(Hi, everyone! Here I am: I've finished eating my supper and drinking a little Ramadan juice, and now I'm writing again.)
I'm finding that in general, this summer in Jerusalem -- or at least the second half of it -- is defined much more than was the last one by conversations with the people here rather than by excursions, and it's rarely possible to turn those into something publicly bloggable. Still, there are excursions, if small ones. The stories from most days are best told by the pictures (selected with the usual consultant; the contract stipulates this mention!).
There are two notes to make about the pictures: one, there are many more videos than normal, and two, I emptied the pictures I took on my phone when my camera wasn't available, so there will be some low-quality ones among them.
Speaking of which, to start us off, here are a few that would've made it into the West Bank post had I had them in time. First, a popular Internet meme appears on the wall in Bethlehem:
Second, a good example of the engrish created in the very odd situation of transliterating your translation using only the sounds from the original language:
A piece of Banksy art in which it's the soldier who is checked for weapons:
And the view from inside the cave Paul and I found on the way back:
Last Saturday I spent relaxing. I hung out around the student village, blogging and washing dishes, which yielded a couple of classic student village views:
And in the evening I walked around a residential neighbourhood near the student village. I'd been wanting to do this for quite some time -- you know, see something made not for visitors but for residents. I figured it would be like walking down a street in Georgetown on one of the many walks I take purely for fun, not so much because I'm on my way to see something.
Of course, that doesn't mean the views aren't nice.
I wasn't sure exactly where to enter the neighbourhood, so I followed this friendly feline.
It led me up a little staircase into the parking lot of an apartment building. So far, not so promising, but oh well, I decided to walk through it.
The whole time I was there I was mildly paranoid that someone would come up to me and say, "You can't be here, taking pictures! You're a tourist!" At the time I figured I had only two possible replies in Hebrew, and I can see now that only one -- "Ani raq metayel barekhov" ("I'm just walking in the street") -- made any sense; the other expressed only my love of paintings.
By and by I came to a few streets with some nice landscapes.
I realized I didn't really know my way back, but from a couple of places one could see landmarks, like the tower attached to the Boyar Building where we international students have all our classes.
Walking towards that led to some interesting scenes, like a UN van and a felled tree...
...a mural for children on one of the walls...
...and a synagogue, the first I've actually noticed (though I'm sure there are millions I missed).
And sure enough, this street led me safely back.
I've always loved this view of Isawiyya, the Arab area east of the student village, from my window -- particularly the blue building:
And at night Cas, Lars, and I went out to a foccacia place to get something to eat, since Shabbat was now over and things were open. They took forever to make our food (that place is perpetually understaffed), so we redid just the smallest bit of my walk. The funny thing is, at night it looks like a scene that could have come out of downtown Toronto:
At least, as well as I remember downtown Toronto, being the country mouse that I am.
The foccacia place has a bizarre mural. Note, besides the pizza cutter, the spectral girls having an inordinate amount of fun over the beach whereon a child walks away beneath a man in a suit exploding out of a flower labelled PIZZA.
Sunday was a fairly typical day in class.
Nomi was the teacher today, and she took us to a synagogue on campus. In the readers there, see how inside one word you have another:
The larger word is the Tetragrammaton, or four-letter name of God, a word commonly pronounced "Jehovah" but whose vowels are mysterious, here marked impossibly with four of the same vowel (yielding "yihiwihi"). The idea is that it's not actually meant to be spoken aloud, so they slip a replacement word into the last letter; that word is the name "Adonai", literally "my lords", using the deceptive plural common in Hebrew ("Elohim" is also grammatically plural).
A cool thing about this synagogue is that it was built with a window facing a magnificent view of Jerusalem.
The Hebrew name for Mount Scopus is "Har HaTsofim", literally something like Mountain of the Onlookers.
After class there was an amusing incident involving Caper convincing me that the average human being in the developed world uses deodorant. Somehow this is a fact I had ignored, willfully or not, all my life up to that point. Apparently I either (a) don't generally need it that much or (b) have very tolerant friends. (Actually, Lyera had tried to convince me earlier.) Anyway, the point is that between learning that -- much like everyone else -- I need sunscreen and that I need deodorant, twenty-two seems to be the age at which I shed the tacit assumption of exceptionality, for better or for worse.
That evening I had an errand: go downtown and acquire an oud for Cas, his birthday being on Monday. It was a bit of a hasty decision, since I already had a gift in mind, but decided at the last minute that something similar to yet not precisely a guitar would be more interesting.
