putting a towel and a my jumper over my face. The deck would have been nicer.

At about 4am I woke up and went for a little walk. The DVD soundtrack had for some reason come on again, though not the video, and the sound of, I think, Maggie Smith as Mary Poppins suddenly filled the cabin in a rather creepy way. Up on deck there was a little breeze and lots of stars and on the way down again I thought I would look in on the disco. I cracked open the door to find myself in a huge black room, pounding with hi-energy Eurotrash and the whole thing a riot of flashing blue neon lights, sparkling chrome, strobes and a spinning mirror ball, as if the DJ had set all the controls to MAX and walked out. In the middle of all of this, sitting at the bar with a vodka and tonic, was a single young woman staring at herself in the mirror and a bored-looking barman gazing past her into middle distance. Neither looked as if they had moved for hours. I nipped back out again before they spotted me and went and found someone to turn off Maggie Smith.

After all of that Bari was nicely low-key, though arriving there on a Saturday morning was like walking into some bizarre gender-role experiment. After living in London, it's easy to forget that there are still parts of the European Union like the south of Italy. Everywhere you looked, women and young girls were scrubbing, sweeping, hanging out washing, carrying bags of shopping and making pasta in kitchens that opened to the street, while groups of men and boys stood around on the street corners eyeing up each other's Vespas, grunting occasionally and putting the world to rights. No wonder Germaine Greer sticks to Tuscany.

The old town, where I was staying in the least useful hostel in the world - check in at 11 (not before), leave your stuff there but have no access to it until 5, then check out the next morning before 9.30 - is lovely in a classic Italian old town kind of way. I did some exploring, lost count of the shrines to Madonnas of this and that dotted up and down the little alleyways and glanced inside the cathedral. Then I took a bus to a tiny beach just down the coast where everyone has a nice paddle in an incredibly shallow bit of the Med.

The beach is all very family and a little old fashioned and really the only thing to do in Bari, so I went again today before getting my train. The one little bar was hosting what is obviously a regular Sunday morning Latin dance session. LIttle groups of three generations of the same family sat around in the sun and listened to dad sound off about something or other. And the lifeguard and his mates, light years away from the world of Hasselhoff and Anderson, were reading the Ikea catalogue.

Now I am on the overnight to Paris. I am a staying there with Gilles and Joel tomorrow night - it'll be great to see them - and then on Tuesday lunchtime I'll be back in London and my trip will be over.

There'll be plenty of time for reflection and reminiscence when I get back, of course, but what started as a small idea to learn some Hebrew in Israel has turned out to be a wonderful adventure. I have met some incredibly interesting people and been to some unexpectedly fascinating places.

It's also been fun writing this blog and I want to say thanks to those of you who have been reading it and sending comments. One of the very best things about being back in London will be seeing you all in person again and I am really looking forward to that.

But there's another reason I'm looking forward to being back too. When I set off from Marion and Steph's house back in June I remember looking round at the sights that were familiar to me (including the end of my own road) and wondering if I would see them in a different light when I got back. Now I am only a day or so from being home again, all I can say is I very much hope so. Call it the 'Wizard of Oz' complex if you want - and forgive me one last schmaltzy moment - but the way travel makes us see the familiar in a fresh way is, for me, one of the real joys of setting off from home in the first place. And we are lucky we live in a time and in a place that makes travel so easy. So, I'll sign off now and here's to all our travels in the future and plenty of discoveries to come.

David

2008-08-28T19:41:00.005+01:00

A mellow day at the lake

I spent the morning at Athens' Jewish Museum, partly out of a sense of loyalty, partly because the Lonely Planet called it one of the most important Jewish museums in Europe and partly because out of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were living in Greece at the start of the second world war - and who had thrived in the country since 300BC - more than 97% were transported to death camps in 1944 and murdered by the Germans and their Bulgarian allies.

Unfortunately, after the joys of the Benaki Museum, the Jewish museum was (a) dusty, (b) badly lit and (c) often quite uninspired. There were some beautiful items from happier times and poignant ones from the Holocaust - I especially liked the collection of tickets and passes that traced a camp survivor's journey back from eastern Europe to her home town in Greece - but, for me, the museum didn'y really do them justice, which was a shame.

I spent the rest of the day at a very nice place, though. South of Athens, after you have passed all the little beaches (and a fair few swanky marinas), you get to the end of a bus line and big natural lake that sits, surrounded by rocky cliffs, just back from the coast. The water is a mixture of salty and fresh, is at a constant 28C and is perfect for lazy swimming.

The place has a bit of a sanitorium feel about it as apparently the mineral mix is good for you and the clientele are mostly older people and families out with gran. You pay your entrance (6 euros) and then you can loll around on chairs and sun loungers and take a dip whenever you fancy. Waiters come round and bring drinks and snacks and the whole thing is very mellow and civilised.

There's an easy slope into the water, plus some steps and a lift for wheelchair users, and once you are in you paddle out into the middle and sort of pootle around for a while. The water is silky and smooth and you don't really want to make an effort. Fast swimming doesn't really happen here and is proabably non-de rigueur. The most rebellious anyone gets is nipping across the line of buoys that separate the swimmers from the 'dangerous' waters near the cliff edge.

There is, however, an unexpected treat when you first get in. A school of little black cleaner fish, no more than 4cm or 5cm long, lurk around the steps and if you stay still they will descend on your feet and give you a pedicure, nibbling away at all the dead skin and leaving you, like the water, smooth and silky. The feeling is about a micron away from unbearable, like being continually tickled by someone who refuses to stop. But, if you can get over that, it is actually quite pleasant and there's no doubt that, after eight weeks' wearing flip flops, my feet could do with some attention.

I really enjoyed this lake and I wish I could remember what it is called. (I'll update this post tomorrow or the next day when I have found its name again.) It was an unexpected way to say goodbye to a city I feel I have only just begun to get to know. I'm sure I'll be back. Greece has always been something of a mystery to me bit now, just as when you meet a new person and have the feeling good things will come of it, I think there will be some interesting times here up ahead.

In the meantime, tomorrow I get the train to Patras (which, half of the time, appears to be called Patra - another Greek mystery I haven't been able to unravel) and from there an overnight boat to Bari, which is home, apparently, of one of my favourite pasta dishes: orecchiette with anchovies and broccoli. After that Bologna, Paris and the Eurostar to St Pancras. But all of that is to come. In the meantime, I am going to brave the hostel rooftop and have one last beer looking out over the Acropolis.

2008-08-27T18:46:00.011+01:00

A day among the ruins

Once I had sorted my stuff and done some washing I thought the Acropolis could wait, so I went to the beach. Actually, it's not quite that simple. Here you don't really go to the beach. You go to one of dozens of little private beachlets that stretch about 20km down the coast and where, for a fee, you get deckchairs, umbrellas, showers, music, a bar etc etc. A city tram runs the length of the coast and you hop off when you get to the one you want. I chose pretty badly (on the basis of the logo, now you ask) and ended up in a sort of slightly seedy sub-Wallpaper kind of joint with too loud techno music, some odd people and extortionate prices. I hung on in there as long as I could, dividing the amount I had paid by the minutes I was getting out of it, and then double-quicked it back to the hostel. Not the mellowest afternoon I have spent by the Med.

In fact back at the hostel, things had revved up a notch too. The overwhelming demographic at Athens Backpackers is twentysomething New Zealander and they do like their fun. The hostel has a rooftop bar that looks out over the Acropolis and (dumbly) I thought I might go up there a for a quiet beer and watch the sun set over the ruins. By now, though, the time was Happy Hour + 2 and you could hear the party five floors down. As I got to the top of the little metal stairs that led on to the roof, the first thing I saw was a solid mass of bodies, the first thing I smelt was beer and the first thing I heard was someone complaining in a plaintive Kiwi wail that she had just turned 24: 'I'm so OWWWWWWWWLLLLD and I hate it!' I decided to give them a miss.

Today, though, was wonderful. Unlike almost everyone else in the hostel (there are some people over 25; I saw them at breakfast) I didn't sleep in till 12 with a hangover but got up early and headed out for the culture. The aim was to beat the crowds to the Acropolis and it kind of worked.

I am not a big fan of archaeological sights but Athens is changing my point of view. It was great to see the Parthenon at last in the flesh, so to speak, though I'm still not exactly sure what went on there and obviously the best bits are in the British Museum. But I also was really taken by the Temple of Athena Nike, which sits just away from it and is somehow more elegant and compact, the Mozart to the Parthenon's Beethoven if you like. (You can pretend I didn't say that.)

What I hadn't really thought about was that the whole of the Acropolis would be a big building site. Restoaration work has been going on continually, I think, since the 1970s and there is scaffolding all over the place and cranes and hammering and a little railway that carries marble between the sites. Plus there's a constant background noise of sawing, drilling and chiseling which tend to drown out the tour guides shepherding streams of people up the hill and from site to site (I only just managed to stay ahead of the crowds). Billions have gone into this project (and when the new museum is opened they will soon be ready to have the Elgin marbles back - haha) but it turns out not everyone is impressed by the work in progress. I found myself standing next to a guy from Liverpool who said to his friend:

'I don't know why they're doing that, putting the new marble in the gaps, those white bits... I mean, I know they'll treat them with something to make them look old, like, but it's not right. You don't want to look at new stuff. What I like is what you see is what you get. That's why I like the Colosseum. I like Pompeii. There, what you see is what you get.'

After the noise of the Parthenon, the wander down through the trees to the ancient marketplace at the bottom of the hill is so quiet you wonder if your ears have popped. But while the Acropolis gives you the razzmatazz, here you get a little taste of real (ancient) Athens.

At risk of coming over all Michael Wood, I really found this place exciting. You can see where Socrates stood and spoke to the crowd. Here was were those great debates took place about what it meant to be free and what it meant to be a slave, nearly 1,800 years before the Magna Carta (and more than two millennia before the Bill of Rights). And here you can literally stand on the ground where they invented the idea of democracy. It was powerful to think that so much of what we take for granted (or at least fight to preserve) about modern liberal living came from this small patch of land by the Med. Roman ruins are interesting, especially if you have seen 'I, Claudius', but the stuff that happened at Greek ruins still influence us today.

Once you have done all the swooning over rocks and pillars and stuff, there's also a nicely presented little museum. Here, among the various pots and shards of terracotta, is a real bronze Spartan shield - captured by the Athenians in the Battle of Something-or-other. It measures almost a metre across, looks like it weighs a ton and is fantastically dented and battered by what were real Athenian swords aimed at the real man behind. There is also a clever little machine, involving black and white balls, that picked people for jury service - uncannily like the one that picks the lottery numbers now, though this was in 500BC. And, my favourite for some reason, a terracotta bucket (that's a reproduction in the pic above) with a little hole in the bottom that you filled with water and used to time people's speeches. When the water had run out they had to stop talking (this one lasted six minutes). Apparently real experts could time their conclusion perfectly to the last drop. The museum is also a good answer to the Liverpool guy's complaints. Its restored colonnade (pic below) gives you a very good idea of what Athens 550BC must have looked like.

After that I went walking out into the real world again and into the Monastiraki Flea Market. It was early but I was hungry so I sat at a little corner cafe and, with 100% authenticity and 0% originality, had lamb kebab and Greek salad. (I could probably have had Demis Roussos and some tsatsiki too, but I didn't want to be clichéd.) The flea market was like a small version of Camden and no better and no worse, though I did find a cool stall of Greek posters from the 1940s and 1950s (they would, unfortunately, crumple up in my rucksack) and, for me at least, an even cooler one of instruments and bits of electronics from old military aircraft (though even I wouldn't be sure what to do with them when I got home). I did manage to stock up on some good second-hand books in English - though I had to pass on Homer when the stallkeeper, having heavily discounted Alistair MacLean and an old Simenon novel, refused to knock a cent of his original price for 'The Iliad'. Maybe that's what patriotism is.

I had almost had enough history by then but here the past seems to pull you back to it and I was wandering back to the hostel when I caught a glimpse of some towering columns on the other side of a busy six-lane highway. It turned out to be the Temple of Olympian Zeus and you can't really get much more towering than that. Rather spectacularly set apart from the rest of the ruins in a space all of its own, this temple beat all the records. It took 700 years to build. There were 104 columns, each 17 metres high and 2m in diameter (I'm reading this from the guidebook by the way; I don't actually know these details). It held a giant gold and ivory statue of Zeus and a similarly huge one of Hadrian (currently everybody's favourite Roman emperor), who finished it in AD132.

Even now, with only 14 columns remaining - and a 15th that fell over in a storm in 1852 and now lies on its side - it has a kind of mammoth presence. I loved it. It must have been a stunning building when it was finished and I thought that if I had lived in Athens in those days I might have signed up to be one of the Zeus priests. It would certainly beat cowering behind your metre-wide dented bronze shield while half the cast of '300' thundered down on top of you - though maybe you had to do that bit too. That's the trouble with democracy.

