Random reflections on Israel

I know I talked about having more to say about Turkey, but that seems like a lifetime ago. Instead, let’s have a go at some thoughts on Israel, while I warm myself in Africa and get ready to tell you about that.

***

Language has been a bit of a struggle for me since I left France, but never more so than in Israel. Spanish and Italian were different but manageable. Russian and Greek came with the added bonus of a slightly quirky alphabet, but they were puzzles I could crack. Turkish was largely meaningless, but at least had letters I could recognize and sound out. In Israel official signs are in Hebrew and Arabic and both of them are completely impenetrable. Not only do the letters look more like art than language, they’re both read from right to left. It’s really really good that the other language most signs are in is English, and almost everybody speaks it too.

At least I knew what this said.

***

Steve’s Weird Food for Israel: This one was a bit tricky. Since I really embraced the SWF project, I’ve taken to asking friendly locals what kind of weird thing they’d suggest I try, and in Israel nothing really popped up. The Jewish kosher and Muslim halal dietary laws means that a lot of the usual suspects - innards and such – just aren’t very common in Israel. So what did I find? Only the second sweet offering of the trip, and the first beverage: shlab (pronounced sort of like sah-huh-lab).

Here’s the guy making up my cup.

I don’t have a good picture of my shlab, because I grabbed it from a street vendor while I was on the move with that first walking tour on the day I was struck down by the plague. But that doesn’t really matter because it’s not much to look at anyways – just a thick white concoction with sprinkles on top. It’s a winter drink, served warm, and tastes basically like runny rice pudding without the rice. Milky and sweet and vanilla, and thick enough that it comes with a spoon. The main thing that makes shlab different, and qualifies it as a weird food, is that one of its ingredients is flour made from grinding dried orchid tubers. Other ingredients include milk, gum arabic, starch and vanilla. It came in a standard-issue styrofoam cup, poured out of a big samovar-like container. After dispensing it into the cup, the shlab man dropped in a spoonful of sultanas and topped it with shredded coconut, ground almonds and sugar (At least I think that’s what it was. Whatever it was, though, was tasty.) All in all, it was a nice break from the innards.

***

Naturally, you see a lot of men wearing yarmulkes in Israel, but here they’re called kippot (that’s the plural, the singular is kippa.) And where do they buy them? Possibly from a shop called “Kippa Man” that I saw. Here’s just a sample of what the Kippa Man had on offer.

Spot the Rolling Stones, Maple Leafs, South Park and Pringles kippot!

***

The security at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv was… well I was going to say it was unbelievable, but in fact is was entirely believable and understandable. It was actually a lot like I wish airport security would be, though it means you have to arrive three hours before your scheduled departure time. It started before I even entered the airport – I was stopped just outside the doors and pulled over to a screening station with a metal detector and a security officer who had many questions. (I’m not sure why I got picked, but the same thing happened on my way in to the country. Right after landing, almost at the end of the jetway, I got pulled aside by a woman doing security and asked a lot of questions about where I was going and where I’d been and how long I was staying and what my next destination was. Once I got past her, passport control was a breeze.)

After I was allowed into the building, there was another long lineup where all baggage – checked and carry-on – was x-rayed, and I got quizzed again. After that all baggage was inspected by hand – and I don’t just mean all my baggage. I mean all baggage. It was opened up so the inspector could compare the contents to the previously recorded x-ray image of each bag she had on her big flatscreen monitor. Many many things were swabbed with the little explosives-detecting wand. And lots and lots of repacking was being done all around me.

Then it was on to the check-in desk, which took a bizarrely long amount of time. When I finally got through with that I still had to go through the regular security that’s like every other airport in the world. Except here again my entire carry-on bag was swabbed – inside every pocket and compartment, the covers of books, my computer, my camera, and my cell phone. They get a lot of mileage out of one of those little square bits of gauze in Israel, let me tell you. Finally I was allowed to proceed to the land of duty free, but the three hour wait I’d been expecting had turned into about 30 minutes to wolf down a food court salad and head straight to the gate. It was time-consuming and a bit frustrating, but at the same time I’ve never felt so safe getting on a flight in my life. (And no pictures, because I didn’t feel like missing my connection in Addis Ababa due to the fact that a guard with a machine gun was standing on my neck.)

