Really, there are only three days left to recount: Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Before we even get to Saturday, though, there's a small video left over from Friday -- a supplement to the last video, since in this one you can see the distant fireworks (from an Arab district) quite clearly, but you can't hear them.
On Saturday morning I woke up early. There was something unique sitting on the stove: a pot of chicken broth. Really the first actual soup in the apartment.
On Wednesday night, you may remember, Ivony brought home some chicken legs and we ate them. As we were finishing, I wanted to dispose of a bone and instinctively looked for the plate we always have in our family. "Oh, there isn't one," I said. "Normally we keep the bones and boil them into broth."
"Could still do that," Paul pointed out.
And so, with a bit of help researching how, on Thursday night I went down to the grocery store to acquire celery, parsley, and carrots to add to our onions and chicken bones. Carrots were easy enough to find. After reading all the Hebrew herb names and failing to find anything that would spell "parsli", I decided to ask someone. I simultaneously said "Slikha" ("Pardon me") and bumped into a middle-aged man.
"Bseder" ("It's okay"), he replied, and kept walking.
I started again. "Ah, rega." ("One second.") "At --" Then I stopped, because for all my five weeks of learning Hebrew, my sentence had begun by addressing him as a woman. "Er, atah..."
"Good so far," he said in English.
Well, now the game was up. But I still tried to press on. "Atah yode'a liqro ivrit;" ("You know how to read Hebrew;") "eifo haparsley, bevakasha?" ("where's the parsley, please?")
"Well, in Hebrew, 'parsley' is pitrosiliah," he explained. He picked out a bag, had me read out the Hebrew to him, and judged it fresh enough for me to buy. I explained that I was learning Hebrew, but still didn't speak much of it. And it came out in a second that his wife taught in the ulpan as well, and he knew Ateret personally! "Just tell her you ran into Gila's husband," he told me. "She'll know who that is."
I also managed to buy a spring onion under the impression that it was celery.
Anyway, back in the apartment, I brought this all to a boil and then let it simmer on and off for a few hours (including on Friday), which brings us to Saturday morning, where it was waiting to be made into soup for lunch.
But the first order of the day was a final walk to the Shepherd's Fields. (Yeah, I know you've seen a lot of it. For those of you who haven't read last year's posts, it was significant to me for two reasons: one, it was the first real semblance in Jerusalem of the wilderness I crave, and two, it was such an astonishing pastoral scene to discover, on my first visit, a young boy of maybe eight or nine tending a little flock of sheep and goats.) For some reason I thought it was better not to bring my camera, but then I ended up taking phone pictures anyway.
From up here I spotted a familiar sight across the highway, towards the desert: a young man with a small herd of goats. After a brief hesitation, I decided that it was worth seeing if he understood Hebrew (despite the extreme likelihood of his being an Arab) and try to ask him about himself, on the grounds of my curiosity as someone somewhere between a tourist and a resident.
I came down from the hill you see in that last picture and jogged across the highway. When I approached him, he was sitting and looking a little nervous. So had the little shepherd boy last year, so I thought that maybe these people aren't very comfortable around foreigners. "Shalom," I said.
"Shalom," he said, or "Salaam," I couldn't tell.
"Atah mevin ivrit?" ("Do you understand Hebrew?") I asked.
He replied in terms that I couldn't understand. "Ma, slikha?" ("What was that, sorry?") I asked. (Only later did I learn the more polite way to ask someone what they said.) "I'm from Canada, and I was wondering if you speak Hebrew?"
He replied something that sounded like it could have been "Ani lo mevin" ("I don't understand") or something similar, but I couldn't be sure. At this I decided not to bother him anymore and said goodbye, but still went away with an exhilarated grin.
