Catch-up, Part 1
שלום
So…back story. It’s August 11 today and I haven’t had internet on my laptop since July 30.
On Saturday (July 31) the flight to JFK was pretty uneventful. I slept a couple hours, then spent another couple of hours wandering towards Terminal 4 at JFK. I was wayyyyy early, so I was forced to hang around and read or get food until 10:00 local, when I could go check in at El Al. In line I ran into a couple people going to the University too, and Torin and I got waylaid by security after their extensive questioning revealed that we didn’t know anyone in Israel, didn’t have a clue about Hebrew, and were generally the most Israel-naïve people around. I guess that raises a couple mild flags over there, but all it meant in the end was that we had to get one step down from a strip search: our personal bags checked again, our laptops examined, and they even took our shoes. For what, I never found out, but they looked okay when I got them back.
The flight was by far the longest I’ve ever experienced. Plus, I was feeling stuffed up and cramped and didn’t want to bug the people next to me by blowing my nose every ten minutes. But at least we all had TVs in front of the seats and I could watch Shrek 2 (three times) or House of Sand and Fog (okay, didn’t watch it) or Mean Girls (avoided that one too) or a digital image of the plane’s progress over the Atlantic and then the Mediterranean region. The upside was that I did meet Anastasia, who sat next to me and we played Speed with my cards for the last hour or so of the flight.
Then came Ben Gurion airport, where everyone goofed off while waiting for luggage, and those of us who came up empty (grrrr…) spent some fun times at the Lost & Found desk. Finally we all loaded into buses and set out from Tel Aviv for Jerusalem. The first half of the journey, I would have sworn I was in a somewhat flattened part of California. Maybe Riverside, except not as unsightly as Riverside. The strangest part for me was that the houses on the route as we came into Jerusalem are almost all bone-white, meaning they’re probably Arab. I found out that Mount Scopus is in the North-eastern part of Jerusalem, where the neighborhoods are primarily Arab, French Hill in particular.
By then it was of course the afternoon of August 2, but still August 1 back home. I checked in to the dorms, met Nari, the girl in the other room in my flat from New York, and we walked around before meeting everyone else for the campus tour. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention on the campus tour, I’ll admit, because I was dead tired and not looking forward to figuring out how to sleep without my bedding or blanket. They (the madrichim, or counselors) took us on buses to Talpyiot, a shopping district in Jerusalem where we could buy stuff we needed, then when we got back took those of us who had lost our luggage to a place where we could be loaned bedding until we got ours. Then I crashed.
Can’t say I remember a whole lot about Tuesday. I was jet-lagged and still kinda sick, but I managed to find my way to the Forum, where my Hebrew classes are. Luckily, Anastasia is in my class, and we’ve gotten to be better friends over the past week and a half. My teachers are named Naftally (a guy) and Busmat (a girl), and it’s one of those classes where right off you realize they’re not going to speak English and they’re not going to tolerate people who insist on asking long questions in English every five minutes. They’ll explain things, using hand gestures and basic words you know, pictures and the like, but they’re not going to spell it out for you in English. So that’s about five hours of every day since the Tuesday before last (only day off has been last Saturday).
By Wednesday I was pretty pissed about my luggage, and probably would have totally lost it with the madrichim but luckily it showed up at the end of the day. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see my clothes.
Friday is when I figure this whole trip really started, with my first trip to see the Old City. First we went down to a mountain on the southern part of Jerusalem to see the view, and went through some of the neighborhoods near Bethlehem. In particular, there’s a neighborhood called Gilo which saw some of the fiercest fighting during the intifada a couple years ago. Small walls were built to protect the houses near the top of the hill from the Arab neighborhoods on the other side farther down, and today the walls are covered with various murals that artists were hired to do. The intifada meant that property values there had dropped dramatically, so that people who wanted to move now find it almost impossible to sell their house for a good price.
Side note: Israeli drivers are by far the craziest I’ve seen. One guy wearing his kippot with his family in a tiny car was practically playing chicken with our bus on a part of the road past Jaffa gate that merges a bit. The bus kept merging slowly and he kept putting his little car right between it and the wall on the side of the highway, totally unconcerned. Which is not to say our driver wasn’t crazy too. He did a three-point turn in the middle of a two-lane highway with other drivers beeping at him and then sped off the other way.