***

The clash of cultures in Jerusalem is everywhere, especially in the old city. It’s probably exacerbated there because it’s such a small area – a mere square kilometer that’s home to about 35,000 people. This was brought home to me on my last afternoon when I did a tour of the tunnels along the Western Wall, which was quite neat. The tunnels run at the original level of the street from the time of the Second Temple, underneath 14th century vaults. It was cool to get up close to the original stones that were laid by Herod in 19 B.C.. Well, actually I don’t think Herod laid any of them himself, but that’s just nit-picking. The tour ran along the entire length of the Western Wall and ended up letting out at the far northern end. So just as I was emerging from being deeply immersed (heh… literally deeply immersed) in Jewish history for over an hour, I came up into daylight right across the street from the first two stations of the cross. And then I turned down the Via Dolorosa and straight into the Muslim souk marketplace. It all happened in about two minutes and two blocks. It’s no wonder they get on each other’s nerves, they’re right on top of each other.

An uncharacteristically wide and uncrowded section of the souk

***

I told you a bit about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and though I intended to go back I never did. One thing I liked though, is the story about the keys to the church. As I mentioned, it’s a contested site – argued over by Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Armenians, and even the Coptics and Ethiopians. (Is it any wonder Jerusalem has such issues when Christians can’t even agree among themselves about things, let alone with Jews and Muslims?) In fact, the arguments go back so far that long ago Caliph Omar decided to give the keys to the church to a Muslim family for safekeeping. Since that time, more than 900 years ago, the same family has unlocked the church doors every morning and locked them every evening, passing the tradition down from father to son for almost a millennium. (This is another one of those mandatory tour guide stories, like the ladder on the window ledge.)

Greek Orthodox priests in the square outside the church.

***

Saran-wrapped luggage. I first encountered it in Russia, so it’s not just an Israel thing. And it took me a long time to figure it out. There are stations in a lot of airports where you can, for a fee, have your luggage completely swaddled in that stretchy plastic stuff. At first I thought it might be because the luggage in question was so dodgey that the owner wanted to make sure that it didn’t explode its contents all over the arrivals area. Then I realized that it must be a low-cost security measure. Either that, or lots of people are traveling with very, very large sandwiches.

King-sized ham ‘n’ cheese arriving in Tel Aviv.

***

You can buy actual, genuine antiquities in the souk in the old city of Jerusalem. There’s a short stretch along the Via Dolorosa where they’re congregated, and my tour guide said that they’re licensed by the government for this kind of thing. I guess the whole country is so completely crammed with archeological sites that the museums really can’t use another 750 small, chipped oil lamps or cracked jugs. Naturally there were no prices marked on anything in the display windows, and I was too chicken to go in and start asking. But imagine – you can just walk in with a wad of shekels and walk out with some genuine Biblical-age bit of antiquity.

Need a nice bowl for some chips ‘n’ dip?

***

And in closing, another non-Israel-related note: On my last night in the country I slept well, and I dreamt. When I woke up in the morning I didn’t remember much of the dream, but I remember this: prominent in one scene was a large dresser, filled with all my normal clothes from home, and finding it gave me with great joy. Later that night, mere minutes before the shuttle arrived to take me to the airport, the zipper on one of my two pairs of pants self-destructed and I had just enough time to pull out the other pair, which were sadly in need of a wash but at least functional. Sometimes I really miss having a normal wardrobe, and obviously my subconscious does too.

Pick of Pics - Jerusalem

Two-for-one today. I couldn't decided which of these two I liked better. You are, of course, welcome to render your opinion.

