Welcome to Israel

Well, I kind of want to begin with the dozens of plastic-gun-wielding Arab kids pointing them at me and shouting and throwing rocks at each other if not quite at me while yelling what are definitely not words of greeting, but I suppose first I should say something about my departure from Egypt.

Hm, I hung out with that couple from Hong Kong, spoke a lot of Chinese, went to another giant temple covered with ancient hieroglyphics, this time on an island, and this time which had been moved from an area flooded due to the creation of a giant energy-providing dam along with the rest of Nubia. In fact a lot of temple sites in the south have been completely relocated brick by brick and put back together in some new place due to the flooding caused by the dam. It sounds impressive enough, but when you see the size of these places it is even more so.

After Philae Temple which necessitated vigorous bargaining for what would ultimately be an unfair ferry price anyway (I tried to let the Chinese handle that, they're used to it) we returned to the mainland and I may have taken a nap before meeting up with the couple again (Fifi and Qi, actually the 2nd Fifi from HK I have met, go figure) and we went to the Movenpick hotel on another island to watch the sunset. I frankly would've stayed in my hotel room at this point to just avoid contact with anymore hassle until I left Aswan, but it sounded nice and I felt I should fight my urge to withdraw. It ended up being this gorgeous 5-star hotel with an empty cafe overlooking the entire city where I had my first beer in Egypt. It's not so easy to come across beer in a Muslim country as it turns out. So I sipped my Egyptian beer and ate peanuts and smoked indoors while we watched the sun set, then returned and it was my turn to share something of my Egyptian knowledge with these guys who had more or less avoided Egyptian food during their stay. They told me they had KFC for lunch actually. So I took them to the koshary place I'd found the night before and they both loved it, though probably not as much as I did.

The next day I did very little. I didn't go see any temples or sites or anything. I just relaxed. The details of my trip from Aswan to Tel Aviv are kind of uninteresting. The highlights are the Egypt Air guys at the airport initially telling me they had never seen a paper ticket before (non e-ticket) and almost not letting me on the plane to Cairo. Then I enjoyed getting fucked over one last time by a cab driver from the airport to the nice hotel I booked for my last night in Egypt. I splurged and stayed in a Radisson for $90 USD which was worth every goddamn penny. I had the hottest shower in history, actually was able to clean 3 weeks of Egypt off of my feet, and slept in a bed made of pillows although only for something like 5.5 hours. I also had a mixed drink which made the bed even better. As I recall they brought me a glass with ice and vodka in it, and then a can of Sprite on the side.

I arrived in Tel Aviv on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year for the heathen among you and for my friends who forgot or pretend to have forgotten everything they learned in Hebrew school (you know who you are). The airport was so clean and everybody I talked to was so professional. The security was hardcore as expected, though I attribute the ease with which I passed through to my fantastic shower the night before. I answered about 6 questions at the immigration desk where my passport was stamped (without filling out that stupid piece of paper which they have done away with in Israel) and then about a dozen more questions upon emerging into baggage check. We should totally profile people in the US. Israeli security is so much more ridiculous and efficient than ours, it's just embarrassing. Today we were pulling into an underground parking lot in a mall and the guy comes to the window and just says hello or something just to hear our accents and see where we're from before he lets us pass.

Anyway, so arrive in Israel, shared taxi with confused and lost German girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown plus a half-dozen others in which I end up lucky enough to be the first stop. I have spent the nights at my cousin Yitzchak's house and since it was Rosh Hashanah followed by the Sabbath, I didn't go out, I just stayed in the house, spent time with my cousins, slept, and was fed an unbelievable amount of food. They live in a neighborhood in the suburbs of Jerusalem called Ramot, of which it turns out there are several. It's not gated, but it reminds me of a gated community. There isn't much car traffic on the streets, most people walk, and there are some alleys and staircases leading between the streets which are quite scenic. It also turns out that in much of Jerusalem there is a building code that the exterior of buildings must be natural stone with which this whole neighborhood complies, so even though it is not that old, it feels like what I expect from Israel.

My first foray into the city was with Yitzchak and Sonia at night. They took me to a newly constructed outdoor shopping center also with beautiful facades covered in stone, though in this case truly old facades which had been meticulously numbered and taken apart, then rebuilt to turn what was apparently a former slum into a wealthy shopping center with upscale stores and cafes which was filled with people young and old and I'm told is so every night. This neighborhood is called Mamila and is adjacent to the old city of Jerusalem. We could see the city walls from the cafe in which we ate that night, but besides sticking our head in briefly, I wouldn't see the old city in earnest until this morning.

Sonia took me to another mall to pick up a sim card for my phone and then dropped me off at the Jaffe Gate of the old city. For the first 5 hours or so I wandered more or less aimlessly. The old city of Jerusalem is divided into four "quarters" more or less. The Christian, Armenian, Jewish, and Muslim quarters. The whole old city takes up about a square kilometer I believe, though I'm making that up and too lazy to check it. Maybe when I read the correct figure in my guidebook I'll come back here and edit it. The entire old city reeks of history. Here's the wall from the 2nd temple, here's the place where the virgin Mary was born, here's the place where Jesus was crucified, this is where Mohammed ascended to the heavens, etc. I didn't go in many places since for my first day I just wanted to walk around and get a feel for the place.