When we got back to the Old City, the guide took us to Mount Zion, which is right outside Zion gate on the southern side of the Old City. In Jewish tradition, it’s the site of Kind David’s tomb. In Christian tradition, the Last Supper occurred in a room in one of the buildings. The guide was saying that one of the things he always tries to talk about when taking groups around is that in Jerusalem, it often doesn’t matter what the facts are, it matters what people believe. Archaeologists are fairly certain King David’s tomb couldn’t possibly be on Mount Zion. But if he said that to any observant Jews praying in the temple right behind him, he’d get his ass kicked. Nor does it matter that the building the Last Supper supposedly happened in is only a couple hundred years old. Nor that according to the Bible, Jesus was crucified outside the city, but the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has an altar on the “site of the crucifixion,” right smack in the middle of the Christian Quarter, which happens to be only thirty or forty feet from his “tomb.” In all likelihood, none of those things happened where the temples and churches were built. Do the people who come to pray and kiss the slab of rock Jesus was supposedly anointed on care? Nope.
But once he was done talking, we went through Zion gate and walked through the border between the Armenian and Jewish quarters, stopped on a rooftop to listen to the guide a little more, hear the Muslim call to prayer, and enjoy the pretty amazing view. The we walked down through the Jewish Quarter to the Western Wall, and back out through Dung gate, then took the buses home.
The Western Wall was an interesting experience. Men and women, of course, pray in separate sections, men on the left, women on the right. It used to be the women had to be silent, since Orthodox Jewish men can’t hear women’s voices (I can’t remember if it’s women singing praying or even talking) while praying. Now I think they arrange special times for that, but it certainly wasn’t silent while I was there. I kind of wandered in and sat in a chair not far from the wall to watch people and examine the wall. I watched a lot of women (some of them my classmates) pick up their books and move into newly freed places at the wall, and start doing that funny swaying type of prayer they do, saw some tuck their written prayers into the cracks of the wall. I did go up and touch the wall, too. I must have been there for a half hour, or maybe even forty-five minutes. Lots of people, when they leave, walk backwards almost to the entrance, probably because you’re not supposed to turn your back on the wall. I didn’t know if anyone would be severely insulted if I didn’t bother, but I doubted it, so I just turned around and walked away.
That night we (the group that had done the tour) had a Shabbat dinner at the Hyatt, which is just down the street from my dorm. The food was good, but the hotel was even nicer. We were seated in a kind of courtyard with olive trees all around, and there were Jewish students at most tables who knew how to do the ritual prayer while the table holds their wine glasses and then drinks before going to get food. There were some interesting people around my (and Nari’s) table, including an older guy named Solon who’s a Greek Jew here for law school and very nice. After Shabbat dinner most people stay to talk, which is when I got into the creationism debate with another guy named Mike, who’s normally a very nice guy but starts to freak you out when he gets into the whole born-again, Christians-should-love-Israel, hidden-meanings-of-Jesus-and-the-Tabernacles, the-earth-is-six-thousand-years-old thing. People who believe all that stuff get the same weird gleam in their eyes when they talk about it, which isn’t very nice to say, because I know they’re sincere, but crazy is crazy. J
Saturday (August 7) I didn’t get up until twelve, and that was only because Nari knocked on my door and wanted to know if I wanted to go with her and two guys from Jerusalem who were going to show her around. I was happy I went, actually, because we went through Damascus Gate to the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, and after eating at an Arabic restaurant (hummous and pita and all kinds of Dad-food) we eventually got to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Christian Quarter, which Nari and I hadn’t seen yet. Pretty amazing. It’s darkened, with rock walls that look cave-like when they’re not covered by mosaics. What must be hundreds of candelabras hang very low from the high ceilings, and almost all light comes from the candles that are lit and stuck into random altars and boxes by visitors. When you walk in, the slab of rock Jesus was anointed on is right in front of you, and you can go left or right. To the left is a smallish wooden house built over the site of his tomb, where a line of people wait to crawl in. To the right and up some stairs is the site of his crucifixion. There’s a passageway that curves around the back to connect both sides that has a bunch of altars that probably mean something, since I think about five Stations of the Cross are in here, but I didn’t know what. There’s also steps down to a place that feels even more cavern-like than the church, with more mosaics and some pretty astounding pictures on the walls. The whole place has the feel of some ancient church that was recently excavated. I really like it, and I wish I’d had my camera, but we’ll probably go back sometime.