When I came back it was time to make the chicken noodle soup. I strained the broth and disposed of everything that had been sitting in it, and to my dismay the broth then smelled quite sour. (It had also been left on the stove instead of in the fridge one night, and Paul was worried that it hadn't kept.) But I decided it wasn't worth wasting the progress made so far, so I added more carrots, parsley, salt, pepper, vegetable seasoning, cracked eggs, and noodles that Paul had cooked before.
Gradually, as this all simmered, and I added a bit of water because the liquid:solids ratio was low, it began to smell amazing. I was very hesitant to taste it, lest I somehow interrupt whatever magic was reversing the sourness. And then... it was done.
Everyone was called together to eat what easily qualifies as the healthiest and least lazy meal I've ever singlehandedly cooked in my life, let alone at the apartment. And it... was good! The taste was a bit weak (I had no idea how much water was appropriate for five chicken legs), but at least it was a good taste. It was an interesting mix of sweet -- I'd forgotten that my mum, on whose model I based the whole procedure, uses egg noodles, not wheat noodles -- and savoury.
That was the main event of the day, besides writing another blog post. It was a hazy day, but surprisingly it was less hazy than most days in Israel, and outside my window you could actually see the Dead Sea and the mountains on the Jordanian side.
That evening, it was time to see Lars off; she was flying, not home, but to Singapore to meet her family and see her grandparents.
She had discovered that the best way not to be shouted at and hung up on by the sherut company is not to mention what time you would like to be picked up, but to let them tell you what times they'll be by, and select an approximately appropriate one.
We said our temporary goodbyes, and then the road was empty again.
I told you that last year, when Lyera, Lars, and I went to Paul's house in Canada to be briefed on our upcoming trip to Israel based on his experience the year before, he told us that the best way to get to the Old City is by walking along the street called Wadi Al-Joz, the main artery of an Arab neighbourhood, which he aptly termed "the Garbage Road". Almost every time I went this year, I went by light rail, and I was beginning to regret skipping the more immersive experience in favour of the quick and easy one. So I decided to walk one more time down out of the south gate of the student village and down Wadi Al-Joz to the Old City.
At the bottom of this street you turn left and face the now-refurbished Wadi Al-Joz, no longer deserving the name "Garbage Road", at least for most of its stretch.
Why, it even supports this unusual vegetation.
And then the road goes up the hill on which the Old City sits, offering a classic view of the mountain. And at the top of it you come to the northeast corner of the wall.
Across from it: more unusual (but equally spiky) vegetation.
The Old City is such a weird place. It thoroughly stirs together the old and the new, the reverential and the commercial, and both parts refuse to be dissolved. You see the constant clash most violently inside it, where outside the door of every ascent to Temple Mount, every yeshiva, and every station of the cross someone is selling handfuls of cheap religious charms, t-shirts with slogans more reflective of modern culture than most of the country, and bundles of postcards, while down the street a shop selling spices mentioned in ancient holy books is competing for attention with a shop whose owner warns you his bootlegged Wii games won't work without the proper hack to your console -- and both are out-advertised by a fruit stand where a young man holds out a pomegranate and shouts to passersby, "Much more fresh. Much better than Viagra!"
Even outside the walls, the ripples are visible. You can look at the top half of a photo and see a scene from the sixteenth century, a set of gardens growing over the huge blocks of stone.
Then look down and see the busy traffic huddled up close to it, never without a package tour bus or two.
As you walk along the walls, heading to one of the famous entrances, you pass through a uniformly Arab neighbourhood, which is filled with normal residences and respectable establishments (like good-looking schools), but whose face adjacent to the street is one big market. You can even furnish your home here.
Two steps further, you can stock up on fruit.
Just a little ways down, a break opens up between the storefronts and you can go down a quieter street, nearly empty...
...and filled with beautiful buildings...
...before turning again to the market.
On the inside -- you've seen the gate enough times already -- the Ramadan lights are strung up.
The last bit of engrish to grace this blog is this toy, "Best Glaive".
The text at the bottom says, "Let you getting surprised and pleased completely new to come in to the market!"