On the way, I filmed a bit of the light rail ride -- admittedly as much to stir my memory of this very familiar sight in a few months as for your curiosity now.
Downtown Jerusalem, i.e. the new part of the city just west of the Old City, is quite a nice place.
Sadly, the store I had identified online -- the only one, as far as I could tell, that could be relied on to sell an oud to me at this hour -- failed to exist. People gave me confusing directions that kept me searching for a long time, but in the end I had to give up. And emergency research done by Caper revealed that Israel's musical instrument shops tend to be in Tel Aviv. I resolved to just stick with my original gift idea.
At least the walk back was nice (Jerusalem in the cool of the evening is ideal). Here's a funny sign that reveals just how useful it can be to learn the Hebrew alphabet even if you don't speak a word. You're extremely likely to find things like restaurants whose names spell out "spaghetti":
Or rather "spaghettim", using the Hebrew plural! Multiple spaghettis.
I came across a park that shares part of its space with a small but apparently important cemetery...
...Mamilla in one of its more attractive lightings, it being a place I don't like very much...
...and a scene I like much better, the exit from the Old City's Jaffa Gate.
There's always something new in the Old City. The stones might change from rough lumps to smooth, dyed blocks at any moment.
And the ugly low shops (I can call them ugly because I love them) are suddenly replaced by the beautiful salmon stone of a church.
The way they inadvertently clean the Old City, by the by, is by mopping their shops and pushing the suds out onto the street. I wonder how much of the wear on these stones is just since people started doing that? :)
On my way out I discovered a place selling those crepe-like things I mentioned in Bethlehem. So good. A meal on its own.
Meanwhile, much closer to home, I don't know any grocery stores that provide such an evocatively hazy view of the horizon when you step outside the door...
The rest of the night was quiet as it so often is. Caper's apartment ordered pizza and invited me to have a piece, and it turns out that her browser's automatic translation of Hebrew websites is not the most accurate:
While I was out, Cas and Lars had also been out, renting (of all things) a guitar. Cas wanted to practice for a party he was scheduled to play at the day after he got back. Here's the whole apartment family heartwarmingly contributing to a little concert:
As a last thought about the day, illustrated by this next picture, I really like how the student village does kind of feel like a village, in an old-timey sense. Between the grocery store, the laundromat, the mayoral administrative building, and the apartments, you have the common space that belongs to everyone. When you walk through that common space you always run into people you know, and you stop and chat in a way that we rarely do (at least I rarely do) with our neighbours in the average Ontarian suburb. You also see people in bathing suits suntanning on the lawn, or holding little picnics with food and drinks, or playing music.
Monday was, of course, Cas's birthday. In the evening we (the apartmentmates minus the very ill Paul) went out to a restaurant Cas had spotted in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City. The good old light rail.
The three of us were to meet Ivony down there.
We saw mounted police riding off somewhere, intriguingly...
The Armenian Quarter is chock-full of ceramics shops. It's like everyone there knows how to do ceramics.
The restaurant itself was unusual from the instant we stepped inside. From this picture it's probably hard to tell that it even is a restaurant.
They were very big on art and artefacts, filling up every bit of unused space like a trinket shop in the Muslim Quarter -- just with much fancier and more wonderful trinkets. (The following pictures are Cas's.)
All of us in good spirits, we sat down after being warned that due to the intersection of (a) our lacking a reservation and (b) the restaurant being more classy than most in the Old City, we had to order at least fifty shekels of food.
Not hard, we realized, when the bottles of Taybeh beer we got for seven shekels apiece at the brewery ran for twenty-three here!
Also adding to the classiness is this free primer on the Armenian alphabet that comes built into the menu.
Speaking of which, somehow I got the intuition that the menu would sound particularly good to my parents. I'm not sure why, but I'm sure they'll tell me what they think. Behold, it has lamb:
When it came, the food had the sparse look so many restaurants favour here, but it was still so appetizing!
We had a tremendously interesting conversation (particularly between the brothers), but the funniest thing was when Cas was eating his soup in a way that involved leaving his rice on the side --
-- and all of a sudden --
-- the waiter (chef??) barged in to tell Cas, "No, no, you eat it wrong! Here, you put the rice in the soup, like this!!" And he promptly strong-armed the rice into the bowl, quite without warning or permission, before contentedly storming off. Truly bizarre what isn't rude here.