(This shouldn't be funny...)

My diversion to the Temple of Olympian Zeus (and I bet you can't believe how long this post is going on) put me in a perfect position to go to my second museum of the day - which for me must be a record. But the Benaki Museum, which sits just north of some nice gardens in the middle of the city, is a treat. It's small, it's interesting and it has a lovely rooftop cafe with good cappuccino and nice biscuits.

The collection, which I think was once the private collection of a 1920s Alexandrian merchant, traces the cultural development of Greece from almost the origins of time to the present day. And if I were Greek I would be incredibly proud - a British collection would begin around 900AD.

For me, the best stuff is near the beginning. In one of the first cabinets there is a little clay figurine of a woman from about 6,000BC and whose face is so detailed and realistic that she wouldn't look out of place on a street in Athens or London today (except that she is 6in high and made of clay, of course). A little more recent are some intricate and delicate solid gold wreaths to wear in your hair from about 600BC, when we Brits probably hadn't even discovered coracles, and - maybe to go with them? - tiny ornate earrings of winged gods holding bows and arrows and of little animals and human figures. And of course there were loads of painted vases, though, unlike most collections of Greek painted vases, these weren't (a) dusty, (b) badly lit or (c) boring.

The exhibition runs chronologically and rather abruptly (in about gallery 4) you hit 300ishAD and Christian Byzantium. I like Byzantine art but it's strange to see it next to all those pieces from earlier Greek history and you are left with the odd impression that suddenly everyone was wearing more clothes - as if the coming of Christ had caused a serious drop in temperature. Plus comedy seems to have been banned. While in the earlier Greek stuff there are plenty of satyrs and funny masks and frolicking maidens on vases to create the impression of a pretty carefree life. (And if they were wearing clothes at all, it would be those Greek-y drape-y things that look as though they have wrapped themselves in a giant Kleenex.) But come the Byzantines and it's all saints spearing serpents, dour-faced virgins contemplating the crucifixion and everyone wearing at least three more layers.

The rest of the museum I scooted round a bit more quickly, though there were some treats here too. I almost entirely skipped a gallery showing the development of Greek ethnic costume over the ages - all sashes, buckles and ethnic prints as far as I could see. But there are two genuine living rooms from 18th-century Macedonian homes that blow you away. One especially has walls and ceiling entirely made entirely of a light intricately carved wood, like a particularly beautiful church, and it reminded me why I have always wanted to live in a wooden house. If you dropped in on the owner of this room, you would simply refuse to leave.

There is also a beautiful embroidered bridal bed valance - not a phrase you find yourself typing every day - with little pictures of people and animals and rural life. It reminded me of a very similar (woven) bridal gift I saw in Peru, with the same people and scenes from life but, of course, llamas instead of goats. Greece to Peru: we are more of a family than we often imagine. Later, in the galleries dedicated to the War of Independence, there was a haunting portrait of someone called Dimitrios Botsaris as a child. He was orphaned during the war, semi adopted by the new Greek royal family (his father was a big independence fighter) and went on to become minister of war.

I've pasted him below. The reproduction is not that great but there's something in it that made me go back and look at this portrait again and again, perhaps because, even this young, he seems to know the danger and the glory that is up ahead.

I also need to find out more about the satirical Athenian shadow puppeteer Sotiris Spatharis but as that's the second phrase today that you don't find yourself typing that often, and this post has gone on long enough, I am going to go now and say hi to the New Zealanders, efharisto to you for reading this far and good night from what has turned out to be, historically at least, a pretty magical place to be.

2008-08-26T09:33:00.012+01:00

From Haifa to Piraeus

When I was trying to set up this part of my trip, I had a brief email exchange with the shipping agent in Haifa. I wanted to know what I could expect on board - I'd heard that some of these cargo ships even had swimming pools and stuff like that. So I dropped a line to my new friend Alicia at Rosenfeld Shipping to ask about the facilities. Her reply was succinct:

David

It's a cargo ship.

Yours

Alicia

So it was with pretty low expectations that I showed up at Haifa docks at 9 on Friday morning to find a little bunch of fellow travelers, a woman with a clipboard and the inevitable Israeli security guy waiting to be taken to our boat. There were a couple of German motorcyclists taking their bikes back from a holiday in Israel, a Dutch man who was driving a Transit van but who otherwise was pretty schtum about what he was up to and an older Israeli couple who were friends of the ship's owner and were going to see him in Cyprus.

After a couple of hours' meandering from immigration office to customs check and back again (the port was all but closed as there were no big ships in that day) we came round the corner to find the M/V Notos waiting for us: 8,111 tonnes, registered in Limmasol and a veteran of the Athens - Cyprus - Haifa run.

I say waiting for us, but only in the way that someone is waiting for you who invites you to dinner and when you show up the kitchen is still cold and they are reading the paper. It stood there at the quayside, big, white-(ish) and proud and spectacularly empty, its rear doors wide open to receive a worryingly large number of containers before we sailed.

Needless to say we have spent most of the day in the port, but that has given us time to explore the ship and watch the lorries bringing the cargo aboard. Mostly we are shipping those big metal containers that could have anything inside but there are also crates of Israeli plums and pomegranates and various little packages for people in Cyprus. There seems to be an enormous collection of bathroom fittings and Mr Popodopoulos of Nicosia will be pleased to hear his lighting units are on the way.

Apart from the Israeli couple, who are in the Owner's Cabin (upstairs, next to the captain and almost certainly with its own en suite jacuzzi), we are staying in crew quarters, which means a deck or two below, simple, a bit scruffy and clean. I'm in a cabin for two with upper and lower berths and a little washbasin, plus a porthole which looks out on to the Med - though admittedly on to the Med across the top of an exhaust vent from the lorry deck below. The showers and toilets wouldn't go down well on a Cunard cruise (well, to be honest they would cause a few grumbles on a prison ship) but they are OK and give you a kind of 'one of the boys' feel when you use them. Thank goodness, though, the sea so far has been calm. And there's a little place - the 'Salon' - where we can sit around and watch TV.

The crew is a mix of two or three Greeks (the guys in charge) and about 20 Egyptians, Russians, Indians and a couple of guys from Japan. Everyone eats together in little shifts and the food is great and comes in huge portions - they are, after all, feeding people who haul big containers on and off ships all day. We are, though, on a kind of NHS hospital food timetable, which is posted on the 'Salon' wall:

Breakfast 0830-0900
Lunch 1230-1300
Dinner 1700-1730

And if you miss those times that's it - there's no shop or 24-hour buffet on board (thanks, Alicia).

We have finally set sail (it's 5pm) and it was sad to see Israel disappearing behind us. But the ship itself is like a little country of its own. We can go just about anywhere as long as we don't get in the way. I am guessing the engine room is pretty much out of bounds and no one has invited us on to the bridge yet, but we are working on that. And you can even get right to the front (yeah, yeah, I know, the bow) for that 'Titanic' moment. But it does look a bit risky and it would be embarrassing to fall in.

Tomorrow we dock at Limassol in Cyprus to take on more stuff. I'm hoping to go ashore and buy a mains adapter. My Israeli one, which was pretty hopeless in Israel, is useless with the sockets here and my iPod needs recharging. No one is clear if we will be allowed off or not. It seems to be up to the Captain so we are going to ask in the morning.

The Day of Pigs

We woke up to find ourselves in port. The day was a bit hazier than before and by the thermometer it was cooler than in Haifa. But the humidity was intense and as soon as you stepped outside you found yourself covered in that film of sweat that's neither tropical nor sporty but simply not nice.

We were to be here, loading up with more containers, for most of the day so the captain gave the OK for three of us to go ashore and see the town. He kept out passports but we were given little laminated badges that said we were passengers on the Notos and told to be back on board by 3pm. Two huge cruise liners (or huge compared to out little cargo ship) had just docked and the immigration staff were getting ready for an influx of day trippers. So we nipped ahead and got to the front of the queue. In fact we needn't have worried. They just glanced at our badges, asked if we were from the EU and waved us through. So much for Fortress Europe, we thought, though the southern half of Cyprus is probably not the best place to land if you are an illegal immigrant and plan on opening a corner shop in Hamburg. The only way is out again or up into the Turkish half, which probably wouldn't help.

I'm afraid I have almost nothing to say about Limmasol, except that it was hot and they do nice ice coffees. We sat by the beach for a while and then I bought an adaptor for my MacBook and was back on the ship in time for lunch.

By the afternoon, the whole of the upper deck, which yesterday was empty, was covered with new containers. Among the new arrivals was a lorry load of pigs, who even now are grunting and snorting around in their pens and drinking from little pipes that squirt water when they get their snouts round them - rather like the ones you get in airports. I reckon there must be 200 of them on the three decks of their container, which is open at the sides. I'm no expert but they seem happy enough, though the appearance of a plate of ham at dinner was a little too much of a coincidence for our comfort.

Now we are on our way again and at least the movement of the ship provides a breeze. I've just got into trouble-ish with the Captain for going for a run on a bit of the deck where some crew members were asleep below. He was fine about it really but I think he thought I was crazy. And to be honest he really doesn't look the running type - imagine a 63-year-old Greek ship captain with a grubby t-shirt and you probably have the right idea. Actually I'm not sure I am the running type either. But after the enormous quantities of food you get at lunchtime, followed, only four and a half hours later, by a similar amount at dinner, you feel you have to do something.

Sunday on the briny blue

By now we have got into the rhythm of life on board. Sleep is idyllic, with the soft hum of the engines and the swushhhh of the sea coming in through your porthole. And the day is punctuated by the crazily close-together meal times. We are served by a shy 20-year-old from Gujarat called Max. He told me his full name but then watched patiently as the 20 or so syllables failed to get into the right order in my head and said, 'but everyone calls me Max.'

This is Max's first job aboard - though whether it's his first on this ship or any ship I couldn't work out - and he doesn't look too happy about it. His immediate superior, Ahmed, all smiles and jokes with us, seems to be breaking him in almost literally and there are frequent orders for Max to tidy this, polish that or Hoover the other. When he serves us our food he does so with a kind of melancholy that suggests life should offer more than a Greek cargo ship on the Med. And he probably has a point. Here he is pretty much the bottom of the pile. On the internal phone directory, which is posted on the wall in the 'Salon', the final entry is for 'Servant', though I doubt even that rings in Max's room.

The rest of the time we divide between sleeping, walking around the decks, reading books and watching the fuzzy television set that gets various random channels depending which land mass we are near. Today, a few of us managed to get up to the bridge and the navigator (or whatever that guy is called on boats) showed us that we were soon to be passing Rhodes. And indeed the whole day we spent sailing through beautiful deep blue seas past the various Dodecanese and Cyclades islands on our way to Athens. Obviously - this would have been the case in any country - the TV was showing the Olympics but, when the Greek flag was raised alongside the Chinese one in the closing ceremony, there were extra enthusiastic grunts of patriotic approval from the Captain and his cronies.

We have discovered that you occupy a funny space as passengers on a cargo ship. One the one hand - and the Captain in one of his rare sociable moments confirmed this - we are totally in the way. A cargo ship probably runs a lot better if there aren't excited landlubbers clogging up your gangways and taking pictures of the pigs. One the other, at least no one has to worry about us and there are no Quiz Nights, daily bulletins, trips ashore and fancy dress parties to organise. In fact they don't even have to be polite, though so far we are all getting on fine.

Like all travellers thrown together randomly for a few days we are happily swapping stories about where we have been, when we were last in each other's cities etc and discussing at length a topic that right now seems to get every traveller from Aachen to Zanzibar foaming at the mouth: the cost of living in London. I've only been away a couple of months but I have lost count of the number of times I have had to commiserate someone on how much it costs to to get the Tube from Covent Garden to Golders Green or advise them on where to stay in London for less that 50 euros per night (er, like, nowhere?). Really, we need to do something about our city. We won't be able to afford to live there soon.

Tomorrow morning we arrive in Piraeus and we and the pigs will be disembarking. My fellow passengers, with their motorbikes and van, will be heading north and west through Greece. I'll be stopping in Athens for a few days, which I am excited about. I've never been there and I have found a hostel right next to the Acropolis. The pigs, I guess, will soon discover where they are headed and will be looking back on their last few days on the Notos with some nostalgia.

Update: Monday morning

It's 11am and we are stuck just outside the port in Piraeus. There's a go-slow on the docks and a queue of ships waiting to berth. It turns out that there is a hierarchy of vessels in this situation. Cruise liners get in first, car ferries next, etc etc. Little ships with containers and pigs aboard are pretty much near the bottom. We may be here some time.