Sunny spot in Jerusalem, the long shot.

Old man in a sunny spot in Jerusalem, the close-up

The Dead Sea. It's weird.

Jerusalem is a blockbuster destination, make no mistake. But I wanted to see some more of the country, and I really couldn’t leave without floating in the Dead Sea. On Saturday I managed to get myself to Tel Aviv, which turned out to be reasonably simple despite the fact that the buses don’t run on Shabbat. What does run is a system of “shared taxis” called sherut, and it wasn’t hard to find one of them. That took me to the Tel Aviv central bus station, and then I managed to blunder around long enough to locate the right local sherut to get downtown to my hostel.

I went to Tel Aviv to hash, and it was the first time I’ve been an easy 3-minute walk from the start of a run, which was luxurious. The Holy Land Hash House Harriers were a friendly bunch, mostly Americans, and they welcomed me as I’ve come to expect. Lots of them had done an overnight race 30km run through the desert the night before, so there was a larger walking contingent that usual and the run was mercifully short. This was good because I was still generally plague-ridden and could really feel it when running. And not only was the run short, and conveniently located, it included a beer stop half way through at a bar that served the largest beers I’ve ever seen!

Two litres each

I should also add the the Holy Land HHH were the first hash I’ve visited that gave me a memento of my run with them – a patch to sew onto my running shirt. (Never mind that it was a patch for a different hash, the Thirsty Knights HHH. It’s made up of the same people, they just run on Thursday nights instead. Get it?) Oh, and I had a nice time Saturday night after the run hanging out with Susan and Tina having beers, even though they took me to that crazy bar that had been blown up 6 years before (“If we can’t sit here and eat nachos, then the terrorists have won.”) We also went to a bar right out on the beach and I tried smoking shisha which was a bit weird, and didn’t really taste like much, so I’m not sure I really see the point.

It’s all about trying new things, right?

Tel Aviv is a beautiful city full of beaches and waterfront walkways, and I desperately wanted to go for a nice long run. On Sunday morning I suited up, but after about 5 minutes my chest and throat were on fire and I had to stop. It was really disappointing because the place was full of runners who kept blowing past me on my dejected trudge back to the hostel.

He got to run!

I consoled myself with a big, leisurely Sunday breakfast of shakshuka, which is a traditional dish of stewed tomatoes and peppers baked in the oven, with an egg poached in the middle of it. Not bad, but a bit on the soupy side. I spent the rest of the day wandering through a bit of Tel Aviv and walking up to Jaffa where there was a big flea market, a weird art installation, a passion fruit slushy, and a pathetic visitor’s centre (where they should be ashamed to be charging 8 shekels admission, even though that’s only $2.25). It was a quiet day, but reasonably relaxing. I had an evening of blogging and turned in early because I planned early start the next day.

On Monday morning I was picked up from the hostel for my day trip to Masada and the Dead Sea. It was a smallish bus, whose first stop was at the Ahava Centre, a thinly disguised (actually completely blatant) attempt to get the tour participants to buy Ahava Dead Sea skin care products. We got herded off the bus to watch a 4 minute video on Ahava products that depicted happy men clad in pristine white overalls gingerly snipping twigs from therapeutic bushes or scooping small trowels of Dead Sea mud into gleaming glass cylinders. Very sensitive and sustainable, though I suspect the actual harvesting uses more backhoes than trowels. After the video we were funneled into the store. I hate this kind of captive consumerism, but even I found myself thinking, “I need shampoo anyways…” before I snapped out of it and realized I didn’t need $10.00 Dead Sea shampoo.

Once we shook off the shackles of commercialism it was on to Masada, which the LP describes as “a desert mesa rising high above the Dead Sea, which figures prominently in the Jewish psyche.” It’s best know as the spot where, in 66 AD, 960 Jews chose suicide rather than be captured by besieging Roman forces led by Peter O’Toole. It’s an impressive sight and a really long way up. People with more time and energy hike all the way to the top. We took a convenient cable car, and got some great views along the way.