On the way back through the Old City Cas bought a chess set, we both bought knaffa, and apparently I bought a white stone egg the use of which I do not claim to know:
Outside Damascus Gate was some kind of large demonstration. It was more packed than we'd ever seen it, and there was loud music and shouting and the usual flag-flying. It was a little frightening; almost everyone seemed to be involved in whatever it was that was happening. We decided to move through it as quickly as possible.
There are steps leading out of this little plaza by the gate, and at the top some men meowed at Lars and Ivony -- literally saying the word "meow" in an odd interpretation of the word "catcall". They also followed us a little ways until, as Lars recalls, she turned and stared them down. Meanwhile, the party/demonstration, whatever it was, continued.
There was a stall nearby still selling something or other, so we went up to ask what was going on. The man manning it didn't understand English, so I asked him in Hebrew what it was, and he used a word I didn't know: "hafgana". Later Google Translate revealed that this means "demonstration" or "protest". He then used a word I do know: "Ballagan, ballagan!" ("It's a mess, a mess!")
We continued on our way out of there, and passed a large squadron of soldiers sitting nearby, apparently at the ready in case anything should happen. We also discovered where those mounted police officers we saw earlier had been massing:
We rode back pensively. There was nothing on the news the next morning. Perhaps it was potential energy that seemed to the police. I wish we knew more about it now.
The kind of thing, anyway, we probably want to avoid.
For Tuesday, there was a holiday: Tisha Be'av (it simply means the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av and commemorates the destruction of the temple). Paul was staying home sick instead of his original plan of going with a scuba instructor to Eilat (he actually went to the hospital about a severely upset stomach and received dietary recommendations), Ivony and Lars were going to Haifa, and Cas and I had booked a tour to Masada, Ein Gedi, and the Dead Sea with Abraham Hostel. The very attentive (and patient) readers among you will recognize this as another tour I took last year.
Why did I want to take this tour again? Two reasons. One, I wanted to do it in the company of Cas. Two, I wanted to conquer the mountain at Ein Gedi. Ein Gedi is an oasis valley in the Judean Desert, a crevice between two mountains flowing with water from a spring -- its name means "spring of the young ibex", according to our tour guide. The regular hiking path follows a series of small waterfalls that have formed pools in the rock where people can and do wade. It takes under half an hour at a good pace.
When I got to the last waterfall last year, Lyera having turned back to stay in the bus because she was too tired to do any hiking, I was unsatisfied. And on the path on the way back I saw a sign pointing up the mountain to Dodim (apparently i.e. "uncles") Cave. So I started climbing. Now, to get very high up the mountain, the path needs to run all the way back to the entrance of Ein Gedi, except higher up, of course, and then double back to get further up. I was going without a hat and with a half-empty thermos of now-warm water. I kept climbing up, thinking the cave must surely be over this ridge -- over that one -- over the next one -- no good.
Soon my head started to hurt and I felt heat in my lungs and throat, and I realized I was burning up. Finally I accepted the fact that I had to give up, and I turned around to go back down without having reached the cave. As I was coming back, Lyera called me to say she was holding the bus -- they wanted to leave and I had to run to get there! So I spent the last of my strength running. When I got to the bus, my legs were trembling and the sweat was standing on my arm. I drank Lyera's entire 1.5-litre spare bottle of water. And when he heard about it, my dad made me promise not to do anything so stupid again.
So this year, equipped with lots of water, a hat, and a brother, I wanted to make it all the way up.
The day began with the usual hot sunrise:
And then Cas and I taxied downtown to the hostel to join the tour. Our travel guide was Alon, who was the same travel guide I had last year -- a talkative but informative and entertaining guide. This time he had a sign posted at the front of the bus saying that he was a photographer, writer, and travel leader. (His email is alon2travel@gmail.com -- I suggested alon4fortheride@gmail.com).
We descended through the Judean Desert, which Alon explained was mostly rock, not sand, unlike the typical desert, to the point of sea level. The beach of the Dead Sea is actually the lowest point of land on Earth at about four hundred metres below sea level, so not only is it very hot but your ears pop a lot as you go down. Anyway, we reached sea level, and I took this photo, and then --
-- Cas's and my cameras simultaneously ran out of battery, restricting us to our phone cameras for the rest of the day.