I decided once more to look for souvenirs, something I could only find in one store, not carried by anyone else. A good person for that is Ramdan, whose store seems to be one of the more established ones, and with whom Paul and I have talked a lot (and exchanged rosaries and other goods from one year to the next, long story).
Ramdan himself was there -- his sons sometimes man it -- and when I reminded him of the old sword I bought from him last year, he immediately went behind the counter to rummage in his Official Poor-Condition Antique Bin. He produced faded silver coaster/napkin holders, cutlery, and other dishes. Some of it actually looked pretty cool, and I told him so.
Then the haggling began. I won't go into the details, because it was more or less a matter of my guessing rather low prices (I forgot to be careful about knowing the real value of what I was buying) and Ramdan inching towards them, but finally declaring, "You're a hard man this year!"
Perhaps as a distraction, he presented something I would most certainly love, he said, but that would require "many money" -- over a thousand shekels, he said. I did indeed think it looked fantastic.
But as I was not out to spend hundreds of dollars that day, or even to haggle in that range, I settled on a wooden rook to replace one in the chess set Cas bought, a little wooden donkey, and a hooked silver knife, and I agreed to pay much nearer his price than I would have liked. Perhaps as a concession to me for giving in, he threw in a silver napkin holder with the Last Supper on it and a curious broken silver goblet, which my dad has since fixed. I walked out of there a happy tourist, and bid Ramdan farewell... for another year, anyway.
Walking home from the Old City at sunset is a beautiful experience. Everything is lit in deepening yellow.
This is the road the light rail follows, aiming somewhere to the west of what was not to be my home for much longer.
The light rail station at Damascus Gate is beside a plaza filled with palms.
Past that, one reverses one's journey, the wall on one's right this time, on the way back to Wadi Al-Joz.
Opposite that, a hotel's name aptly describes the scene:
And then you come to the Mount of Olives again.
That night there were only three of us in the apartment. In two days there would only be one.
Sunday was my last full day and the last day of the ulpan. The class had been falling away a bit: Jaclyn, who had come up to the apartment for tea once, returned suddenly to America to attend her grandfather's funeral; and, if I understood correctly, the visas of our two Chinese Bible teachers, Weihong and Liu Xiang Dao, had expired before they could finish the course. It was sad to see them go. (Incidentally, thanks to the pronunciation effects of Chinese names via a Hebrew speaker, for the first couple of weeks I thought one of them had the oddly Spanish-sounding name "Lucianto".) Our remaining corps of ten were to learn a last grammatical concept or two, and then take our final exam.
During the break, I walked around the school one last time. It's a nice campus.
Can you spot the cardboard cutout of Einstein riding a bike in the back of that last one?
Oh, and the university is no less exempt from stray cats than anywhere else in the city.
The exam itself was not outlandishly hard, but there was a long reading section that was surprisingly difficult to slog through and answer questions about. I think it concerned Rehavia, which (as I just learned from Cas's photos on Facebook) is the name of the neighbourhood in which that rooftop party we went to was situated. The rest was just grammar.
In the end, I really liked the teaching method. I was down on it at first, because I was very frustrated as the kind of student who wants to be told explicitly what's what. In Biblical Hebrew we got sheets of verbal conjugations, we got sheets of vocabulary, and we got explanations of concepts some of whose terms I only know from linguistics. That was a certain kind of intellectual pleasure. And when the ulpan proceeded by sheer modelling, it seemed like a worse method because it hid away the things I wanted to know.