1pm: No sign yet of any movement on shore, so of course we have another hearty lunch. We sit around in the 'Salon' and get slightly nervous about missed connections etc. But really the biggest danger is running out of reading matter. Unexpectedly together for a fourth day, we're finding the conversation moving in dangerous directions. The Captain turns out to be a passionate supporter of Putin and what he is doing in Georgia. The Dutch guy has started to hint at what he was doing in Israel: it has something to do with Old Testament prophecies starting to come true. We are wondering how much food is left in the kitchen.

3pm: The captain comes in and says, 'Ninety-five per cent tomorrow.' We hold on to the possibility of the other five per cent but really it looks like we are here for another night. Piraeus and Athens tantalisingly in view but out of reach. Thoughts turn to hijacking a boat.

5pm: Another meal (of course) and confirmation that we are staying the night. The ship is supposed to dock at 6 in the morning and we'll allegedly be off it by 7. Talking to one of the crew, Sind from Punjab, it turns out this happens quite often in Athens - there just aren't enough parking spaces or whatever they are called for ships - and passengers sometimes go a little beserk. We, so far, are calm, though the two German guys finished off all their beer yesterday in a final-night-on-the-boat drink-in and so now are a little ansty.

Tuesday, 6.15am: Awoken by the very welcome clunk-clunk of the anchor being pulled in (is that 'weighed' or is that when you let it down?). I get up and have one last prison ship shower and go up to what quite possibly might be the poop deck to watch us come into the port. The sun is just coming up over the hills behind Athens (insert suitable Homeric epithet here) and the pigs are starting to squeal in excitement. The last few metres are a wonderful choreography of tug, ship and anchors. Two of the crew position themselves behind two huge winches which each control an anchor on a chain about 100m long and with links twice the size of your hand. When the two anchors have found the sea bed, a third man, leaning over the side, waves his hands in a delicate little ballet (which is impressive, as he is about 20 stone, wears an oily boiler suit and has a roll-up hanging from his mouth) and the others ease out the anchors first on one side and then the other until the back of the boat just touches the dock and we have arrived. It's just like parking, though with a vehicle that weighs 8,000 tonnes and has no brakes.

Now I am in Athens at a hostel that has probably won Hostel of the Year many times over. It's friendly, clean, full of nice people and has a free breakfast. I'll just finish my toast and jam and then it's off to see what all this Acropolis business is about. In the meantime, thanks for reading and have a great day.

2008-08-22T05:56:00.003+01:00

Sailing today

It's 8am and I am just about to go down to the docks to find my ship. I decided to travel up to Haifa yesterday rather than stay in Jaffa and rush everything this morning, and that gave me the chance to wander round the city a little. Besides, my dorm in Jaffa was like an oven. I ended up sleeping on the roof.

After Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Haifa is pretty low key but it is pleasant enough. It has a German Colony, just like Jerusalem, and there is an enormous Bahai shrine and some gardens leading down to the city centre. You can visit the gardens but only as part of a tour so I went to down to have one last afternoon on an Israeli beach instead.

Thursday afternoon is the busiest time of the weeks to travel as all the soldiers leave their barracks to go home for the weekend. So the train that runs down the coast here (and eventually on to Tel Aviv) was full of those uniformed kids with guns that has become such a normal sight here. It will be strange to get to a country where carrying a semi-automatic weapon in the street is not something most people do.

Last night four of us from the hostel here went out for a final-night beer or two in a bar that had a great Jewish/Arab mix - the first time I had really seen that working in Israel and a very good farewell to a country whose joys and challenges I've been very privileged to share very slightly in this summer. It has been an eye-opening experience and I'll miss Israel's unique brand of craziness.

But in the meantime, I've got my bag, my book and some sea sick tablets (just in case - I don't think these ships have stabilisers) and it's time for me to, er, embark. I'm guessing there won't be internet or mobile reception at sea, so see you in three days and Athens, here we come.

2008-08-20T16:44:00.013+01:00

A Jaffa photo gallery

I guess this is the first day of my journey home. I stayed last night with my friends Ben and Avi in Jerusalem, packed up my stuff, dropped into the yeshiva to say goodbye and caught the little minibus to Tel Aviv. It was sad seeing the familiar sights of the city disappearing behind me but the melancholy was tempered somewhat by the most irascible driver I had ever encountered - and in Israel that's saying something.

He yelled at us all to give him the ticket money as soon as we climbed aboard - usually it's done as a kind of graceful passing to and fro of notes and change up and down the van. He short changed an Arab woman and was deaf to our entreaties to give her the 10 shekels her owed her (in the end, almost at Tel Aviv, he relented). And, in between sitting loudly and constantly on the horn, he made numerous, high-volume calls on his mobile. Eventually a man sitting at the front, who I had taken to be an American tourist (he was reading Patricia Cornwell's 'The Book of the Dead') barked at him in perfect Hebrew to shut up and drive properly. And then he was as quiet as a puppy.

I have booked into a backpaker hostel in Jaffa rather than Tel Aviv itself. It's more mellow here and relaxed and away from the sometimes frantic partying of the city. There's a lovely roof terrace (below) where I am now, which, until about 30 seconds ago, was an oasis of calm. Then an Israeli guy, oblivious to the fact that I was writing my blog, insisted on talking. And, when he found out the type of yeshiva I had been studying at, he started berating me loudly about it (he was an Orthodox Jew). He was particularly upset that women and men prayed together and said my father would be ashamed of me. At that point, luckily, my Hebrew ran out, though an expletive or two would have come in handy.

I am here till early Friday morning when I go up to Haifa for my boat. Opposite the hostel is a huge flea market, which will be good to explore tomorrow, and just round the corner is Israel's most famous bakery (run by an Arab family and open 24 hours) and a restuarant called Dr Shakshuka, which is also renowned for its cheap and good Middle Eastern food. So I guess I could eat my way through the next 48 hours.

In the meantime, these are just some pictures from a little walk I took this evening (the cat was obviously away when they handed out nice coat colours).

2008-08-20T08:05:00.003+01:00

A Jerusalem moment

I had forgotten how barmy this city can be and what gets taken as normal here. I was walking past the end of the road where the prime minister lives yesterday and there seemed to be an unusual amount of activity. There were more armed policemen on the corners than there normally are and others sitting in cars with their lights flashing.

Then a man going the other way on the pavement stopped me and said, '[INAUDIBLE] is coming.' I couldn't work out who he was talking about but I looked back at the police cars, expecting to see some sort of diplomatic cortege pull up, and said, 'Oh, when?'

'Soon, brother, soon,' he replied. 'In our generation. I feel it.'

And I realised he was talking about the Messiah.

2008-08-19T11:25:00.012+01:00

A slight change of plan

A couple of days ago I was walking along the Dahab seafront when two Arab boys in the water called out, 'Mister, come!' pointing to the sea bed. 'A snake of the sea! A snake of the sea!' The water was only about 5ft deep so I splashed in and indeed there was a lovely grey/brown sea snake weaving in and out of the stones. They leant me their mask and we watched it for a few minutes and chatted for a bit until I said goodbye and carried on to the cafe I was heading for.

Now I am back in Jerusalem, it's moments like that that have stuck in my mind. There's a sign on one of the Dahab bars that says, 'Come as a guest, leave as a friend' and really that should be the motto of the town. On my last morning there, as I was walking one last time along the sea front, people came out of the cafes where they worked to say hello. And when they discovered that I was going they said, I think with all sincerity, that they hoped I would be back very soon. And I think I will.

I took a morning bus again up the coast to Taba and noticed for the first time some interesting little places to stay north of Nuweibah. Simmy had emailed me earlier about his Dahab experiences in the early 1980s, when he stayed in straw shacks on the beach and ate at just 'one little cafe'. And I was a little envious Dahab wasn't like that now (though the dismally unreliable water supply in my hotel room's ensuite bathroom did give it a slightly desert flavour). But here, suddenly, was the Simmy experience just an hour or so north - straw huts looking straight out on to an sapphire blue sea (blurry picture below) - and it looked magical. There were little dive sites dotted along the coast. And I am sure there must be that one little cafe somewhere. So next time, who knows, maybe we could get some friends together and stay a little more in the wild. And if it isn't too much of a cliche someone could even bring a guitar...

This week sees the start of my journey back home. I had originally planned to travel a little in the north of Israel before heading to Haifa next Monday to catch a cargo ship sailing to Piraeus. But yesterday I had a call from the shipping agent to say that my sailing had been cancelled and offering me a place on a boat that leaves on Friday instead. So now I am spending a couple of days here saying goodbye to friends and packing up my stuff before going north and then into a new world of commercial shipping. I think I am going to get to Haifa on Thursday so I can work out where the docks are (the ship sails on Friday morning) and where I need to go. I have a reservation but no ticket. I am pretty sure that the ship will be there. And I am guessing there isn't going to be a departure lounge with duty free and a Costa Cofee. But who knows?

2008-08-12T21:51:00.021+01:00

Dahab, Egypt

I left Jerusalem at 7am on a bus bound for Eilat. Somehow I had imagined it would be a peaceful journey through the Negev. Maybe I could catch up on some reading, have a doze, listen to my iPod. What I didn't count on was the mass of teenage girls who were also heading south for sun, sea and whatever the Middle Eastern equivalent of sangria is. Even at that hour they were revved up to an incredible level of excitement - and Israeli teenagers probably beat all other teenagers hands-down when it comes to sheer volume. There were screams, shouts, laughter, songs, clapping, running up and down the bus borrowing make-up and sharing crisps and, a little scarily I thought, considering we were travelling at 70mph down a motorway, multiple attempts to ingratiate themselves with the driver by offering him sweets. I did need my iPod in the end but only to use the headphones as earplugs.

I lost them, at last, when we got to Eilat, Israel's premier resort in the sun, and realised the place was just perfect for them. There are probably nice parts of the city, but they aren't obvious from the route into the bus station. Instead it's more like a kind of sub-Benidorm with sweltering heat, kosher food and no Brits. After the mellowness of Jerusalem, the gangs of shirtless kids (no one seemed to be over 15), roaming the streets and peeling in the near-Saharan sun, looked like extras in some badly thought-out cross between 'High School Musical' and 'Mad Max'. It was a relief to catch the little local bus to the Egyptian border.

After the madness of Eilat, the tiny town of Taba, where Israel has a crossing into Egypt, was an oasis of calm. Almost literally in fact, as it is pretty much surrounded by desert. I had expected the chaos, hold-ups and total confusion of the Allenby Bridge border I had come through into Israel, but, apart from one or two people pootling around the duty-free (which you have no choice but to go through after passport control - who says Jews don't make good businessmen?), I was the only person there. After a cursory glance at my passport from the Israeli army immigration woman and the security guy at the gate asking me if I had my gun with me, I walked about 50 yards through what I guess is no man's land and into a large, shabby, marble-floored 'Arrivals Hall' that was the entry point into Egypt. And here was what I have come to realise is a very familiar sight in the Arab Middle East: 20 or so slightly sweaty men in various uniforms lolling around doing pretty much nothing and looking bored. I managed to get one of them to give me a visa, got my passport stamped and strolled out into the country that was once Israel's bitterest enemy.

I was determined to get a bus to Dahab, about 150km down the coast, rather than take a cab, which I had heard would be nonsensically expensive, but I wasn't totally convinced there would be one and the bus station was a fair walk down the road. So I was ready for the usual hoard of taxi drivers just outside the border crossing gates shouting for business, swearing on their lives that the bus had been cancelled or the bus station had burnt down or something and otherwise persuading you that there was no alternative to paying through the nose for a ride in their ancient Peugeot.

Instead, all was peace and quiet. Someone did look up from their mint tea and mumble "taxi" when I walked past but otherwise I was left to myself. Maybe nobody comes in this way any more. Or maybe it's the heat and they can't be bothered. And, after all that, there was a bus, so, after two and half diesel-fumed hours rumbling down the beautiful Red Sea coast - crystal clear blue water on one side, browny-goldy-grey desert on the other (plus at least five checkpoints where more bored, slightly sweaty men got on and pretended to check everybody's ID) - I arrived in Dahab.

As the Lonely Planet says, Dahab is indeed light years away from the little hippy village it was 10 years ago but the package tours haven't got here yet (they all go to Sharm El Sheikh further down the coast) and everything is low-rise little hotels, open-sided cafes right on the water's edge and some wonderfully hospitable and friendly people. Chatting to the various Mohammeds, Ahmeds and Abduls that punctuate your day - Egyptian women are hardly to be seen, apparently they are all back at home in Cairo or Alexandria - I couldn't help being reminded of a young Israeli man I met in Jerusalem who said something fantastically offensive about "all Arabs" (which, at the time, I was too timid/shocked/depressed to challenge) and wishing he could come here. But of course he can't and won't - I guess that's how conflict scars people - and certainly things go a little quiet here when I say I have just been living in Jerusalem.