On the way up

At the top were more of my favourite things – rocks and Roman ruins! There’s the remains of a whole settlement up there, including Herod’s palace (he really got around, that Herod). There was also a very clever water collection and storage system and yet another Roman bath. (I think I’ve seen too many of these by now, I can practically recite along with the guides: apodyterium, frigidarium, tepidarium, calderium…).

Not the baths. Instead, a picturesque bit of wall and a nice tree.

There’s one thing I liked about how the restoration was done at Masada, and I think it should be adopted in some form by all archeological restorers. All around the site along the walls there was a thick black line painted, snaking up and down at different levels. Our guide explained that this was the line of restoration – everything below it was original, everything above it was a recreation. I thought it was a brilliantly simple way to give visitors a good sense of what they were really seeing, and it made me wonder how much of every other archeological site I’ve seen in the last six months was original and how much was not.

See? Original frescos below, recreated wall above

What did I not like at Masada? I did not like that a small bottle of water cost 10 shekels, and I did not like that the associated Visitor’s Centre had a banner for the “Masada Muselogical Experience”. Honestly, must everything be a bloody experience? Can I not just go to a museum?

By this point you must be thinking, '”But what about the Dead Sea? This post is supposed to be about the Dead Sea!” Well after Masada it was time for the main event and the bus zipped us down to the sea. (And I do mean down – it’s the lowest point on earth, 1,385 feet below sea level). It was a strange sight. The Dead Sea is rapidly disappearing – apparently it dropped 1.5 metres last year alone. I find that astonishing. It must mean you can poke a stick in the beach at the water line and come back a day or two later and see a noticeable difference. It also means that the Ein Gedi spa built along the shore is now so far from the water they use a shuttle to take people back and forth. Most of this water loss is because water from the Jordan River – the only source flowing into the Dead Sea – is being diverted irrigation.

Of course I went in. There are change rooms and showers and lockers just like any well-appointed beach, but the actual area for swimming was very small – cordoned off with a line of buoys. And you all know the gag, right? The water of the Dead Sea is so salty (33% salt – more than 8 times that of normal seawater) that it’s impossible to sink.

Here’s the obligatory photo of me floating.

It’s fun, but the water is also incredibly harsh. I put just a dot of it on my tongue to see what it tasted like (don’t try and tell me you wouldn’t do the same thing) and it was awful. Not just salty, but really chemically too. They tell you not to put your head under water or get it in your eyes. You’re not even supposed to splash around. It actually kind of stung, especially any tiny cuts or scrapes I had.

I also went into the black mud and covered my self from head to toe but my appointed photographer did not have a very steady hand, so you get a photo of other people in the mud instead.

After rinsing the mud off in the sea, and gingerly wiping off my face, I gradually noticed that it felt like my skin was kind of burning, especially my face. So I got out to try the hot spring, which was nice and warm, but just as harsh. Pretty soon I had to get out and clean off with some fresh water. But that wasn’t the end of me and the Dead Sea. The water itself is… tenacious. It felt almost oily on the skin and was hard to wipe off. Later that night I realized how insidious it really is. When I was walking from the shore back up to the change rooms I put my bare, still wet feet right into my shoes. The water from my feet soaked into the inside of my shoes a bit, but I figured it would dry soon enough. Not so. There’s now an oily film all over the inside of my shoes, which naturally transfers to the outside of my socks, which naturally transfers to the shiny tile floor of my hotel room, making the whole place sort of skating-rink-ish. Also, the drips of water that landed on the outside of my shoes created big dark oily stains that didn’t really come off despite vigorous scrubbing. So I still have Dead Sea with me to this day.

And then it was time for the ride back to Jerusalem. A bit long, and sort of tiring, but at least the view was good.