The guys were obviously Arab-Israelis, which was handy in the Muslim Quarter, named Khalil and Muhammad. I had that moment talking to Muhammad that probably every non Middle-Easterner has when he mentioned five children killed in a firefight a while ago in the West Bank, and the smile didn’t leave his face. When I asked why he was smiling, of course he answered that it happened all the time in that area. He was actually pretty up on politics, we talked about how Americans and the government deal with terror. We also passed some Palestinians who were having problems with the Israeli police (probably no visas or something, the guys said) after we left through Jaffa Gate and looped up around back past Damascus Gate.
So we came back to school and I slept through another nine hours or so, but I think by Sunday I had finally gotten on a normal schedule. Except for getting up and going to school on Sunday, which is anything but normal.
Tuesday was interesting. Both Anastasia and I had aced the test, and Naftally thought we should move up to a more difficult class. I like my class, but I figured whatever he said. So in my new class, there was about five or six people who knew what they were doing; they read at light-speed and were forming long sentences and verb tenses and the works. Most of them had taken an ulpan a long time ago and forgot it, gone to Hebrew school and forgot it, or knew Arabic, which is close. The first teacher whose name I can’t remember was the type who talked to the people who knew what they were doing and occasionally asked questions of everyone else. Once she had prompted an answer from you (and I was seventy pages or so behind this class, so I needed prompting) she moved on as if you now understood the concept, which of course I didn’t and neither did a lot of others. Stupid.
The second lady was a much better teacher. She was enthusiastic and nice and she stopped to tell me what the verbs I hadn’t gone through meant. Still, it turned out there was a mix-up, and neither Anna nor I were supposed to be in the upper class. We were back in our old class today, which everyone had a big laugh over. Still, it means we’re acknowledged as the whiz-kids in the class now, since our test grades were made pretty public because of all this.
So I spent a couple hours in an upper class in which all I caught was the infinitive form of “study.”
Anna and I went to a café in the Old City to catch up on what we’d missed last night. I’m getting much better at navigating my way around the place, and since she’s been in Israel before, she showed me a couple little places, like a shop run by the son of a famous photographer, who took black & white pictures of Jerusalem dating back to 1925 or so. I’ll probably go back to buy some.
We left through Herod’s Gate, which I think was the only gate I hadn’t been through.
Anyways, that’s about all I can think of right now. I’ll probably remember things I forgot in the meantime and post 'em. :)
שלום
So…back story. It’s August 11 today and I haven’t had internet on my laptop since July 30.
On Saturday (July 31) the flight to JFK was pretty uneventful. I slept a couple hours, then spent another couple of hours wandering towards Terminal 4 at JFK. I was wayyyyy early, so I was forced to hang around and read or get food until 10:00 local, when I could go check in at El Al. In line I ran into a couple people going to the University too, and Torin and I got waylaid by security after their extensive questioning revealed that we didn’t know anyone in Israel, didn’t have a clue about Hebrew, and were generally the most Israel-naïve people around. I guess that raises a couple mild flags over there, but all it meant in the end was that we had to get one step down from a strip search: our personal bags checked again, our laptops examined, and they even took our shoes. For what, I never found out, but they looked okay when I got them back.
The flight was by far the longest I’ve ever experienced. Plus, I was feeling stuffed up and cramped and didn’t want to bug the people next to me by blowing my nose every ten minutes. But at least we all had TVs in front of the seats and I could watch Shrek 2 (three times) or House of Sand and Fog (okay, didn’t watch it) or Mean Girls (avoided that one too) or a digital image of the plane’s progress over the Atlantic and then the Mediterranean region. The upside was that I did meet Anastasia, who sat next to me and we played Speed with my cards for the last hour or so of the flight.
Then came Ben Gurion airport, where everyone goofed off while waiting for luggage, and those of us who came up empty (grrrr…) spent some fun times at the Lost & Found desk. Finally we all loaded into buses and set out from Tel Aviv for Jerusalem. The first half of the journey, I would have sworn I was in a somewhat flattened part of California. Maybe Riverside, except not as unsightly as Riverside. The strangest part for me was that the houses on the route as we came into Jerusalem are almost all bone-white, meaning they’re probably Arab. I found out that Mount Scopus is in the North-eastern part of Jerusalem, where the neighborhoods are primarily Arab, French Hill in particular.
By then it was of course the afternoon of August 2, but still August 1 back home. I checked in to the dorms, met Nari, the girl in the other room in my flat from New York, and we walked around before meeting everyone else for the campus tour. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention on the campus tour, I’ll admit, because I was dead tired and not looking forward to figuring out how to sleep without my bedding or blanket. They (the madrichim, or counselors) took us on buses to Talpyiot, a shopping district in Jerusalem where we could buy stuff we needed, then when we got back took those of us who had lost our luggage to a place where we could be loaned bedding until we got ours. Then I crashed.