I'm mostly here for the scuba diving, which I had heard was some of the best in the world, and now, two days and five dives in, I'm pretty blown away by it all. The water is almost travel-brochure transparent turquoise and the fish, none of whose names I can remember, swim around you in a wonderful kaleidoscope of colour. And - and anyone who has been diving will appreciate how important this is - the dive leaders are friendly, knowledgeable, skilled and calm (and handsome, too, which helps).

Today we went on a dive into what is known as the Blue Hole. [Skip to the next paragraph if you are already bored.] You swim down through a narrow channel between two rocks to emerge about 30m underwater into an enormous blue abyss. The sea goes down another 120m to the seabed and almost infinitely to your left - or at least until it gets to Saudi Arabia. And to your right is a huge wall of coral, stretching into the distance and swarming with fish. There was a little one that cleans your teeth if you let it. (I didn't - at that point I was finding the hugeness of it all a little unnerving and didn't want to take my air supply out of my mouth.). And another one that cleans your ears. (Ditto, though air supply less relevant.) But less weird and just as wonderful, you float weightlessly through great clouds of fish whose scales catch the sunlight coming down from the surface in flashes of red and green and gold. It's hard to describe diving and rereading this paragraph I realise my prose is heading in a dangerously ponsey direction, so I'll stop now and just say that the diving is great and I'm looking forward to more.

In the meantime, the rest of day ambles along from lazing in the sun to a juice by the sea's edge to a cheap meal (£3) in one of the little, formica-table restaurants in the main street (chicken, chicken or chicken, so far, but I might be a bit more adventurous tonight). I have a pile of rubbishy books (well, rubbishy-ish, I've just finished a PD James), some beach shorts and my suncream. I've met some nice people. The yeshiva seems far away. And there's wifi in the beach bars. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, I might stay a little longer.

2008-08-10T13:55:00.039+01:00

On the road again (and some old pics)

This is my last weekend in Jerusalem - or at least the last one in my flat. Term ended on Thursday (I've posted our Hebrew class end-of-term pic below, with me in my customary I-hate-having-my-picture-taken gawky pose) and since then I have been cleaning and packing and, because today is a special fast day, eating up what's left in my fridge. I can't really recommend lentil salad, tuna bake, pickled herring and yogurt washed down with tonic water but, hey, at least nothing went to waste.

The fast is held to commemorate a number of calamaties in Jewish history, most especially the days in 587BC and 70AD when the first and second Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed (by the Babylonians and the Romans respectively), the city was all but razed to the ground and the Jews were sent into exile. Jerusalem in those days was the crown of the Middle East and it had been the centre of Jewish life since 1000BC. To lose it must have been catastrophic and the book we read on this day - the Lamentations of Jeremiah - is a bleak description of palaces destroyed, men and women slaughtered in the street, people selling themselves for food and mothers eating their children. It's traditionally read to an unsurprisingly mournful chant, by low light, on the eve of the fast and last night we went to the Wailing Wall, the only part of the Temple that remains, to hear it and dwell on the destruction that overtook the Jewish people in those days.

Well, we went to part of the Wailing Wall. As men and women can't pray together at the main part of the Wall, which is controlled by the ultra-Orthodox, we gathered in a small area to the south where, if anything, the effect is even more palpable. (Veteran readers of this blog, if there are any, will remember that this was where I went for morning prayers in the first or second week of my time here.) You sit on the stones of an old Roman road that functioned as a shopping arcade next to one of the Temple entrances. (There are still little stone booths where the merchants kept their stock, just like the souks of many Middle Eastern cities today. I like to think this is where Jesus overturned the tables of the moneychangers, but I'm probably wrong). In front of you, the Wall rises up maybe 30 or 40 feet to the huge platform that is now the location of the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. And all around are enormous blocks of stone, some measuring four or five feet, which were thrown down into the street, and still lie exactly where they landed, during that second destruction in AD70.

It would be easy to find all of this too distant and historical. I have never really been one for archaeological sites and, to be honest, last night left me a little cold. But a picture I saw in this morning's paper, as I was walking to prayers at the yeshiva, put it all into a grim, more modern, context. It showed a man somewhere in Georgia or South Ossetia (I don't know the city, I'm afraid), his face twisted with despair, holding the body of another man killed in the conflict that has just erupted there. Around him, his city also lay in ruins and when I got to the yeshiva I looked again at the Book of Lamentations and found, sadly, that in the 2,500 years since it was written, very little seems to have changed.

Yet, for many Jews - cautiously, gently, delicately - there is also something celebratory about today. The exile that began in AD70, it could be argued, has now ended - in 1948, maybe, or 1967. And, today of all days, the Jewish love for, and attachment to, Jerusalem is very much in the air. For many people, especially those on the right here, this fast day underlines the centrality of Jerusalem to Jewish identity. And it shows up how problematic the idea of dividing Jerusalem again really is. I can't think of many other places in the world that are so steeped in longing, rhetoric and significance - for Christians and Muslims, as well as for Jews. And I can't think of many other days in the year when you can feel the Jewish connection to this city so potently.

For me, leaving tomorrow morning on a bus to, of all places, Egypt, today has left me with a bittersweet set of feelings about Jerusalem. I long for a peaceful two-state solution to the conflict here and I think that will include a capital in East Jerusalem for the Palestinians. But I also feel a strong Jewish connection to a place that, for six weeks, has been a wonderful home. Here I have been, for want of a better word, more observant. I have been going to prayers more or less twice every day. I have been wearing my kippa most of the time. I have been discovered texts and had many discussions that have been both inspiring and challenging. And I have studied with, and made friends with, some remarkable people.

Yet I have also loved the summer nights here, with their gentle breeze that means you can leave all the windows open and ignore the air con. I'll miss the shwarmas and felafel in Ben Yehuda Street. I'll miss the gangs of American teenagers, here on subsidised trips from the States, discovering a kind of Judaism that is based as much on the bronzed and handsome men and women in the Israeli army as it is on Talmud and prayers in the synagogue. (Well, rather more, to be honest; I think many of them could probably skip the synagogue part altogether.) I'll miss the crazy, pedestrian-unfriendly traffic lights that take you halfway across a busy intersection and then leave you stranded on a little island in the middle. I'll miss the cats. And I'll miss the quiet of shabbat and the sounds of the muezzin calling out from the mosques in the east of the city. This is a place where, even if you are not religious, you feel religion. In traditional Judaism, this is where the Shechinah - the female, worldly attribute of God - still resides and, although, I don't totally subscribe to that idea, I will miss the way the geography here inspires in you something very spiritual. And I will have to find some way of carrying all of that with me back to London.

A clue to how to do that came on Friday when a friend at the yeshiva suggested we spend a day at the beach in Tel Aviv and then go to a shabbat service in the evening that was being held not in Jerusalem, not in a synagogue even, but on the promenade looking out over the sea.

We got there around 6pm, salty and slightly burnt, to find maybe 100 people sitting around in white plastic chairs, chatting and listening to Jewish-ish music performed by a keyboard player, a flautist, a drummer and a couple of singers. In front of us was the sea, the sun beginning to set on the horizon and, rather wonderfully (see below) a jet-skier riding the waves. To begin with, if I'm honest, the service wasn't really my kind of thing. (I am a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to liturgy.) But once I had climbed down from by hoity-toity high horse it was possibly one of the best shabbat evening services I have been to for a long time. We sang songs, we sang the prayers, we prayed out over the sea, the sun set (which marked the start of the shabbat) and it all felt somehow cosmic even. And then, as if the whole thing had been choreographed by Disney, at the point when we stood to welcome the shabbat as if it/she were a bride coming to her wedding (a Kabbalistic idea - the Shechinah again), the jet-skier did a superb leap over a wave that looked as if this particular bride was already on her tropical honeymoon package, which included free watersports at the resort.

Tomorrow I will go to Dahab for some scuba diving. I have found a small resort that I hope will be suitably hippy-ish and low-key. And I have borrowed a pile of low-grade books from the non-Jewish, non-Israel, non-serious part of the yeshiva library that I am hoping to plough through with a beer or two by the sea. I'll be back here briefly next weekend but really this is my farewell to the city - for now at least. I've had a great time and I've been looking through some of the pictures that give me fond memories and which I have uploaded here before. So, because I don't really have any new ones, I've posted a few of them here again.

2008-08-05T06:42:00.026+01:00

Spelunking (kind of)

One of my favourite moments in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' is when Bob Hoskins first goes from human land into Toon Town. One moment he is driving down a dreary underpass, the next he passes through a pair of cartoon velvet curtains (complete with Looney Toons glissando) and everything around him is animated. Pink and blue cartoon birds twitter in cartoon trees, cartoon rabbits hop around crazily green grass and everything is in vivid, overbright Technicolor. I think he even has to retrieve a pair of sunglasses from the glove compartment.

A similar thing happened to me a couple of Saturdays ago when I was walking through the Old City. I had entered through the Zion Gate, the southernmost of the eight massive gates that pierce the city walls and the one that leads into the Jewish quarter. Between 1948 and 1967 the Old City was controlled by the Jordanians and, during that time, much of the Jewish quarter was seriously damaged. (The other three quarters - Muslim, Christian and Armenian - are pretty much how they have been for centuries.) As a result, most of the buildings here have been restored in the last few decades. There are still winding narrow streets that lead into little courtyards but it's all clean and new and, to be honest, a little dull, like some Biblical version of Palo Alto. (It does mean, though, that the Jewish quarter is the only part of the Old City that is accessible to people in wheelchairs.) It's also mostly residential and on a shabbat afternoon there's hardly anyone about.

Yet, after you have walked north for about 10 minutes, you take three steps and you are suddenly in the middle of the Arab market. Here, everything is colour, noise, smells and people. CD stalls pump out Arabic pop hits and recitations of the Quran. Barrows overflow with fruit and vegetables and mountains of little pastries and cakes. There are stalls piled high with spices, pickles and brightly coloured sweets that all seem to defy our boring European ban on crazy food colourings. You can get your hair cut, send money abroad and buy kitchenware, all within a few shops. There is an unexpectedly high penetration of Spiderman costumes among the kids (see photo). And, most wonderfully for a visitor, you can get totally lost until you unexpectedly pop out again and find yourself looking up the enormous Damascus Gate that cuts through the walls in the north.

I was thinking about this yesterday when two of us set off to find the other entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Holy Sepulchre marks the spot where Jesus was crucified and buried and, since about 300AD, it has been one of the holiest sites in the Christian world (the holiest, even, maybe?). This is where the Via Dolorosa leads and at any time of day you can find pilgrims carrying big wooden crosses, singing hymns and dodging barrows of fruit and veg as they follow Jesus's final journey from Pontius Pilate's palace to Golgotha.

"Church", however, is something of a misnomer as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is really a group of 20 or so different churches and chapels that form a sort of huge Sepulchre complex. Over the millennia, different Christian sects have added their own altars and chapels and now it's hard to tell who runs what (although the priests on duty certainly know). I think the Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches control access to Jesus's tomb, the Roman Catholics run the place of his crucifixion and so on, though I may have got that the wrong way round - sometimes altars and naves and chancels just seem to bump into each other. The only people who, I think, are not represented are the Protestants, which is why the British, when they were here, liked to claim that Jesus's tomb was actually north of the Old City near the American Colony Hotel.

Most people enter the complex at ground level but on Friday night the host of a shabbat dinner I was at was talking about another, smaller, entrance that brings you in at the top of the church and gives you access to a huge disused water cistern that you can climb down into and explore. So yesterday, instead of going to a seminar on contemporary Jewish law, I met up with a friend of a friend from home and we set off to see if we could find it.

Our directions were a bit vague - more or less leave the church behind you, head left into the spice market and look for some stairs on the left - but eventually we spotted the turn and found ourselves climbing up and up, past the usual Jerusalem sights of cats and piles of rubbish, until we were maybe a couple of storeys above the narrow streets and on eye-level with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre's dome. And there we found a sign for the cistern.

You go through a little church (I didn't get the denomination, but it looked Greek-ish) and, just to the left of the altar, there are some rough stone steps that wind downwards and out of sight. Here, after the baking Jerusalem day, the air was cool and damp and as we turned a corner we were suddenly in an enormous, rough-hewn cave, about the size of a small ballroom, that was originally the Holy Sepulchre's water supply. There is still some water in the bottom of it - it looked a bit mucky to wade into - but the best thing is the acoustic. Because the rock walls and ceiling are all irregular, the place has a fantastic echo and any sounds you make bounce back and forth for a few seconds. So of course we started to hoot and ummmm and ahhhh and soon we had our own little choir going. We discovered that if you sing three notes in quick succession you can make a chord and some of our output ended up pretty jazzy. We were by ourselves, of course. I don't know if we would have been so Miles Davis-like if other people had been there. But it was a great, and very different, way to pass a quarter of an hour or so in the afternoon.

Back in the open air, the roofs opened out into a little square and we almost walked into someone's house until two men with very dark, African-looking features (not that common here) pointed us towards a small door in one corner.