But on the other hand, here, after only a couple of weeks I was able to speak with people in the street and then build on that in the following weeks. And it wasn't just because this was Modern Hebrew instead of Biblical Hebrew. It was also because the immersion and practice was not there. That class was designed to allow us to read the Old Testament and consult our resources for whatever we didn't understand. We never had to produce any sentences of our own. Here, no word was introduced without having to be produced at some point. My memory of the words for "sword", "flock", and "altar" is foggy, and my main mental associations for them are with the sheerly visual experience of the printed lines of the Torah. But I feel I know, rather than have memorized, the words for "sunlight", "restaurant", and "people". For me, the Hebrew for "to die" is a row in a table, while the Hebrew for "to go" is associated with memories of walking from one place to another. "Wilderness" is attached to a lesson on a mistranslation of Isaiah 40:3, but "No problem" is attached first to a memory of Ateret demonstrating it and then to a memory of the grin and thumbs-up given by a restaurant manager who was apologizing to Cas, Lars, and me for the slow service. It's really amazing.
And in the end, there were even a couple of times that the grammar was made explicit. We organized verbs into categories after we learned enough in each category, for example, and we talked about Hebrew having a root-and-pattern morphology. So there was a bone thrown to everyone.
The other thing about the ulpan is that, to an even greater degree than the Biblical Hebrew class -- with whom I also spent five hours a day, five days a week, for five weeks -- we all came to know each other quite well in the ulpan. We had practised so much small talk (and, of course, snuck in some English during breaks) that one of our classroom games was for one of us to describe a classmate in Hebrew while the rest of us guessed who it was. It wasn't long before that became much too easy for everyone.
Once, the Biblical Hebrew class invited me out to a weekly dinner some members of the class were holding. I never felt quite comfortable enough to go (although now I regret that I never did). But it wasn't quite goodbye yet when I finished the exam this year and left, because we had planned a party at the apartment of one of the students, Sara, in the German Colony. Both teachers, Ateret and Nomi, were also coming. Nomi was even going to bring a guitar.
After class, Caper and I played chess and she advised me on what was not worth packing despite my reluctance to throw anything out. Then she, two of her friends, and I took the light rail to the shuk (another "one last time", at least for me). Along the way, we saw a familiar sight: shapeless, not particularly evocative Israeli public art. Someone told me this statue is of ammunition.
Okay, I say.
The shuk was as it always is. It was actually the first visit for one of us who's a Jerusalemite, oddly enough. I guess there are plenty of things I haven't seen in Toronto.
Caper was there to get a handbag, and I bought a block of halva out of a halva cake to take home. Then the three of them were off for a farewell dinner, and I went back to east Jerusalem to buy a tablecloth for Sara's party while waiting for the evening.
After spending a lot of time on this street for utilitarian purposes -- it extends north from the student village on the way to the bank, the grocery store, and the light rail station -- and finding it quite dull, I was surprised to discover that I now think it's, well, beautiful.
In the evening I was impelled to document some last scenes of the apartment, too. The view towards campus from my window (actually, for all the window shots I have, there aren't many in this direction):
Our living and dining room with its humble table that was the centrepiece of many great night, and its big window (a rather frustrating window, since every time you want to look wistfully out of it you're faced with the building just across the way):
The other half of the same room, where our luxurious couch and chairs frame the coffee table with its thrift-quality kleenex box and chess set:
I miss that place so much already.
The evening came and it was time to head off to the party. Caper, me, and a classmate named Colin waited around a long time for a bus (I forget which of them it was who pointed out that a passing van was soldiers disguised as police since they want to patrol here but aren't allowed to because -- surprise surprise! -- this is technically part of the West Bank) before giving up and taking a taxi.
The street Sara lives on is called HaRekevet -- "the train". Down the middle of it (not visible here) is a set of old train tracks converted to a pedestrian walkway. It's a very nice area, and feels very different from the rest of Jerusalem. There are big European trees and the apartments lining the sides have a somehow different flavour.
We got lost for a bit, but ran into Ateret and Nomi looking for the place as well (and speaking Hebrew not as teachers but as Hebrew speakers, which was strange after only hearing the one mode!). Soon we all found the building, and -- after Ateret disappeared for a second to help a woman up the stairs with her bags, earning the label "hero" from Nomi -- identified Sara's apartment.