Can’t say I remember a whole lot about Tuesday. I was jet-lagged and still kinda sick, but I managed to find my way to the Forum, where my Hebrew classes are. Luckily, Anastasia is in my class, and we’ve gotten to be better friends over the past week and a half. My teachers are named Naftally (a guy) and Busmat (a girl), and it’s one of those classes where right off you realize they’re not going to speak English and they’re not going to tolerate people who insist on asking long questions in English every five minutes. They’ll explain things, using hand gestures and basic words you know, pictures and the like, but they’re not going to spell it out for you in English. So that’s about five hours of every day since the Tuesday before last (only day off has been last Saturday).
By Wednesday I was pretty pissed about my luggage, and probably would have totally lost it with the madrichim but luckily it showed up at the end of the day. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see my clothes.
Friday is when I figure this whole trip really started, with my first trip to see the Old City. First we went down to a mountain on the southern part of Jerusalem to see the view, and went through some of the neighborhoods near Bethlehem. In particular, there’s a neighborhood called Gilo which saw some of the fiercest fighting during the intifada a couple years ago. Small walls were built to protect the houses near the top of the hill from the Arab neighborhoods on the other side farther down, and today the walls are covered with various murals that artists were hired to do. The intifada meant that property values there had dropped dramatically, so that people who wanted to move now find it almost impossible to sell their house for a good price.
Side note: Israeli drivers are by far the craziest I’ve seen. One guy wearing his kippot with his family in a tiny car was practically playing chicken with our bus on a part of the road past Jaffa gate that merges a bit. The bus kept merging slowly and he kept putting his little car right between it and the wall on the side of the highway, totally unconcerned. Which is not to say our driver wasn’t crazy too. He did a three-point turn in the middle of a two-lane highway with other drivers beeping at him and then sped off the other way.
When we got back to the Old City, the guide took us to Mount Zion, which is right outside Zion gate on the southern side of the Old City. In Jewish tradition, it’s the site of Kind David’s tomb. In Christian tradition, the Last Supper occurred in a room in one of the buildings. The guide was saying that one of the things he always tries to talk about when taking groups around is that in Jerusalem, it often doesn’t matter what the facts are, it matters what people believe. Archaeologists are fairly certain King David’s tomb couldn’t possibly be on Mount Zion. But if he said that to any observant Jews praying in the temple right behind him, he’d get his ass kicked. Nor does it matter that the building the Last Supper supposedly happened in is only a couple hundred years old. Nor that according to the Bible, Jesus was crucified outside the city, but the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has an altar on the “site of the crucifixion,” right smack in the middle of the Christian Quarter, which happens to be only thirty or forty feet from his “tomb.” In all likelihood, none of those things happened where the temples and churches were built. Do the people who come to pray and kiss the slab of rock Jesus was supposedly anointed on care? Nope.
But once he was done talking, we went through Zion gate and walked through the border between the Armenian and Jewish quarters, stopped on a rooftop to listen to the guide a little more, hear the Muslim call to prayer, and enjoy the pretty amazing view. The we walked down through the Jewish Quarter to the Western Wall, and back out through Dung gate, then took the buses home.
The Western Wall was an interesting experience. Men and women, of course, pray in separate sections, men on the left, women on the right. It used to be the women had to be silent, since Orthodox Jewish men can’t hear women’s voices (I can’t remember if it’s women singing praying or even talking) while praying. Now I think they arrange special times for that, but it certainly wasn’t silent while I was there. I kind of wandered in and sat in a chair not far from the wall to watch people and examine the wall. I watched a lot of women (some of them my classmates) pick up their books and move into newly freed places at the wall, and start doing that funny swaying type of prayer they do, saw some tuck their written prayers into the cracks of the wall. I did go up and touch the wall, too. I must have been there for a half hour, or maybe even forty-five minutes. Lots of people, when they leave, walk backwards almost to the entrance, probably because you’re not supposed to turn your back on the wall. I didn’t know if anyone would be severely insulted if I didn’t bother, but I doubted it, so I just turned around and walked away.