Inside was a tiny church of Ethiopian Christians. Positioned a little sadly, I thought, far from the main action - Jesus's tomb and the location of the crucifiction are two floors down and next door - this is an Ethiopian monastery and a handful of monks who could have come straight from east Africa (and probably did) were sitting around contemplating the altar. The furnishings were fairly sparse but there were some nice, mellow icons and paintings of Jesus on the walls and the whole thing felt like some very devout person's living room - well, a living room that for some reason also contains an enormous wooden bishop's throne painted in shocking Barbie pink.

Through another little door you begin your descent into the rest of the complex and here there is more Africa. A small niche with a (very white) Jesus on the cross is decorated in Rasta colours and there is a huge modern painting of the Queen of Sheba coming from Ethiopia to see King Solomon and hear about this new-fangled God he was worshipping. The story goes that she returned to Ethiopia having converted to Judaism and so began the lineage of Ethiopian Jews and Christians that continues today.

There was something very Jerusalem about finding the Ethiopian church. For centuries this city was called the navel of the world and it still attracts people from all over who come to experience a moment of stillness and, perhaps, a closer connection with the otherworldly. I liked the Ethiopian church a lot and it helped me understand a little more why this place, so far from both the plains of Africa and the streets of central London, still exerts such a pull on the imagination.

In the meantime, this graffiti has appeared on the road I walk up in the mornings to get to the yeshiva. It says "No petrol, no problem" and is part of an underground campaign to promote cycling here. I would love to cycle in Jerusalem but not many people do and if they do they tend to cycle on the pavements. Israeli drivers are not the most patient people in the world and they don't always have their eye on the road. The other morning I saw a driver, with his mobile phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other, only just manage to stop at a red light, while his passenger, feet out of the window, carried on reading his newspaper. And they were in a police car.

2008-08-02T06:12:00.025+01:00

Confessions of a failed radical

Quite a few people here have asked me why British academics are boycotting their colleagues in Israel. (That's the kind of question you get if you are a minority Brit here. Lots of people are also interested in the Queen.)

To be honest, I don't think they are any more (and, in practice, almost never did) but it's an interesting question and it perhaps throws some light on both Britain and Israel.

To put my cards on the table, I think it's pretty incontravertible that Israel commits human rights violations in the territories that it occupied after the 1967 war. The Palestinians do too - only last week there was big report from two human rights groups, one of them Palestinian, about widespread torture in Palestinian jails. But the original boycott, back in 2002, was aimed at Israel, so I guess that's what we should deal with here.

The most common question - and this is from people here who, as far as I can make out, oppose the occupation - is why British academics voted to boycott Israel, rather than, say, China or Zimbabwe or any of dozens of other countries where human rights are abused, ignored or simply non-existent (and which also occupy land controversially).

In a way, the proposers of the original boycott answered this question before it was asked. In their letter to the Guardian in 2002 (it's all here on Wikipedia if you want to take a look), they pointed out that many European academic institutions regard Israel - uniquely in the Middle East - as a European state when it comes to handing out grants. (It would be tempting to call this something like the Eurovision Song Contest Paradox, but if you have spent any time in the company of a particular type of British left-wing academic you will realise that, for them, almost nothing is a laughing matter.) Their proposal was that these grants should be suspended until Israel entered into what it called "serious peace negotiations" with the Palestinians.

Whatever the authors' original intentions, however, their letter set off a series of motions, mostly at the meetings of academics' trades unions, that called for a full academic boycott of Israeli institutions and a severing of links between UK academics and their Israeli colleagues. For a few years, things went back and forth and nothing much happened, and then, I think by about 2007, the campaign had all but fizzled out.

There has a been a great deal written about this debate, mostly in terms of academic freedom and the distance universities sometimes like to place between themselves and the "real" world. (It's a little like the argument that sport is above politics.) But that doesn't really answer the questions: why Israel and why Britain. For that, I think it's worth looking at what has happened to those of us on the old anti-Thatcher left in Britain - and, yes, I include myself in this - now that we have become a little more jaded and our political latitude is increasing with our waistlines.

Back in the day, by which I mean the 1980s (sorry, I was having my bar mitzvah when flower power was breathing its last and I never really got into punk) you knew where you were on the left. Although belonging to activist groups often involved long, tedious meetings that droned on into the night, there was a pretty clear pair of enemies: Margaret Thatcher and apartheid South Africa. We probably didn't think too hard about the details at that time (and secretly I rather liked the denationalised British Telecom and the cool things it brought like Call Waiting) but the "cause" was clear.

It was also pretty easy to boycott South African goods. You could buy cheap Chilean wine instead, skip the grapes and feel wonderfully politically correct on your way to that Islington dinner party. (I don't think we had thought much about Pinochet back then, certainly I hadn't.) Besides who needed an account at Barclays?

Unfortunately while we were still debating, our enemies disappeared. Apartheid South Africa collapsed, Thatcher went and was replaced, in the end, by Blair. We all got older (and got mortgages) and, in my area of interest at least, Section 28 was repealed and the age of consent was equalised at 16.

Now, there are few things a leftie hates more than having nothing to hate and, for many people I think, Israel handily filled that gap. For start it feels a bit like the South Africa of old: there are white(-ish) people oppressing brown(-ish) people; it's always in the news but usefully distant from everyday life; and it triggers lots of deeply buried European guilt about colonialism, which we still haven't really come to terms with. So a boycott seemed to be the perfect solution.

The trouble was that Israeli products, Jaffa oranges aside, were not that visible, so boycotting them was going to be harder work. It's a lot easier to pass over a bottle of wine than to steer clear of some bit of technology in your mobile phone that has come out of Tel Aviv's version of Silicon Valley. But there were plenty of joint projects between British and Israeli academic institutions, so the way was clear for the academic unions to come forward with motions that must have felt far more exciting and meaningful than negotiating better wages for ancillary staff at colleges of further education.

My own feeling is that, generally, boycotts don't work and that anyway we tend to be selective about them. (Are we going to avoid watching the Olympics because China has the highest per capita rate of capital punishment in the world?) Besides, I think we can overestimate the effect the boycott of South Africa had, though I'm happy to be corrected on that. I do, of course, respect anyone who works for an end to the conflict here but I am not sure severing ties with some of the most pluralistic universities in the Middle East is the right way to go. Instead it has made us (ie Britain) look somehow dumb in the eyes of thinking people here and that's not good.

I am sure the people behind the boycott had good intentions but if you want to know my position on the conflict, I'm with the Israeli novelist Amos Oz on this one. (The quote is from a piece he wrote for The Nation in 2002.)

Two Palestinian-Israeli wars have erupted in this region. One is the Palestinian nation's war for its freedom from occupation and for its right to independent statehood. Any decent person ought to support this cause. The second war is waged by fanatical Islam, from Iran to Gaza and from Lebanon to Ramallah, to destroy Israel and drive the Jews out of their land. Any decent person ought to abhor this cause."

Shabbat shalom and hope you are having a good weekend.

2008-07-30T15:49:00.013+01:00

Nice summer days (and some pictures)

The city has got cool again, literally. We had a few days last week of almost unbearable heat, though nothing like the heavy clamminess of Tel Aviv, but then there were a couple of nights of strong cool winds and everything is back to warm sun, blue skies and a gentle breeze. Yesterday it was so nice outside that I decided to bunk off the second half of my Hebrew lesson and go and sit and doze under an olive tree in the park. Apart from the heavy traffic on a nearby road, the sound of the American consulate's security guards' radios, two teenage girls listening to Eminem on a mobile phone and a mangy dog looking at me weirdly, it was almost Biblical.

This is a funny time in the Jewish calendar. We are in the three weeks between two fast days that commemorate, respectively, the breaching of the walls of the first Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587BC and the date they finally broke through and razed it to the ground.

The Temple was built by King Solomon in 957BC and for nearly 400 years it put Jerusalem at the spiritual, political and cultural epicentre of Jewish life. Its destruction, and the subsequent exile of the Jews to Babylon, was a calamity for the Jewish race (although it led to some marvelous literature of longing, especially in the Psalms) and even today traditional Jews tend to lay low during this period. They don't celebrate weddings, they don't get their hair cut, they avoid eating meat (except on shabbat when it is obligatory) and they don't listen to music. In the religious areas of Jerusalem you can see that life goes on but it's all a little more subdued.

In the yeshiva we are more liberal but we have been marking this period by looking at the effect of fasts on modern life. For many modern Jews, fasting means Yom Kippur, when almost all Jews, even non-observant ones, go without food and water for at least some of the 24 hours between sunset and sunset. The effect is slightly hypnotic, especially when combined with the liturgy of that day in the synagogue, and it can take you into an otherworldly place, away from the ordinary pleasures and annoyances of everyday life. Muslims say the same thing about the fasting of Ramadan. But - and this will come as a surprise to many people stuck in the synagogue that day - Yom Kippur is not meant to be sad day. If nothing else, for a moment or two it edges us a little nearer that strangeness we call God.

By contrast, these fast days are days of mourning and they remind me of how funerals, and especially the wakes or parties after them, also take us away from the "real" world for a while and help us reflect on where we are and what we are up to. I don't feel particularly evangelical about fasting (or about God, really) but fasts do make a powerful contrast to the way we often live our lives in the west. Our 24-hour cities, with their work hard, play hard mantras and busy weekends, sometimes make it hard just to take time out and think. And I think we are poorer because of that. And even if that doesn't resonate with everyone, being hungry for a day can also put us back in touch with people for whom hunger is much more of an everyday experience - even in London. And that can't be a bad thing.

Back in the real world, I have found a Hebrew teacher who lives near my house and I am going to her for an hour's conversation three times a week until the course ends. It is incredibly difficult to practise your Hebrew here as everyone loves to speak English and the first time you fail to make an adjective agree with a noun or, in my case, reveal that you can't say anything in the past or the future, they switch languages and refuse to go back. I have had three lessons so far and they're going well. The teacher is patient with my attempts to say something a little more complicated than "The pen is on the table" and we end up, I think, having some pretty in-depth conversations about life, love and the universe. Or at least that's how it appears to me.

The yeshiva course is ending soon and I am starting to think of my journey back home. As I am trying not to fly, getting out of Israel is a bit of a problem. I can't go back through Syria now I have been here. Crossing the Lebanon border is impossible with Hizbollah on the other side. And the passenger ferries that used to sail between Israel and Cyprus stopped in 2002. So the only solution is to bag a place on a cargo ship and I have found one that will take me.

The ship sails from Haifa to Piraeus on August 25. I don't know what it is going to be like or what it is carrying but it seems legit and they are happy to take me. My plan is to hop from Patras by boat to Bari and then by train up through Italy to Paris and then London. It will take about a week, though I may have to put the brakes on slightly so as not to have to catch the Eurostar on September 1. The only fares available on that day (it's a Sunday) are at Business Super Executive level and, really, I just don't have the right clothes for First Class.

I'm looking forward to being on the cargo ship. It will be three days of doing almost nothing except sailing through the Med. You eat with the crew but otherwise your time is your own and I'm planning to find a little sunny corner of the deck and work my way through a pile of trashy books, preferably not about Israel, Palestine or Jewish philosophy.

In the meantime, the weekend beckons again and a bunch of us are planning a trip to the beach in Tel Aviv on Friday. I'll come home for the lovely Jerusalem shabbat again. And, after that, it will be the last week of our yeshiva programme, that second fast day (on Sunday 10) and then, I hope, a few days scuba diving in Dahab on the Red Sea. If anyone has any Dahab tips, they'd be more than welcome.

The pictures, from top: my neighbourhood; the view from my flat; the home of the Israeli Philharmonic (x 2); a typical local house; Brits were not always so welcome here; posters for Jerusalem's live music scene; hoarding around a building site - the Hebrew says, "How to climb the separation wall" (not really); spotted in a chemist - does what it says on the jar, I guess

2008-07-28T20:27:00.015+01:00

The city's other inhabitants

Jerusalem is full of feral cats and I thought I would take a photo of every cat I ran into in a normal day. It turned out to be harder than I had imagined. They tend to run away before you can get your camera out and it's like being on some sort of cat safari. But, apropos of nothing in particular, here are the ones that hung around long enough for their close-ups.

2008-07-28T06:15:00.005+01:00

Some random thoughts

There's probably a scene in 'Being John Malkovich' - and if there isn't there should be - where time stands still, and things have felt like that here for the past few days. It's probably because, in week four out of six of living here, I am at that point where the novelty of everything has worn off but I haven't yet begun to appreciate the more subtle joys of the city. It will come and in the meantime I am content with things like doing the washing, sitting on my balcony with a beer and catching up on news from home.