I will give the most limited possible impressions. The Jewish Quarter is incredibly clean and looks new, even though it is ancient. Apparently a lot of money was put into restoring it. The Armenian Quarter is also quite nice. These areas are contiguous by the way, there is no actual division, you just walk and things sort of overlap. There are some main streets many of which are filled with active markets, and then side streets which can be stairways, tunnels, and other twisting and turning paths. The Christian Quarter was filled with more tour groups than other places it seemed, though I suppose I saw quite a few near the Western Wall in the Jewish Quarter. It seemed to be populated almost entirely by churches rather than people, though each quarter had its share of residential streets away from the market-streets (Souks) filled with souvenir shops and restaurants. The shops vary in what they sell depending on your proximity to a particular tourist attraction. Some are shops of artisans selling jewelry, ceramics, rugs, metal or woodwork, paintings. Others sell trinkets like Egyptian shops, toys, clothes, especially plastic guns in the Muslim quarter. Near churches rosaries and other related religious items are popular. The markets in the Muslim quarter reminded me a lot of the markets in Egypt. They are very busy, and seemed to be populated entirely by Arab and Muslim communities. They feel more chaotic to me than the other souqs, but this could be my perception.

Finally, wandering through the residential streets of the Muslim Quarter of old Jerusalem and more or less alone, a little kid yelled at me in Arabic twice. I asked later what it meant and somebody told me "Finish" but I'm pretty sure it was "Get the hell out of here." No harm was necessarily done, but then later I started to feel like there might be a pattern when kids started pointing their plastic guns at me and firing repeatedly. They didn't actually shoot any of the plastic pellets at me which it seemed were in short supply, but it was still disconcerting. I saw this quite often. Also, I would say 90% of the Arab kids I saw had toy guns. I wonder how the soldiers and security (of which there are many) deal with it since the guns kind of look real in many cases. I saw kids with handguns, shotguns, and ak-47s. The kids in those neighborhoods call out to tourists and harass them a bit. This doesn't happen in the other quarters as far as I saw, nor did I see any non-Arab kids with toy guns. I felt unwelcome in the residential streets of the Muslim Quarter. Later I was walking in another area before I had learned to just stay clear of these streets and the kids were having a toy gun battle while simultaneously throwing rocks at each other, and not pebbles. Then one kid broke a huge rock in front of me into pieces and was picking up the pieces to continue throwing to the far end of this narrow pedestrian street as I tried to get through between them. They did not stop as I walked and though they didn't throw them at me, the whole thing just felt volatile. In all my time in Egypt, I never saw anything like this nor did I feel this sort of tension.

All this being said, I feel I should say I had a few nice interactions with Arab shopkeepers, a few in a restaurant and another at a cafe. I spoke Arabic with a few people who were nice. Also after walking the streets, I walked around half of the city on the ramparts of the old walls, which is a beautiful walk and extremely peaceful. When rounding the corner of the city in the Muslim Quarter, there were some kids trying to pull their friend up onto the ramparts through a very narrow shaft in the stone and he was pretty stuck and they asked me to help, so I helped lift the kid up through and we all laughed and they said thank you and it was like a normal interaction with kids, but that was the only one where kids didn't try to intimidate me or something like this.

After walking up on the walls, I hiked to the top of a hill called the Mountain of Olives beyond an enormous Jewish cemetery and watched the sun set over Jerusalem. I met an Austrian girl and her mother who told me they were nervous about walking down alone because some Arab kids with a donkey had been aggressively asking them for money and when her mother declined, one of the kids had hit her mother and the girl had hit the kid back and sent them running. I offered to walk down with them and we ended up walking a bit and then eating dinner together. She was a very interesting girl, a doctor from Austria but living in Germany and with some pretty amazing travel tales of her own of which I was at times envious, though in particular I was impressed that she had worked 6 weeks with an NGO in the slums of Manila. I have always felt a particular respect for those who go to practice medicine in the parts of the world where people suffer horribly and have no money. It's one thing to give money to help people like those, but it's another thing entirely when you can go and make a difference with your own hands and the knowledge you have.

So there it is more or less, my first few days in Jerusalem. By the end of the day I had put some of the negative experiences in the Muslim quarter behind me and had begun to sort of develop a picture of what the old city is all about. This is only a very small piece of Jerusalem and an even smaller piece of the whole of Israel, so tomorrow I will begin at the Yad Vashem holocaust museum and probably visit the Dead Sea Scrolls among other interesting items at the Israel Museum before heading to the modern downtown area of Jerusalem to contrast today's adventures. My cousin Yitzchak told me that Haifa is a city of work, Tel Aviv is a city of play, and Jerusalem is a city of prayer. The backdrop of religion is indeed everywhere here, despite the obvious presence of many secular Jews, but I think as I spend more time here I will begin to piece it all together.

I told my cousin Yitzchak and his daughter Shira about my experiences in the Muslim quarter today and they both said the same thing: "Welcome to Israel."