The shores of the Dead Sea

First thoughts on the Holy Land

I did not have a good start in Israel. I arrived from Istanbul with my nose running like a faucet, sneezing every 14 seconds, and generally miserable. The hostel I’d reserved online turned out to be one of the grimmest ones I’ve encountered thus far. I was shown to a bunk in an eight- bed room with cold bare concrete floors and grey sheets and the resident cat stealing food from a shopping bag on a neighbouring bed. It was not what I’d been led to expect from the website, which promised en-suite bathrooms and free breakfast and showed shining corridors and bright, pleasant rooms. Sitting on the side of the bed, nose running and head pounding, I came to a quick decision. “Do you have any private rooms?” I asked, and was quickly shifted across the hall to the hotel side of the operation. Here were the shining corridors and en-suite bathrooms! And though the price was 3 or 4 times that of the hostel, they were some of the happiest shekels I’ve spent. The room was the tiniest I’ve had so far – about 8’ square, and the bathroom was so small it could only be viewed with the aid of a scanning electron microscope. But it was mine.

The next morning when I woke up it was clear that the antihistamines I’d taken the night before had been completely ineffective. I was sick, but I was also determined not to waste the short amount of time I had in Jerusalem, so I loaded up on tissues and Vitamin C and trudged off for a walking tour of the Old City. It was a good tour – we saw part of the Armenian Quarter and then went up to the Temple Mount itself, home to the Dome of the Rock, and Al-Aqsa Mosque, though non-Muslims are not allowed to enter either. (And you can’t just walk up and say, “Uh, yeah… I’m Muslim… no really…. Allah rocks!” If there’s any doubt, they make you recite the first chapter of the Qur’an.)

The golden dome.

We also had a look at a small, hidden section of the Western Wall, and wandered through some of the Muslim souk, which reminded me a lot of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, though shabbier and more cramped. We even stopped for lunch as a group, which was nice and sociable. After lunch we trooped along part of the Via Dolorosa past about five or six Stations of the Cross, including this one, number nine, “where Jesus fell a third time”.

This is the where really devout pilgrims who’ve dragged crosses through the maze of city streets drop them off before entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The church itself was odd, it had so many different levels and shrines and tombs and other holy cubby-holes in it that it was easy to get confused and overwhelmed. Not surprisingly, a lot of different groups have claims on the church, chief among them being the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Armenians. They argued about things for so long that eventually they came to a “status quo agreement”, confirmed in 1852, that means everything in common or still-contested areas must remain unchanged unless all parties agree on the changes to be made (and you can guess how often that happens). This means that there’s an old wooden ladder leaning on an exterior window ledge that’s been there for at least a century and a half. Every tour guide in Jerusalem in required to point this out or they will be immediately stripped of their guiding credentials and ridden out of town on a donkey. Similarly, every tourist in Jerusalem is required to take a photo of the ladder. I will spare you mine.

Instead you can see the diving bell in the square outside the church. Ok, actually, it’s a tank for containing suspected bombs. No kidding.

Anyways, I had a guide at the church and I was still befuddled. We did see the spot where Jesus is supposed to have been crucified, and the line of people waiting to crawl under the alter and touch the rock at Golgatha itself. And we saw the supposed tomb of Jesus, and the line of people waiting to see inside that. There were also several other hugely significant spots, but this was at the end of our tour and by then it was abundantly clear that it had not been a good idea for me to drag my sick and travel-weary body around for four hours. I was rather hoping there might be another empty tomb in the area so I could crawl away quietly and expire. (In fact there is - the 1st century tomb of Joseph of Aramithea - which was pleasing small and dim, though decidedly rustic.) I stumbled back to the hotel after gathering oranges and juice, and lapsed into a fevered sleep for the rest of the day, waking only to email, Skype and Twitter my misery to the world.