In fact, for the first time this trip, last week I had a moment of nostalgia for everything British. It could have been G Brown's awe-inspiring defeat in Glasgow East (West? was it even Glasgow?) and the predictable back stabbing, attacks and denials that came out of the cabinet afterwards, but I suddenly fancied a cup of tea and some Radio 4. There's Radio 4 on the internet of course and, thanks to my neighbours Ben and Avi upstairs, I now have some Liptons tea bags, but in the end I couldn't quite do it. It sounds dumb but it seemed somehow wrong to bring a little piece of London life into my Jerusalem bubble so instead I sat and read my book for a bit and went to meet some friends. And anyway it would have been the 'PM Programme', which I always find irritating.

There's some stuff in the papers here about religious schools. The state funds a fair proportion of the costs of the Haredi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) schools and last week a law was passed in the Knesset excusing them from teaching maths, English and civics, which, I guess, frees up more time for Torah, Talmud and Aramaic. You don't have to be a diehard secularist to work out that there's something wrong here. Although there is plenty of beauty in the Torah and the Talmud - and plenty of stuff that can be applied to modern life - these kids also live in a modern state and they need a wider education than that. I mean, what if one of them wanted to become a doctor or a lawyer? It sometimes happens with Jewish kids... (Actually, according to another article in the same paper, ultra-orthodox students do incredibly well in SAT exams, thanks to a bunch of crammers that have sprung up to coach them through all those psychometric tests, so maybe I need to revise my opinions here.)

In the meantime, Obama has had his prayer nicked. I don't know if this was reported in the UK, but, if you go to the Kotel (the Wailing/Western Wall) you can put a little note in one of the cracks between the stones asking God for something. (In fact, if you are not actually in situ you can fax or email your message and someone will put it in the wall for you.) Obama, like all VIPs who come to Jerusalem, (actually, did Gordon Brown?) went to the Wall and put a note in, which was later nicked by a yeshiva student and published in Ma'ariv, a downmarket newspaper here. All the other papers have done that Guardian trick of pretending to be outraged at Ma'ariv for its invasion of Obama's privacy while taking the opportunity to reprint the note's contents. It's pretty bland but if you want to you can see it here. (And, yes, I guess I have made use of the Guardian's trick too - but you don't need to click if you don't want to.)

Personally, I think there is something a little un-Jewish about putting notes in the Wall, but, then again, I am not as moved by the Wall as maybe I should be. The main part just seems to be full of Haredi men (the women have to go into another area) who would have very little time for my way of living, praying and being Jewish. In fact I'm not sure if they would consider me Jewish at all.

2008-07-22T12:44:00.005+01:00

Bulldozer #2

There has been another incident here involving a bulldozer and quite close to the yeshiva where I am now. We are all fine. There were lots of sirens and helicopters outside the window for a while but now it's quiet and we've continued our class - which coincidentally is on the relationship between Israel and the rest of the world. I guess that's how it goes over here.

2008-07-22T06:31:00.007+01:00

Settling in

This sign is stencilled to walls all round my neighbourhood and I couldn't work out what it meant. First, I thought it was pointing the way to a bathroom as it was often on the wall of a synagogue and people like to wash their hands before praying. But then I looked it up and it turns out to be something more prosaic but no less significant.

It means "shelter" and it points the way to your nearest refuge should Ahmadinejad or someone send a missile this way. (I think we are out of range of Hezbollah or Hamas right now, but who knows?) I went and found the nearest one to my house but I couldn't see the way in and I don't really know if it's still in use. However there are quite a lot of old people in my area so presumabaly, in the event of an attack, I could follow the trail of slightly crabby women in wigs, zimmer-framing their way to safety and find out where to go.

When I looked up the word, I found that it was connected to the Hebrew root for "to take in, absorb, understand, comprehend". The word is more like "reception" than "shelter" and it was nice to imagine people welcoming you into this place of safety and making an effort to understand and comprehend where you came from. That was so much a value of the early days of Israel, with its waves of immigrants coming here to escape a dangerous life elsewhere and it is still an important Jewish value. Whether Israel as a society still holds those values dear is another discussion.

We are in our fourth week of Hebrew and it's going pretty well. We have all gained the confidence to talk in Hebrew, at least in class, and we are often to be found chattering merrily away with our present-tense verbs and phenomenally limited volcabulary. I think we are somewhere about the level of "I want to go to the shap to buyed the pencil" (infinitives turn out to be pretty tough in Hebrew) but we're happy and we seem to get our meaning across with each other. That said, the lure of English is always present, like some huge electromagnet under the floor, ready to pull us down from our Hebrew flights of creativity. The phrase, "In Hebrew [insert name here], in Hebrew..." (though in Hebrew, of course) is becoming a pretty regular request from our teacher.

I went to a concert last night with Zubin Mehta conducting the Israel Philharmonic. The programme was Bach (a cantata) and Bloch's 'Holy Service', which sets many of the synagogue prayers to some stirring music for orchestra, baritone and choir. You couldn't really imagine it in even the grandest of synagogues but it's a good piece nevertheless. I got the cheapest seat in the house, right up in the balcony, but as the concert hall was built in the 1950s or 1960s, the acoustic was great and I could see fine (though I still have no idea what you are meant to look at at a classical concert). When we came out it was still warm and there was a lovely full moon in the sky so I decided to walk home - until a cab came past and I flagged it down and jumped in.

Today I am saying goodbye to almost the last of my friends from the first half of the course, so it's a dinner out somewhere nice but cheap and some more fond farewells.

Oh, and Gordon Brown has been in town, but no one seems to have noticed. The traffic jams on the big intersection outside college were marginally longer than usual but that was about it. By contrast, Obama arrives today, which will be a very different kettle of fish. I mean, he might even say something anti-Israel...

2008-07-20T15:08:00.022+01:00

Two walks and a cat fight

On Friday morning I took a walk through some parts of Jerusalem I didn't know. My starting point was a disused railway station near my house. The train once went all the way from there to Tel Aviv but people used to throw stones at it when it passed through parts of east Jerusalem. So a new station was built in the south of the city and now this little stretch of track is disused and wonderfully overgrown, with the rails all buckled from the heat.

The line forms part of a cut-through to the cafés and shops of Emek Refaim and, for about the first week or so, each time I crossed it I would instinctively look up and down to see if a train was coming. But I also found myself wondering where it led, so on Friday, instead of taking the minibus shuttle to Tel Aviv, I decided to see if I could walk down the track to the new station and catch the train instead.

It's not really geared for walking, especially not in flip-flops, but it turned out to be pretty magical. Like canals, railway lines take you through bits of the city you don't usually see and I like the fact you can peer into people's backyards, find yourself skirting little industrial estates and nose around in areas you would have never even known existed from the road.

I passed signal boxes, burnt-out railway carriages and bits of track-side equipment. At one point I found a small corrugated-iron shack that was obviously someone's home. And, under a road bridge, I came across an incredibly tidy pile of rubbish - some of it still in bin liners, but elsewhere little stacks of bottles, t-shirts, socks, things like that. The whole thing was obviously part of an someone's ongoing project to rescue what they could from other people's detritus. It was a small glimpse into a world of Jerusalem homelessness, far from the Jewish and Arab "villages" and their tensions, and it made me wonder how many people live here on bits of no man's land and who looks out for them.

But I also found myself thinking about connections, not only spatial ones, though this railway, the first in the Middle East, was the result of grand Anglo-French plans to link up the Levant, but also connections across time. Once I had worked out how to avoid the incredibly thorny plants that looked so sweet until they embedded themselves in your ankle, I noticed that every sleeper had the words "Colevilles 1933" embossed on it. And I started to reflect on those lanky boys from Surrey and Sussex who came out here in the 1930s as part of the British administration to bring civilisation - and new steel sleepers - to the pesky natives. They were met not by gratitude, but by Arab revolts and Jewish terrorism (or Arab terrorism and Jewish revolts - your call) and they must have felt a long way from evensong and tea on the lawn. It's hardly surprising they found refuge in a gin and tonic or six in the American Colony hotel.

But railway tracks and 1933 also have another, more terrible, resonance, for this was the year Hitler seized power in Germany and began a process that would eventually engulf Europe, and especially its Jews, and which would lead ultimately to the foundation of Israel. And, yes, to more Arab revolts and Jewish terrorism (or the other way round - again it's your call).

I got to the smart new Jerusalem station after about an hour and discovered that there's another reason most people take the shuttle: the train is a lot slower. But it runs through some beautiful countryside and is worth it just for that. We passed fields of melon and sunflowers and some sort of low-rise green thing that I think might be potatoes. And then, just around Beit Shemesh, suddenly everything was vineyards. And all of this nestled among low, sandy hills that could be straight out of the Bible.

I spent the afternoon on the beach with Tom's friend Na'ama, talking about life, drinking beer and eating shakshuka - a wonderful Israeli dish in which eggs are broken into a kind of ratatouille of tomatoes, peppers, onions, herbs and spices and the whole thing is baked in an oven. It's simple, delicious and totally open to variation (we had ours with little chorizo-like sausages mixed in too). And, as I discovered later that night, talking to someone after the Friday night synagogue service, everyone has their own secret ingredient. (His was sweet kiddush wine, which, as anyone who has ever tasted it will know, is a much better use of the stuff than drinking it.)

On shabbat itself, I went on another long walk that took me through some pine forests near my house and closer to the separation fence (wall, barrier... again your call) than I had imagined. The route took me past some very expensive-looking newly built condos, destined, I imagine, for Jewish Americans, and down into what I think is the Kidron Valley. And then I found myself in an small Arab district, indentifiable by the fact that there were cars going up and down and people in the streets. (Jewish Jerusalem on shabbat is like a ghost town.) And there, in front of me on the next ridge was the separation fence. (You can see bits of it along the far ridge in this picture. Click on the pic to make it bigger.)

Whatever your politics, you have to admit that the fence, in its concrete part, is ugly. And you get the feeling that it's meant to be that way. On the Palestinian side there is plenty of graffiti - apparently there is a Banksy somewhere but I am not sure where. But on the Israeli side all you see are tall concrete slabs.

I had just finished reading Tanya Reinhart's 'Israel/Palestine' and also this article in the LRB, both of which are highly critical of the carving up the West Bank that Israel appears to be engaged in and it was alarming to see the reality. But I am also aware of the counterargument that the parts of the wall that are concrete as against chain link (about 10 per cent) are there partially to prevent sniper attacks on nearby Jewish areas. And it reminded me of this poem that I came across a couple of years ago.

Where It's Really Dangerous
Uri Orbach (published originally in 2001)

In America, everyone knows that it is terribly dangerous in Israel now, and it is not recommended to travel to Israel.
In Israel, everyone knows that it is dangerous only in the territories and in a little bit of Jerusalem.
In Jerusalem everyone knows there is shooting going on, but only in the neighborhood of Gilo.
In Gilo everyone knows that it is dangerous, but only on Ha'anafa Street.
On Ha'anafa street everyone knows that it is dangerous, but not all along the street, just in the houses that face Beit Jalla.
In the houses facing Beit Jalla, everyone knows it is dangerous, but mostly in a few apartments on specific floors that get shot at occasionally.
In the apartments that get shot at, they know it's dangerous, but not in all the rooms. Just in the kitchen. In the bedrooms and bathrooms, on the other hand, it's totally safe.
In the kitchen that gets shot into they know it's really dangerous. But not in the entire kitchen. Just near the fridge and the toaster.
Those near the fridge know that where it's really dangerous is in the freezer, which is directly in the rifle sights of the sharp-shooters from Beit Jalla.
You can take milk and cheese out of the fridge part without getting hit - usually. Word-of-honor.
And in the freezer over the fridge part of the refrigerator on one part of Ha'anafa street at the edge of Giloh in Jerusalem in Israel? Oh boy, it's totally dangerous there. If you stand there and pull some frozen schnitzels out of the freezer, that's when you really take your life in your hands.
So for a few months, just until things calm down, we're not going to use the freezer.
Nu, so this you call dangerous?

When I got back I found No Name curled up on my bed. (Don't read this if you are eating.) I put him back outside but there are so many open doors and windows here that he was in again before I even got back to the bedroom. So I decided to leave it to Shuki.

At 6pm, Shuki walked in for his evening feed. He saw No Name and, with a burst of energy that was impressive for a 22lb cat, leapt on to him and grappled him to the floor. There was plenty of hissing and yowling as the two of them spun around in a kind of mad cat ball when one of them - my guess is it was No Name - erm, lost control of his bowels and, thanks to centrifugal force, an arc of acrid cat poo shot out over the floor, my sheets and the wardrobe. I yelled. They scarpered. And the rest was silence and, even now, a strangely lingering smell of bleach.

2008-07-17T14:54:00.007+01:00

Unsettling fruit picture of the week

It's a water melon and it's yellow. What will these crazy Israelis come up with next?