Much of what I have to say about Masada and the trip there is the same as last year. Alon explained better this time why the water level is drying up at an alarming pace: there's less rain and so the rivers that temporarily form in the desert in winter don't flow in; more springs around the area are becoming defunct (if I recall correctly); and there is a dam at the head of the Jordan River that can be closed to prevent the freshwater of the Sea of Galilee from pouring useless into the Dead Sea to be contaminated, and the low levels of the former sea in recent years have meant that they have the river blocked a lot of the time. There are parts of the Jordan that, some years, are totally dry.
Masada, meanwhile, is a fortress/palace Herod built on a mountain overlooking the Dead Sea. The famous story about it (as told by Josephus) is that a band of Jewish rebels held it for a long time against the Roman army, and when the Romans' siege equipment finally overcame the mountain's defensibility the rebels committed suicide to avoid slavery. There are a lot of ruins on the mountain (not all from that period), and nowadays Israeli soldiers are sworn in on the mountain with, if I've heard correctly, the oath that "Masada shall not fall again."
The mountainscape around it is awe-inspiring.
This was the kind of tour where they take you to the site and let you explore it on your own for a while, so Cas and I made our way up by cable car.
On top we split up, since I'd already seen so much of the ruins (and wasn't all that interested), and wanted to explore some less attractive but as yet unseen parts. This included a ruined columbarium, or dovecote, where they stored pigeons used mainly for food.
I particularly enjoyed this view from inside a Jewish ritual bathhouse (Herod was supposedly quite observant in his Judaism as a means of remaining in the people's favour -- in reference to his murderous paranoia and his strict kosher diet, Julius Caesar is reported to have commented, "I would rather be one of Herod's swine than one of his sons").
Both last year and this year, the sheer scale of the landscape awed me more than the ruins.
Other interesting sights have no particular backstory that I know of. Like this possibly Roman motorized vehicle.
Or the typical narrow square rooms full of roundish stones with holes in them that characterize so many of these ancient ruin. Not that I don't enjoy them, but there are just so many...
I left a bit earlier than was necessary because I wanted to walk down rather than take the cable car. There's a way up called the Snake Path (Josephus calls it or a similarly laid path the "serpentine path"), which it is not recommended to take on the way up in this heat, but for the way down I figured it was probably okay.
It was hot, painfully hot, but pretty easy on the legs and lungs. It was good practice for the next stop on our trip. As we left, we saw an ibex walking around the hills and then wandering around the bus parking lot. Commented Alon: "It's a tourist ibex, it's lost." Also, as we drove to Ein Gedi, he played the awesome song Sailing to Philadelphia on the bus, further elevating my opinion of the tour.
When we got to the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve (for Ein Gedi also has a spa, a beach, date farms, and a kibbutz), we were told we had only about an hour and a half, "so don't climb the mountain". I went up to Alon on the way out and told him I was here last year and tried to climb the mountain, and this year we intended to do it. He gave us his blessing but warned us to watch the time. We scarfed a couple of hot dogs and I bought a Gatorade to supplement my water.
I mentioned that the path that leads to Dodim Cave only begins at the end of the valley. This meant we had to get there, through what had been described as a half-hour hike by all the pools of water, before we could even set out to achieve our real object. We decided to forswear the pleasures of dipping our feet in and just hurry past them all to make the most of our time. So we immediately started a fast walk that sometimes broke into a run; there is a way over the stones that doesn't take you close to the pools, a very uphill way (though we later hardly remembered it climbing), and we made it in much less than half an hour. Now we were at the sign warning us that the trail to Dodim Cave was for fit hikers only. We were not dissuaded by our disqualification.
Cas and I were still both suffering from our Tel Aviv sunburns, but here, since we were already sweating phenomenally, Cas took off his shirt, and we broke to drink water and rest a minute. The heat was already in my lungs and throat, which surprised me since last year that only happened after I'd been climbing for a while in worse conditions. But the Gatorade soon resolved this. I guess I'm less fit than I was last year. Anyway, we were soon ready to go on.
There are two kinds of terrain on the mountains, as the next picture (of the opposite wall of the valley) shows: what I call the "redlands" and the "ashlands". The redlands are basically rock, whereas the ashlands are covered in a silty soil that allows a bit of growth, but gets in your sandals and (worse) slips away when you step on it, if you're not careful. The beginning of the path is all ashlands, and there are no steps cut into it.