It was a very cozy place, and the party itself was a real treat. Sara had cooked a full kosher meal for the whole class, and others brought snacks, dishes, drinks, and so on. There was a joke about the risk of one of us being under the legal drinking age -- but in Israel, according to Wikipedia, although they can't buy alcohol, "it is not illegal for minors to drink"!
I mentioned Gila's husband to Ateret. It turns out there are two Gilas in the ulpan. She had to puzzle over which one I was more likely to have run into.
There was, of course, a lot of casual conversation that was pleasant simply to be a part of. How often do professors attend class parties in North America these days -- and what's more, warmly welcomed by all the students? (Speaking of different universities, that reminds me that I learned from Nicolas, a physics student from Denmark, that they pay 50% income tax... but no tuition!)
After dinner there was the obligatory class shot. From left to right: Nomi and Ateret (back row); me, Luka, Colin, Julia, Kumiko, Caper, Nicolas, Sara (front row). Not present for various reasons: Sissi, Drew.
Afterwards, Nomi broke out her guitar and her songbook, and the various beautiful singers among us (this excludes me, I'm afraid) sang a few songs. Some were Hebrew, but more were English rock and folk; Nomi knew Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's cover of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and the students taught her Kids by MGMT. During the long final repetition of the chorus of Kids, our soloists from the mesiba -- Caper and Colin -- improvised various harmonies. It was quite awesome. Still, it is a long outro, and, quoth Nomi on guitar, "It isn't ending?!" We also tried to sing the Hebrew translation of Let It Be, but only Ateret knew the lyrics. I wish I had video of all that, but somehow it felt like that would cheapen it.
Not long after that were the goodbyes. It seemed I would be the first out of Israel -- next morning. A few of us left together, passing the main street of the German Colony on the way. Something about it reminded me vaguely of possible streets in downtown Toronto...
As Nicolas, Caper, and I rode back in a taxi, looking out over the city in the dark, I thought about a quality of Jerusalem that, the day after my return, I was to find phrased in very similar terms by Samuel Johnson, speaking about a London that was in his day approximately the same size Jerusalem is now: "If you wish to have a notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. ... I have often amused myself with thinking how different a place London is to different people."
And may I add, as a kind of postscript to this entire blog, how impossible it is to consider my or anyone's experience to have been summarized accurately by eleven posts with visual aids. As I'm writing these I'm always thinking of the thousand and one things I don't mention, either because the experiences properly belong to someone else, or to my private life, or to the realm of feelings and thoughts that can't be communicated satisfactorily, or to the type of thing that slips straight into a less conscious memory, to be remembered not at will but at the most unlikely prompt throughout the years to come. I think that even to have described some adventure from every day is to leave out, in one form or another, more than half of what Jerusalem was to me.
As an epilogue, I woke up early on Monday -- it was now my turn to wait for the sherut. Ivony had left two hours earlier (we disagreed about whether we had to be at the airport five or three hours before the flight), and as for me, having returned my keys and said goodbye to my only remaining companions, Paul and Caper, I was off by 8:45.
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| This isn't the sherut. This is just a car on a sidewalk for no good reason. |
The airport was fine -- the airport officials said "Ekh?" ("How?") to ask me to repeat something, so I finally learned the polite version just in time to leave the country -- up to the point where I had to put my luggage through the x-ray machine. Something or other set it off (as it seemed to do for lots of the passengers), and they had to take it over to a counter, open it up, drag everything out, examine it all with a dangerous materials detector that looked like a debilitated fluffy duster, and declare it safe. (I realized that I did actually have one thing I didn't buy myself -- a canister of ice coffee powder -- which could in theory have had something buried in it! I thought better of mentioning that offhandedly.)