It's a sort of end of term at the yeshiva today, with the first half coming to an end and a lot of people heading back home. I've made some excellent friends here and this evening a bunch of us are going out for dinner and a night on the town. Well, a Jewish night on the town at least - I expect to be in bed by 11. Here's a pic of my fellow ravers (plus teacher on the left) from Hebrew level Aleph Plus (that's one off the bottom, by the way, not somewhere above the top).

Tomorrow, I am going to be spending the day in Tel Aviv, hopefully at the beach, and then it's back to Jerusalem for the start of shabbat.

Thanks for your feedback on my previous post. I am very touched by all your comments and it has led to some excellent - and hopeful - conversations here.

And, just so he's not upstaged by a melon, here's an unsettling picture of Shuki.

2008-07-15T17:41:00.014+01:00

Facts on the ground

I found myself sitting opposite this picture yesterday morning, in the room where we have morning prayers. It was part of a flyer that someone had put up on the noticeboard, for a charity that supports people in the army here, and it totally distracted me from the service that was going on around me.

It's not a comfortable image for many reasons but there is something beautiful about it. In fact, at first, I wondered if it was set up, the sort of thing Israeli photographer Adi Nes would do. (I have posted one of his most famous images, 'The Last Supper', below.) But, looking more closely, I think it is a real photograph of soldiers on patrol somewhere and the photographer just got lucky.

It represents, I think, a set of Israeli values that are still very strong here, and which I like a lot: the pioneer spirit, the sense of protecting each other, determination, outdoors-ness, strength - in fact the sort of things that Jews sometimes had very little of when they were in the ghettos and the slums of eastern Europe. (And, yes, the guy in the front is pretty good looking too.) But, as so often happens here, as soon as you have one thought about something, you experience something else which turns your view of the world on its head.

That something else was yesterday afternoon when I went on a tour of east Jerusalem, organised by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, an activist group that basically does what it says on the tin. House demolitions are one way in which the Israeli state, through the army, punishes/contains Palestinians in Jersualem and the West Bank and they make me uncomfortable.

As I understand it - and I am very ready to be corrected - the demolitions fall into two types. The first is a kind of punishment meeted out to the family of a suicide bomber. The thinking goes that people will think twice about killing others and killing themselves if their family was likely to pay the price back at home. Right now, a proposal to demolish the house of Hussam Dwayat, the east Jerusalem resident who killed three people with a bulldozer in the city a few days after I had arrived, and who also died in the attack, is making its way through the courts. It's a powerful argument. Jerusalem (and Tel Aviv) is littered with places where people have died in suicide attacks. But at the same, it does seem to violate some fundamental principles (and, probably, international law) that stand against collective punishment. While there are plenty of Jewish Israelis who support demolitions, there are many, religious or otherwise, who see it as basically immoral behaviour. And it does nothing, I think, to help Israel's case.

But it is the second type of demolition that I find more disturbing. Because of the strange nature of the West Bank - which is still technically territory occupied during a war and whose status has not yet been finalised - and of east Jerusalem - which was annexed after 1967 but is riddled with areas of land that it is illegal to build on - many Palestinians here end up building homes without planning permission. And these can be demolished at any time, rather like someone's illegally built conservatory in a Tunbridge Wells back garden.

It is hard for Palestinians in many areas to get a building permit, and, according to ICAHD at least, demolitions happen with a kind of random regularity. Troops arrive at a building with a bulldozer (the irony of the bulldozer attack in Jerusalem has not gone unremarked in the press here) and, through a megaphone, give the occupants notice that their house is going be demolished. And then, unless someone secures a court order to stop them, once the occupants have left, they reduce it to rubble.

There are plenty of opinions about why the state does this - and I am trying to find an army or a settler group that might take me on a tour of the same area and let me hear their point of view - but the effect is to make life in Palestinian areas unimaginably insecure. And that is a terrible basis for building a state of your own.

There is also, as we saw, an excrutiating difference in the quality of life of Palestinians and Jews in east Jersusalem. Both groups are officially residents of the city and both pay taxes to the city council. Yet Palestinian areas often lack the infrastructure, such as sewage and an efficient water supply - and even pavements and traffic lights - that almost adjacent Jewish areas take for granted.

A particulary powerful example of this is the Jewish settlement of Ma'ale Adumin, which we also visited yesterday. Here, about 30,000 people live in a rather wonderful new town that functions as a suburb of Jerusalem. There's a sports centre and a shopping mall, the houses are well built and handsome and made of that lovely honey-coloured Jerusalem stone. And, on the edge of the Judean desert, there are lawns, palm trees, parks, fountains and two open-air swimming pools. It looks like a great place to live and the families there love it. Yet, just over a tiny wadi, on the next hill, is the Arab neighbourhood of Abu Dis (twinned with Camden, it turns out), where, again according to ICAHD, the water only comes on two days a week and which looks pretty much like a Brazilian favela. As we looked out across the wadi, I tried to imagine what it must be like to live there and see the sumptuousness of Ma'ale Adumin, just out of reach and where, for all intents and purposes, you are not allowed to go - although you are also a Jerusalem resident.

I am guest here and I am sure I don't undertsand the situation fully. But this morning, when I arrived for prayers, the picture looked different and I was sad.

2008-07-12T07:01:00.024+01:00

Some random photos

Simmy's comment made me realise that pictures are good. So here are some from my trip so far. For some reason, I didn't take any in Damascus, which is a shame.

Click on any picture on this blog, by the way, to see it bigger.*

* I only just discovered that.

Brussels (obviously)

The train to Budapest

On the border with Romania

The Bucharest military museum

Setting off across Turkey

Aleppo

ditto

No Name in Jerusalem

My flat (with the washing hanging on the balcony)

A house in the German Quarter, just down the road

Shuki

Mehane Yehuda market

Gwen

Roger

The Jerusalem Great Synagogue

ditto

An Arab-Israeli boy, with bike

Looking down towards the Old City

The obligatory sunset shot

2008-07-11T17:05:00.005+01:00

Afloat on the briny blue

Today was Dead Sea day. Two of us, Julien, the guy I met in Damascus, and I, got up early and headed for Jerusalem's gargantuan bus station to catch the 421 to the lowest point on earth. It's the start of the weekend and the place was full of Israeli soldiers lugging their rucksacks and M16 rifles from hot dog stand to falafel counter as they waited for buses to take them home to their families. There's a way they wear their uniforms in a calculatedly scruffy way that gives them a cool, almost hippy look and it's easy to see how teenagers here can't wait to join up to be one of the gang. It's presumably less cool when you find yourself in Hebron patrolling the streets and keeping an eye out for snipers. And, of course, there's nothing hippy about the all-to-real guns.

When the bus came there was an unholy scramble to get aboard. Three American tourists had apparently politely queued for an earlier bus, only to find that it had filled up before they could get on board. So this time they were all elbows and shouting and pushing to the front almost before the doors had opened. It was pretty clear that there wouldn't be enough space for all of us, so Julien and I joined the ruckus only to be almost stymied at the last minute by a mother carrying a baby. Once she had secured a footing on the first step (hard to argue when there's a baby involved) she beckoned over six more members of her family to go in first which caused a barrage of loud complaints from the people behind her. We eventually got a seat but the aisle was packed with people standing.

The bus takes about an hour to get to Kalia, at the northern tip of the Dead Sea, passing through just one checkpoint on the way. (The whole area between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea is under Israeli control, even though it is technically the West Bank.) But then we made something of a strategic error. For travellers, the Torah, Mishna, Gemara and Talmud combined is of course the Lonely Planet and under Dead Sea, almost in big letters, it warns you to ask the driver to let you off at Kalia Beach rather than Kalia itself - which of course we didn't. So when we did finally get off the bus - our seats immediately grabbed by the nearest two people in the aisle - we found ourselves on a lonely stretch of road with the Dead Sea about 500 metres away and nothing but those plastic-sheeting greenhouse structures in between. Kalia Beach and its promised bars, restaurants and places to stay was, we thought, going to be a couple of kilometres in one direction or the other. We just didn't know which.

We decided to head towards the shore and see if we could see where we needed to be and we were about half way there when a group of agricutural labourers started shouting and waving at us. It was already very hot, the ground was made of hard-caked mud and stones and, uselessly, we were wearing flip-flops, so, looking like the dumbest couple of tourists in the the world, we headed towards them to ask directions.

As we approached we couldn't work out if they were Israeli or Palestinian and that kind of thing makes a difference in the West Bank, especially if, as I was, one of you is wearing a yarmulke. So, as soon as we were within talking distance, we fired off a volley of Arabic, Hebrew and English greetings, all sort of mish-mashed together, to reassure them that we were friends. ("Salam aleikum" worked wondered in Damascus, so it seemed a good bet here.) That seemed to do the trick and, when we asked where the beach was, they were polite enough only to laugh after they had given us directions. We were nearly 10km too far south.

There were no buses and hitchhiking turned out not to be the done thing (who's pick up a hitchhiker in a potential conflict zone?) so we ended up making an impromptu hike along the asphalt of Highway 90 back the way we had come. We had water but flip-flops weren't the ideal footwear for this kind of this, so the Bainkini and Siesta Beach Resort, when it finally came into sight, was like reaching Eldorado.

It was 40 shekels (£6) to get in to the resort and it is worth every penny. The whole place is done out in some sort of shabby Moroccan chic and you can sit in lovely gardens drinking mint tea and looking out over the water towards Jordan. But of course it's the Dead Sea itself that's the real attraction and so we found a spot on the beach and waded in.

ven if you have been to the Dead Sea before (I went in off the Jordan coast in 2000 ish), the bouyancy is wonderfully unexpected. It is a bit like being on a watery bouncy castle and it's totally impossible to stay upright. And, as it turns out, it's almost impossible to keep the stinging salt water out of your eyes, which sent us hurrying out again to the Bainkini's fresh water showers.

Once we had sorted that one out (head nicely above the water, wear sunglasses and take a bottle of fresh water in with you for those emergency rinsing moments) we were sorted and the day spun out alternately gently floating in (on?) the sea and catching the sun on the scraggy shore. (For golden sands you need to look elsewhere.) And, yes, we did cover ourselves with the lovely mineral-rich mud and now my skin is as soft as a baby's.

There was, apparently, maybe and possibly, a bus from the (correct) bus stop back to Jerusalem at 5pm. Or was it 4? No one seemed to know. So, in good time, we found ourselves walking another half hour along asphalt (flip-flops by now doing a sterling job) towards a garage/cafe where our bus had stopped on the way in and where, hopefully, someone would be able to tell us. Of course, no one could and there was a bit of concern that we would get stuck as Israeli buses stop for shabat. We sat down at one of the little tables on the forecourt and got talking to three Israeli guys who, wonderfully, offered us a lift back to town. And even better, the driver was a policeman, which meant we breezed through the checkpoint in air conditioned 4x4 luxury.

Now shabat is starting and the city has all but closed down. I am going again to my friends Gwen and Robin's house for a shabat dinner but I have bunked off shul for tonight (I did go every day this week) and am sitting here with a beer on the balcony as the sun sets over the rooftops. It's still delightful and I feel totally at home. And, even if you don't quite make it to shul, shabat in Jerusalem is something very special indeed.

2008-07-09T12:23:00.016+01:00

Some thoughts on hate

I pass, every day on the way to college, a little cluster of anti-gay graffiti: Homo = sick; Homo = Danger to Children; Homo = ill; and so on. It is all obviously written by the same person and he (and I am guessing it is a he) has spent a fair amount of time covering the bus shelters, telephone wiring boxes and benches of Bethlehem Street with his marker pen musings. In the scheme of things, they are mostly obnoxious but harmless but one of them sticks in my craw when I see it and is harder to shake off.

It says "Homo = AntiSemite" and it's pointing to another graffiti (by the same person? by someone else?) of a Star of David with the words "Juif" and "Jude" in the middle.

What bothers me about this particular graffiti (graffito? surely not??) is not particularly its suggestion that being gay is somehow unJewish - something that would come as a surprise to a fair few people I know - nor really that it makes you anti-Jewish, though I do know many gay people whose attitude to any religion is pretty cold. But that, by linking homosexuality with the way the Nazis treated the Jews, the person who wrote this graffiti, ascribes to what is basically a loving desire the level of hatred that, even 60 years after the Holocaust, we still find hard to conceive. I have heard homosexuality called many things, but "hateful" is a new one on me and I don't like it. Thoughts on this very welcome.

I heard a related story this morning. We went, as a group, to pray at the Kotel, the Wailing Wall (left). Correction. We went, as a group, to pray at the Kotel but, as we are a group of men and women who pray together, we went, not to the bit of the wall that is in all the postcards, but to a part further to the south near Robinson's Arch. The setting was incredibly moving. Here is a place that has been sacred for 2,500 years, where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, where Jesus was crucified and where Mohammed began his Night Journey into heaven, and to pray there with my colleagues - men and women standing next to each other and two women leading the service - was an experience I will not forget.