We were able to go in short bursts for a while, stopping for water every now and then. Before long we were in the redlands, and here there are a few steps and some very scant, flimsy-looking railings (they're like four feet high, so if you tripped you'd just slip out right under the bar). A couple of young women were also taking the path, and apparently not tiring as easily as we were. Two or three times we stopped under the shade of a boulder and sat and caught our breath as we climbed both up and towards the Dead Sea (away from the valley, to curve back around later), and eventually they overtook us.
When they did, we asked them if they climbed here often. No, they said, this was their first time. "Zeh qashe!" ("It's hard!") I said, and one of them replied either "You fine?" or "You find?" Cas replied to the former by saying we were just tired. We had just completed probably the most difficult ascent, i.e. the steepest, which we practically sprinted up since there was total exposure to the sun on those hot stone steps. Towards the first summit we saw this arch of rock:
This was about the point at which I turned back last time, I reckoned. And beyond it there was a much higher summit, but now we were tired enough already (and running out of time), and it seemed hopeless that we should ever make it up. The climb wouldn't have been so much high as very steep, and it was another shadeless patch of redlands. But before we would get to it, we could see that there was a long, flattish (even a little downhill) stretch, and we felt we may as well go as far as we could and see what it looked like from a little closer.
As we went along, the path now having rounded the corner of the hill and heading back into the valley, we crossed the same vertical run of ashlands that also fell across the beginning of the trail, and we found a large shrub whose shade we sat under. Wonder of wonders, there was also a little trickle of water running under it down the slope, and Cas splashed some on his face and my neck as we refreshed ourselves.
I made the mistake of gripping one of those branches, and it left a ton of sharp little hairs in my fingers. Plucking them out one by one was too slow (and painful), so eventually I just scrubbed my hand with sand until it was more or less clean. When Cas and I were ready, we decided that even now, nearing the point at which our time was half gone and the rest should be dedicated to the return trip, we were curious as to what was ahead, including the origin of the water, since as far as we knew the spring ran into the valley below us and not up here.
We soon found the answer: they were piping the water from somewhere further up the spring to here. Why, we couldn't say. It was enough to cool ourselves down thoroughly. (Several times already I had felt the respiratory heat returning and needed to drink a little.) To us it seemed an invaluable resource we hardly wanted to leave behind.
Nevertheless we did of necessity. Soon we rejoined the path, and went on that way for a while before coming to the patch of redlands at the foot of the higher summit, and a fork. To the left, towards the summit, the sign read Tel Goren. To the right, apparently down towards the valley again, the sign read Dodim Cave. This was a comfort to us, since it exculpated our giving up on the summit. We thought we could surely make it to the cave at this rate, since if it was rejoining the valley anyway, we would hardly need to make the return journey along the mountain. In fact our geography was quite confused: we hardly realized how high up we were, in fact above the last of the waterfalls encountered by any hiker who only takes the half-hour path.
Presently two other hikers joined us from the opposite direction, and we asked them how far it was to the cave. They said it wasn't far at all, "very near here, just down there", but added that they hadn't made it. This omen was perplexing: if it was so near, how had they not made it? But we optimistically pressed on.
The path was now going so much downhill that we thought for sure we were headed in the wrong direction. We were very much curious how it was that, if we were about to rejoin the valley, the path had required us to go all the way we had gone! And soon we came into the top of the valley, where there was water flowing and an abundance of plants.
We didn't want to rest here since we had so little time. There was a sign saying that some of the land was sensitive and hikers were forbidden to go any further from here away from the Dead Sea, but we spied an alternate route that led back down. We noted several openings in the cliff wall and thought that surely one of them was Dodim Cave, since otherwise where was the path leading us? After all, we thought, we were now simply heading back down to the exit! But we could see no way up to any of them, and wondered if we had missed the cave somewhere along the way.
As we progressed, the rock became very bare -- not even redlands but clean stone. We were now very hot and somewhat dejected that we had failed to reach anything in particular. But soon we came to a little stream running through a groove it had cut in the rock, and at the bottom we saw a pool:
The descent to the pool was a little rough; Cas went first and then I followed. Several people were there sunning and swimming, and the pool seemed to be deep enough to submerge oneself in and long enough to just barely extend oneself. Without hesitation Cas emptied his pockets and went in.
At first I hesitated. I didn't really want to empty my pockets, and I hadn't counted on swimming. But luckily Cas convinced me it would be a waste to have come here and not swim, and moreover to be so utterly hot and not cool down. So then I also went in.