That night we (the group that had done the tour) had a Shabbat dinner at the Hyatt, which is just down the street from my dorm. The food was good, but the hotel was even nicer. We were seated in a kind of courtyard with olive trees all around, and there were Jewish students at most tables who knew how to do the ritual prayer while the table holds their wine glasses and then drinks before going to get food. There were some interesting people around my (and Nari’s) table, including an older guy named Solon who’s a Greek Jew here for law school and very nice. After Shabbat dinner most people stay to talk, which is when I got into the creationism debate with another guy named Mike, who’s normally a very nice guy but starts to freak you out when he gets into the whole born-again, Christians-should-love-Israel, hidden-meanings-of-Jesus-and-the-Tabernacles, the-earth-is-six-thousand-years-old thing. People who believe all that stuff get the same weird gleam in their eyes when they talk about it, which isn’t very nice to say, because I know they’re sincere, but crazy is crazy. J
Saturday (August 7) I didn’t get up until twelve, and that was only because Nari knocked on my door and wanted to know if I wanted to go with her and two guys from Jerusalem who were going to show her around. I was happy I went, actually, because we went through Damascus Gate to the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, and after eating at an Arabic restaurant (hummous and pita and all kinds of Dad-food) we eventually got to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Christian Quarter, which Nari and I hadn’t seen yet. Pretty amazing. It’s darkened, with rock walls that look cave-like when they’re not covered by mosaics. What must be hundreds of candelabras hang very low from the high ceilings, and almost all light comes from the candles that are lit and stuck into random altars and boxes by visitors. When you walk in, the slab of rock Jesus was anointed on is right in front of you, and you can go left or right. To the left is a smallish wooden house built over the site of his tomb, where a line of people wait to crawl in. To the right and up some stairs is the site of his crucifixion. There’s a passageway that curves around the back to connect both sides that has a bunch of altars that probably mean something, since I think about five Stations of the Cross are in here, but I didn’t know what. There’s also steps down to a place that feels even more cavern-like than the church, with more mosaics and some pretty astounding pictures on the walls. The whole place has the feel of some ancient church that was recently excavated. I really like it, and I wish I’d had my camera, but we’ll probably go back sometime.
The guys were obviously Arab-Israelis, which was handy in the Muslim Quarter, named Khalil and Muhammad. I had that moment talking to Muhammad that probably every non Middle-Easterner has when he mentioned five children killed in a firefight a while ago in the West Bank, and the smile didn’t leave his face. When I asked why he was smiling, of course he answered that it happened all the time in that area. He was actually pretty up on politics, we talked about how Americans and the government deal with terror. We also passed some Palestinians who were having problems with the Israeli police (probably no visas or something, the guys said) after we left through Jaffa Gate and looped up around back past Damascus Gate.
So we came back to school and I slept through another nine hours or so, but I think by Sunday I had finally gotten on a normal schedule. Except for getting up and going to school on Sunday, which is anything but normal.
Tuesday was interesting. Both Anastasia and I had aced the test, and Naftally thought we should move up to a more difficult class. I like my class, but I figured whatever he said. So in my new class, there was about five or six people who knew what they were doing; they read at light-speed and were forming long sentences and verb tenses and the works. Most of them had taken an ulpan a long time ago and forgot it, gone to Hebrew school and forgot it, or knew Arabic, which is close. The first teacher whose name I can’t remember was the type who talked to the people who knew what they were doing and occasionally asked questions of everyone else. Once she had prompted an answer from you (and I was seventy pages or so behind this class, so I needed prompting) she moved on as if you now understood the concept, which of course I didn’t and neither did a lot of others. Stupid.
The second lady was a much better teacher. She was enthusiastic and nice and she stopped to tell me what the verbs I hadn’t gone through meant. Still, it turned out there was a mix-up, and neither Anna nor I were supposed to be in the upper class. We were back in our old class today, which everyone had a big laugh over. Still, it means we’re acknowledged as the whiz-kids in the class now, since our test grades were made pretty public because of all this.
So I spent a couple hours in an upper class in which all I caught was the infinitive form of “study.”
Anna and I went to a café in the Old City to catch up on what we’d missed last night. I’m getting much better at navigating my way around the place, and since she’s been in Israel before, she showed me a couple little places, like a shop run by the son of a famous photographer, who took black & white pictures of Jerusalem dating back to 1925 or so. I’ll probably go back to buy some.
We left through Herod’s Gate, which I think was the only gate I hadn’t been through.
Anyways, that’s about all I can think of right now. I’ll probably remember things I forgot in the meantime and post 'em. :)
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