The next day I checked out the Mahane Yehuda Market in the New city, because I love a good market, and I was looking for something a little low-key after the previous day’s melt-down. The market is predominantly Jewish and I visited late on a Friday morning, so the place was heaving with people shopping for Shabbat. Of course I itched to take a thousand photos, but only took a few.

These looked good, but I stopped somewhere else, as you’re about to find out.

It was at the market where I had a scary moment. All along I’d been nervous about coming to Israel. It’s just in the news so much that I couldn’t help but think that of all the destinations on my itinerary, this would have to be the place where I was most likely to be blown up by passing bus. However, reassuring words from resident hashers assuaged my fears and in fact the reality seems quite different. But then I found myself in this café, sitting on a stool at the bar. A woman came in and set down a bag and coat on the stool next to me and said something like, “I’ll be back in few minutes” and asked me to watch her stuff. And off she went. I nodded and didn’t think about it until a few seconds later when I realized what I’d done, and then I was instantly terrified. Suddenly I imagined Peter Mansbridge gravely intoning, “Four confirmed dead, including one Canadian, in Jerusalem café bombing…”, while they showed some outdated picture of me behind him. Long long long minutes passed while I wondered if I should just run away. And then I thought I couldn’t do that because someone might steal the nice woman’s coat/bomb. And then I thought that would just be typically Canadian – too polite to make a fuss and too nice to leave the bomb to be stolen by some ne’er-do-well. About another three and a half months passed, and finally the woman came back with her latté and the world kept spinning. Rest assured, I won't make that mistake again.

The funny thing is that I was talking to some Tel Aviv hashers the next day about how the country still made me a bit nervous. They were Americans living in Tel Aviv and both said that they felt perfectly safe there, and it was certainly better than other overseas locations where they’d worked. This conversation happened in a bar called Mike’s, right next door to the American Embassy on the Tel Aviv waterfront. Mike’s was the target of a suicide bombing in 2003 that killed three and wounded fifty. And there I was having cheesy fries and listening to how safe Israel is. But when I told my hashing friends Tina and Susan about my little café episode they both instantly said, “Oh, well I would never do that.” So it’s a country where it’s not unheard of to get blown up in your local, and normal to see 18-year old army recruits wandering the streets with machine guns over their shoulders while simultaneously text messaging, but you can’t trust the person next to you in the coffee shop. Thanks, but no thanks.

Back to Jerusalem tourist scene. After my briefly terrifying visit to the market on Friday, I wandered back to the old city for the rest of the afternoon. Thanks to the LP I managed to see some of the weekly procession of Franciscan Friars along the Via Dolorosa. They stopped at each of the stations of the cross, trailing a parade of faithful behind them. They also have a wireless mic and speaker system, and I saw at least two friars walk by with receiver/speakers slung over their shoulders.

And then because it was nearing sunset, I made my way back to the Western Wall. I wasn’t sure if it would be deserted or crammed. Since it was the start of Shabbat, I thought maybe everyone would be heading home for dinner. Of course I was wrong. People were streaming into the square to gather and pray at perhaps the most sacred spot in Judaism. There was a celebratory feel in the air. On the men’s side there was a rough circle of young men with linked arms, singing and dancing. As I watched more and more joined the circle and they all seemed so happy. I suspect that for many of the Jews there had traveled from all over the world to be there to pray and celebrate at the Western Wall at the start of Shabbat. Outside of the enclosed area right in front of the wall there were more and bigger circles of young people – some of men and some of women, but they were all dancing and singing and it was clear it was a joyous and significant thing for all of them. I hung around for a while, just enjoying the feeling of happiness.

No photography is allowed at the Wall during Shabbat, so the only pictures I have were taken from outside the square.

As night fell, I wandered out of the old city and took the long way around the walls and back to my hotel. I stopped to pick up a falafel pita from a street vendor, and a beer from the market around the corner and decamped to the tiny hotel room to commune with my beer, my nasal spray and a mountain of damp tissues. It was an early night.