How could I ever regret it? The experience was incredible. Rarely before in my life had I been so in need of precisely what was here, even in a small, rocky, translucent pool. Alon had said (what I thought what was correct) that "swim" was too big a word for Ein Gedi, but here there was just enough freedom that we really felt as David must have felt, out in the desert in an oasis like this (one of these waterfalls is called David's Waterfall), pursued but still taken care of. And now you know that the poem in the last post was written after this day.
We had the minor problem that the water, in the course of its refreshing itself, exited by falling out a steep precipice on the opposite side of the pool. The water was too deep to walk through with our backpacks, and considering our slippery wet feet, we couldn't be sure it was safe to walk across:
Therefore we asked the Hebrew-speaking hikers to help us carry our things: Cas passed them to me in the water, I walked through it holding them high to the other side, and one of them leaned down, took it, and lifted it up to a dry place. We were a little afraid that they would run off with our stuff, but they didn't. And when everything was safely over Cas actually braved walking around the pool, and came to no harm.
We asked one of them which way to go, and they pointed us further down the valley. We reasoned that even though we failed to find the cave, this pool was enough of a milestone to have made the hike worthwhile and meaningful. Besides, our clothes were still soaking and we were much refreshed. And so we continued down towards the entrance.
But soon we came to a very steep section:
And, reaching the edge of the precipice, we realized how high we in fact still were; here is the beginning of the path to Dodim Cave below us, and no way down.
Before we had time to examine our options, we spotted a sign that said, "DODIM CAVE -- RETURN THE WAY YOU CAME." This was the most perplexing part of all. But then Cas, wandering a few feet away, found these hand/footholds leading down:
There was nothing for it but to descend. At the bottom we found ourselves knee-deep in water again, and there in front of us was a hollow in the mountain!
There was a little beach of sand as befits the caves seen in movies, and there was enough space inside to walk around a little.
The echoing sound of the water running (and dripping!) in that cool place deserved recording. (There's no video, so there's a picture instead.)
We rested there a while. We had finally found the cave.
Of course, by now our time was essentially gone -- including the time we should have set aside to return. So we hied out of there, and tried to get down towards the entrance again. Promptly it became impossible to mistake the fact that there was no way down from here. There was a little slope and Cas descended it, but at the bottom stood a fence to guard from the very sheer drop after it. So Cas came back up and then we comprehended the meaning of the sign, "Return the way you came."
Yes, we would have to climb back up to the pool, back up to the green space, back up the mountain to the fork in the path, and then down again towards the redlands, doubling back again to the start of the Dodim Cave path, finally doubling back towards the exit of the whole nature reserve. It was impossible that we should make it back to the bus in time, and quite apart from that we were exhausted and hardly had the strength to make the journey in reverse.
But of course we had no choice. We went as quickly as we could back up to the pool, and asked, just to make sure, whether there was no exit the way we had just come. The swimmers laughed and confirmed that we had to retrace our steps. So we continued up. By now we were getting low on water (I was entirely out of Gatorade and had nearly finished my spare bottle, and was now moving on to my last reserve, the thermos).
By and by we came back to the path. Now one of us had the idea that, since the path goes forward and then curves back, couldn't we save time by scaling down the mountain to the lower path rather than walking all that way? We hardly considered what we might encounter on the way down, because we were so eager to make it back to the bus. Had we thought to look at the opposite wall of the valley again, and remembered that besides the climbable parts there are also very steep parts without warning, we might not have attempted it in the first place. But as it was, we did.
The going was very rough. Most of what we were travelling through at the time was ashlands, and the sand kept sliding away. The fact that our sandals were still damp and liable to slip didn't help. In the end we realized we had to scoot down on the seats of our pants, grabbing the flimsy shrubs where we could and hoping they would hold. The whole time we were not travelling straight down but also horizontally, towards the Dead Sea.
It didn't get any easier the further we went down, but harder. It became harder and harder to see a clear way down to the path, and we had no idea now of how far above it we were. Moreover we crossed into redlands, where there were more stones and less silt but fewer plants to grab hold of. The way down was so nearly impossible that we ended up going almost entirely horizontally in the hopes that a way down would soon appear. I began to panic in moderation, and remarked, "This is exactly the kind of thing I promised Dad I wouldn't do..."
When we had gone a ways further and I was starting to think we would never find a way down before we ran out of horizontal space, it occurred to me that we might not be able to get back up, either. Some of the descents had been but narrowly managed. I even became a little afraid for our survival, and then Cas's phone rang. They had our number! It was Alon, and he said they had waited for us a long time and could wait no more.