Yet on the coach back to the yeshiva, we heard why we were praying there and not in the main part of the Kotel. And the story saddened me. It turns out that, in 1997, a group of Conservative Jews, men and women, had started to pray together at the Kotel to celebrate the festival of Shavuot. As they were a mixed congregation they placed themselves towards the back of the plaza and off to the side and got on with their own business. Then, according to two people who were there, things turned nasty.

"By the start of the Torah reading, several hundred Haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] had abandoned their own prayers to come and push, shove, and taunt. To their credit the police and the border patrol were quick to react. They did everything in their power to keep the now-growing and very angry mob at bay. As we made it through the reading of the Ten Commandments, the police were close to losing control. They beseeched us to leave, for they were no longer able to protect us. We were now surrounded by close to a thousand young men pushing, spitting, calling us Nazis and throwing stones... water and fecal matter were being tossed upon us and upon the Torah scroll. I, and not a few others, were hit.

"The crowd of hundreds had now become thousands, with crowds of people from the roofs of the Jewish Quarter homes cheering them on and pointing out where we were: 'Because of you six million Jews died'; 'Go back to Germany!' Some of our prayer shawls were being torn off our backs and stomped on... The mob was accusing the police of being Nazis for defending us."

Rabbi Andrew Sacks and David Fine - from Wailing at the Wall, by Phyllis Chesler

Spitting, throwing stones and accusations of being Nazis - all because men and women were praying together. It is hard to imagine hate so strong that it makes an Orthodox Jew to throw "fecal matter" on to the Torah scroll, something he would normally hold in total respect, let alone on other people. And "Because of you six million Jews died" leaves me speechless. Thoughts on this very welcome too.

And just a final example. Three of us - Robin, a friend from the yeshiva, Julien, an Australian who I met in Damascus (pics below), and I - were walking along the Haas Promenade last night at sunset - the place where I went on Saturday evening - looking down across (Arab) east Jersualem. It's right on the border between the Jewish and Arab parts of the city and there were plenty of Jewish and Palestinian families out for a stroll in the park and enjoying the early evening breeze. Everything is peaceful there. People aren't exactly mixing but you get a glimpse of what a post-peace Israel and Palestine could be like.

As we were taking pictures, three Palestinian teenagers walked by and, with the bravado of people who know you can't understand their language, said something in Arabic (we were obviously Jewish) and laughed. We thought nothing of it but then a couple of Israeli women came over and told us what they had said: 'You're father is dead." Teenage joking, maybe, but in this region jokes can lead to all sorts of ugly places. Maybe it's the heat, but there does seem to be a lot hate to go round.

I liked this van. It's probably deadly serious about something.

2008-07-07T14:00:00.003+01:00

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.

2008-07-05T15:17:00.025+01:00

People are strange

I like this video and I like the fact that it has nothing much to do with Israel, Judaism or anything else really. (However if you do want a little bit of linked-in Jewish thought, it's worth bearing in mind that the most repeated commandment in the Torah is

ואהבתם את הגר כי גרים הייתם בארץ מצרים *
Love the stranger, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.)

Turn the sound up.

* I just put that bit in to show off that I've worked out how to write Hebrew on my Mac, though that sentence did take me about 10 minutes to do.

"People are Strange". Video by Remi Galliard. (Music, obviously, by The Doors)

2008-07-04T06:24:00.005+01:00

The weekend is here (on a Friday)

I tend to wake up here at about 6am because it is light and it's nice to go out on to the balcony. But that means I am tired of course by the late afternoon. So I was hoping to have a lie-in this morning (it's Friday, so it's Saturday, if you see what I mean). However the dust cart came very noisily at 6.45 so I am up. Tonight I am going to a shabbat potluck dinner with some of my fellow students, all of whom are American and are celebrating July 4. We have to bring red white and blue food (I am taking lentil and tomato salad) and it should be fun, though they are all (semi seriously) concerned that it might be some sort of day of mourning for me as I am British.

As a European, I feel it would be lovely if some of my fellow Jews here had similar concerns towards the Palestinians living in Gaza. I am sure they do but so far I haven't really had that conversation. My colleagues here are liberal, compassionate and intelligent people but I suspect many would see the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as a necessary evil. The danger - and I am talking more about the general Israeli reaction to Wednesday's attack rather than specific conversations I have had with friends - is that anxiety can make people simplify the situation and it is easy here to imagine that it's a case of some sort of amorphous and homogenous group of enemy Arabs surrounding Israel and a lot of heroic IDF soldiers keeping them at bay. People are surprised that I spent time on the way here in Syria, for example, and found the place hospitable, even when I said I was Jewish and on my way to Jerusalem.

That said, I also see the world here through pretty cloudy lenses - I find liberal, post colonialism a powerful influence on the way I think; and I'm pretty caught up in romantic ideas about the underdog and freedom fighters, for instance. So maybe I am missing the point too. And I am having to face up to some questions that feel more academic when you are reading the Guardian in London over a cafe latte in Tinderbox. I would fight intellectually, for example, for almost everything Israel stands for. But would I (literally) fight Palestinians in Gaza? Or, as a colleague asked me yesterday when we were talking about the Israeli army, would I find Belgian forces who were invading Britain and threatening to push Britons into the sea? (It's a slightly arresting image and probably for all the wrong reasons.)

Yesterday, a group of us were talking about the safest ways (in terms of avoiding terrorist attacks) for us, as Jews, to get from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv - bus, shared minibus or taxi. It's like some bizarre sort of parlour game that I guess is just part of daily life here. Bus came top because there are metal detectors at the bus station but, then again, we felt the shared minibuses were pretty good because they tend to be driven by Arab Israelis so they might be more immune to attack. (I think both are pretty safe to be honest and anyway who would have thought the Circle Line would be at risk of attack?) I then asked, rather idly, whether we thought a group of Palestinians wanting to travel from, say, Hebron to Ramallah might be having the same conversation and what conclusion they might come to. I think they thought the question was just mad but I am allowed to have crazy ideas like this because I am European.

My Hebrew is coming along well. I am in class Aleph Plus, which means one up from total beginner level, and that's about right. Now I am in that babbling stage where everything is kind of right but the wrong tense, wrong pronunciation, wrong grammar. We did directions (right, left, straight ahead) in class the other day and, to my delight, in the evening someone pulled over and asked me the way to a nearby street. I confidently told him, "straight on, straight on, left then right", until, later, some friends pointed out that I had confused "yashar", straight ahead, with "yafe", beautiful, and so probably said something like, "Hey beautiful, you go left and then right." I thought he accelerated away pretty fast.

I am just about managing to persuade people to speak to me in Hebrew in shops and cafes - which is hard as everyone speaks perfect English and I guess it's frustrating for them when I can't understand what they say. The other day I was totally stymied when a shopkeeper asked me if I wanted my new coffee pot gift wrapped. But people indulge me, just like they indulge my crazy European views (see above).

Today I think I am going to go to the beach. We have a choice of the Med (about an hour west) or the Dead Sea (about 30 mins east). I haven't really got my head round how close things are but really you can pop to either place and easily be back (as I want to be) in time for the start of shabbat in the early evening. But first I am going to investigate Jerusalem's big public pool which is very near my flat. I haven't been swimming since I left London and there have been quite a few kebabs and beers since then.

Hope all's well. It's lovely to hear from you and hear your news. And I hope the sun is shining back in Blighty.

Dx

PS
I thought this looked interesting. I'll try to catch it, though I am going to need subtitles.

2008-07-03T19:30:00.006+01:00

The earth is full of your creatures

I spent a while trying to write something about yesterday's incident in Jaffa Street but although I had a number of different starting points, nothing really gelled. I'll have another go soon. Instead, I am at a religious college so I thought I'd share this psalm with you. We said it in shul this morning because it is a new moon and the start of the new lunar month and I liked the way it pulled the camera back, letting us see the world as a whole again. Plus it also has the word hyrax in it, which can't be bad.

Psalm 104

1 Praise the LORD, my soul. LORD my God, you are very great; you are clothed with splendor and majesty.

2 The LORD wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent

3 and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind.

4 He makes winds his messengers,
flames of fire his servants.

5 He set the earth on its foundations;
it can never be moved.

6 You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.

7 But at your rebuke the waters fled,
at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;

8 they flowed over the mountains,
they went down into the valleys,
to the place you assigned for them.

9 You set a boundary they cannot cross;
never again will they cover the earth.

10 He makes springs pour water into the ravines;
it flows between the mountains.

11 They give water to all the beasts of the field;
the wild donkeys quench their thirst.

12 The birds of the sky nest by the waters;
they sing among the branches.

13 He waters the mountains from his upper chambers;
the land is satisfied by the fruit of his work.

14 He makes grass grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to cultivate—
bringing forth food from the earth:

15 wine that gladdens human hearts,
oil to make their faces shine,
and bread that sustains their hearts.

16 The trees of the LORD are well watered,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.

17 There the birds make their nests;
the stork has its home in the junipers.

18 The high mountains belong to the wild goats;
the crags are a refuge for the hyrax.

19 He made the moon to mark the seasons,
and the sun knows when to go down.

20 You bring darkness, it becomes night,
and all the beasts of the forest prowl.

21 The lions roar for their prey
and seek their food from God.

22 The sun rises, and they steal away;
they return and lie down in their dens.

23 Then people go out to their work,
to their labor until evening.

24 How many are your works, LORD!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

25 There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.

26 There the ships go to and fro,
and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.

27 All creatures look to you
to give them their food at the proper time.

28 When you give it to them,
they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
they are satisfied with good things.

29 When you hide your face,
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.

30 When you send your Spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground.

31 May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
may the LORD rejoice in his works—

32 he who looks at the earth, and it trembles,
who touches the mountains, and they smoke.

33 I will sing to the LORD all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.

34 May my meditation be pleasing to him,
as I rejoice in the LORD.

35 But may sinners vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more. Praise the LORD, my soul. Praise the LORD.

2008-07-02T10:44:00.006+01:00

An attack in the city

There has been some sort of attack in Jerusalem in a road near college. We are all fine, though of course it is a little scary. It doesn't seem to have been a bomb and it's not clear if there is any link to terrorism. More news later, I guess.

2008-07-01T21:06:00.006+01:00

Market day

Went to the Mehane Yehuda market today to have a shufti round. It's Jerusalem's big market with all those promises that you can get anything there but actually it turns out to be pretty small compared to, say, Istanbul or Damascus. That said, the stuff on sale is great and it's all a bit more organised than its Arab counterparts (doesn't that say so much about the Middle East?). There are the usual fruit and veg stalls but also wonderful bakeries, fish counters, places setting biscuits and sweets, and a stall (in one of these pictures) with dozens of different types of halva, some of it actually quite palatable. The place is fairly noisy but it doesn't crowd you like many markets do and we could stroll up and down pretty undisturbed. It's about 45 minutes' walk from my flat so I won't be popping out there for a pint of milk but the pastries were nice and at one of the spice stalls I tasted Za'atar for the first time, a delicious blend of spices that is a kind of Israeli staple and which I can imagine doing a lot of cooking with. I had it first on a spoon and then on top of some soft pita-ish bread fresh out of the oven.

As we were buying the bread a (Jewish) man came past with his shopping, singing and shouting joyfully something about Jerusalem and the Messiah. Further down, a man dressed as Jesus was having a shwarma kebab. No one paid any attention to either of them.

Our Hebrew class continues nicely, in fact at quite a pace and I'm enjoying what I am learning. But of course we chat in English with each other once it's over and Israelis will switch straight into English the moment you trip up on some word or other. So it's hard to practice. A few of us have a pact to try to speak in Hebrew but we soon slip up. Still it's going to be a good way into the language and I can already read pretty well without vowels, which, for those who don't know, is one of Hebrew's biggest challenges for someone brought up outside Israel.

This evening four of us went walking back form college to Ba'aka, the area my flat is in, and ended up passing the Prime Minister's house. The road is closed to traffic and there are little barriers at either end but pedestrians can walk down it, though you can't exactly go up and ring the bell. Obviously there are police and soldiers - with guns - but nothing like the barricade that Thatcher put up at the end of Downing Street and that, if I remember correctly, was to stop people demonstrating.

Another late night and an early start in the morning. At this rate I can forget Tel Aviv, it's going to be 48 hours in my bed come the weekend.

Dx

PS Hope this font size if better. Let me know if it should go bigger still.

2008-06-30T17:20:00.006+01:00

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

2008-06-29T20:10:00.004+01:00

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

2008-06-28T15:27:00.003+01:00

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.

2008-06-25T14:26:00.003+01:00

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

2008-06-25T13:53:00.004+01:00

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.

2008-06-21T16:17:00.007+01:00

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...

2008-06-20T09:55:00.006+01:00

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.

2008-06-18T14:21:00.007+01:00

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.

2008-06-16T16:03:00.001+01:00

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