Before I left the apartment, I wondered aloud whether I could take a bottle of Taybeh beer over, and Paul confirmed that I could. Here at the airport, it was the one thing they insisted I take out of my suitcase. The woman doing the fluffy-dusting had to procure a cardboard box half the size of my suitcase, put the bottle in, stuff it with bubble wrap, mark it for free shipping, and give instructions to a loader. I told her I don't have to take it back with me if it's so much bother! But she insisted. So now I had a much glorified bottle flying with me to Toronto.
At least the questioning was quick and painless. But just after I was through the carry-on check, there came an announcement over the speakers that my flight was boarding and would the remaining passengers please hurry over. I checked my phone and sure enough, it was already ten minutes after boarding time! Mentally admitting to Ivony that she'd been right to leave earlier, I ran the rest of the way through the terminal to the gate just as the last few passengers were getting on.
In the ramp they had these multilingual farewell signs. Just now, looking at this photo, I recognized my first Hebrew typo: this sign spells out "good bah-ee" (it is indeed possible to spell "bye" better in Hebrew).
And then, of course, I have a takeoff video. I couldn't decide between these two musical moods, so... here, have both!
I know flights aren't the rarest experience, but this was the best flight I've ever taken in terms of interesting landscapes seen out the window!
And the vast Atlantic Ocean, which prompted a poem (of which only an excerpt is any good).
[From Chasing the Sunset]
By this time it had been perpetually
the middle of the day for fourteen hours.
We were flying full steam towards the sun,
a race or chase to catch it
before it found a place to set.
Living in its wake was like a beautiful dream.
That’s the funny thing about it all.
Like a dream of an ocean so big below
you couldn’t see the wooden ships trying to cross it
just three hundred years ago.
I always imagined them trying to anticipate
the sunrise before the sun could get there.
But such a journey is so hard to make in the dark
and by nature that’s the way it will be made.
At last... North America!
One descends through some heavy cloud...
...and one appears over one's own city...
...soon recognizable by a certain tower in the distance.
And so I landed, at 6:30 p.m., in my own city again, feeling very strange indeed as I went to be picked up by Cas and my dad, and producing this short poem:
Salut Papa
Salut Papa.
Je viens de débarquer.
J’y arriverai dans quelques minutes.
Que c’est étrange d’arriver dans son propre aéroport.
Entendre sa propre langue.
Il me donne l’envie
d’écrire en français.
Which, antithetically to the poem itself, is translated thus:
Hi Dad
Hi Dad.
I’ve just landed.
I’ll be there in a few minutes.
How strange it is to arrive in one’s own airport.
To hear one’s own language.
It makes me want
to write in French.
And then to drive back, across fields simply flooded with effortless greenery:
What can I say? There aren't many words for the feeling of coming home and at the same time leaving a place that feels like home.
For whatever reason, it did feel like home. On my first morning in Jerusalem this year, I woke up with that feeling people describe -- of being confused for a second and trying to figure out where you are. But the next morning I woke up fully mentally in Jerusalem, and, like I did last year, my whole mindset just switched over and I felt wholly comfortable where I was. It was as if I'd lived in that apartment for a long time already. And early in July, when I asked Paul how it felt to be back in Jtown after two years, he said after a pause, "It feels like I never left."
I think somehow there are two of me: the one who lives in Canada, and the one who lives in Israel. The transition is rocky but brief; when I get there, I put away something of the homebody Luke and put on some other mode, who picks up life in Jerusalem more or less where it left off. And now that I'm back, that one is put back in the pocket, or else left at the airport. Lyera calls this all nonsense, and of course she's right to; but I keep wondering, as a general human observation, how many other countries, or how many other experiences, contain other pieces of our whole personalities, sometimes dormant and sometimes active, to be stepped into and then stepped out of as time requires?
Maybe one day I'll step into this one again. But for now, it's time to get back to whatever it was I was doing before. And it's good to be home.
When we got back to Georgetown, we made one last stop before heading home. That's right...
Thanks very much to everyone who read along.