Cas replied that we might be another ten to fifteen minutes. "Tell him we're off the path!" I said. "Tell him we might not be able to make it back up!" But Cas was more confident than I was, and in a second he bid farewell to Alon, who said we might be able to catch them up at the beach later if we took a taxi.
How unrealistic this seemed to me I can hardly describe. We were now the lost tourist ibexes. We continued not much farther before seeing a dense region of shrubs like the kind that had stuck me with spines earlier, and considered that it would be very difficult to get past them. After all, even if we avoided being scratched to pieces, we would hardly be able to see where we were going: if the growth was even thin enough to get through it might hide a sudden drop.
At this point it seemed best to me that we try and go up and rejoin the path, since we were going to miss the bus anyway and the time no longer mattered, especially compared against our safety. Cas concurred and we began looking for a way to get back up as shortly as possible (for we had no inclination to lose all the horizontal ground we had gained in scaling down). By good fortune we were now in a very rocky patch of redlands, and most of the stones were quite secure. Because we spaced ourselves out a little we avoided having the stones dislodged by one of us tumbling down on the other. It was slow going, but soon the upper path was in sight again, and even the sign at the fork.
We stopped at last to drink a little and take in the awesome sight. Far below Cas you can see the path we were trying in vain to reach:
But for all our hardships, the vista was majestic:
Our walk was easier now that we were staying on the path, and we didn't have too much trouble. Interesting to discover, at least for me, was the difference between the muscles involved in regular walking or ascending and those involved in descending: the latter were already worn out (perhaps by walking down from Masada) whereas I was still capable of using the former without shakiness.
We passed the trickle of water again and cooled ourselves, and when we came to the spot where we had stopped and the girls had passed us on the way to Tel Goren, I built a little monument to mark the spot. Its name is Macom Haeqifa, which means Place of the Overtaking, and it stands in the memory of our adventure.
On the way down we also spied the shrubby region we'd seen earlier. It might have been possible to make it through without perishing, but even so we should not have liked to risk it.
When we got to the bottom, we drank a lot and we investigated our taxi options. The only one whose services were posted at the entrance was Taxi Yosi. Cas phoned him and he said wanted two hundred and twenty shekels to go to a beach not half an hour away. He also said it would take him half an hour to get to us in the first place. Cas said goodbye and we checked with the clerk at the store there, who agreed it was much too high a price.
Cas called back and asked him to make it two hundred shekels instead. He grudgingly agreed. Then, since we were taking a risk about even getting back to the beach in time to catch the bus, Cas thought he might ask for even more of a discount (or rather, even less extortion). "I cannot do business like this!" declared Yosi, and hung up.
So we investigated our bus options to Jerusalem. The bad news was that the buses didn't come right to the nature reserve, they came to a nearby beach. The good news was there was a nearby beach. We confirmed with Alon that they didn't have to wait for us, since we would make our own way back. In fact, we (especially Cas) were looking forward to swimming a little rather than trying to make it to the tour bus just in time to have to leave again.
The beach was about a ten-minute walk down the highway, so we set out at once. On the way, passing a date plantation, we looked at the height of the type of mountains we had been trying to climb.
Now we could finally relax, in any case. We made it to the beach, which has a small shop or two and some changerooms. My phone had stopped working at some point during the hike, so there are no more pictures. But it was more or less a typical beach trip. We changed and we swam.
Actually, first we happened to meet Bas, the Dutch guy who runs with Paul and whom Paul gave that Dutch book to. He had decided to spend his holiday here, and quite by chance we were heading into the water at the just the same time he was.
We didn't swim very long. For me it wasn't a novelty anymore, and in any case I really hate the sulphurous smell of the water, and both of our sunburns stung badly. But I gathered that Cas liked the experience of floating effortlessly. It really is effortless there, and even more than that, not floating is impossible. You would never want to submerge your head, of course, but even if you did, the water just pushes you up way too hard to dive. Anyway, thank goodness they have freshwater showers there.
The last thing we did that day was bus back to Jerusalem and eat falafel, obviously thoroughly exhausted but extremely content with our day -- even if we did lose a bit of money missing the rest of the tour. I would do that hike again any day, and doing it with Cas rather than alone this time was incredible.
That's the main story for this post. Hope you liked it.
But I'm still going to try and cover a bit more ground, because I'm so far behind. Luckily the rest of the days don't have too much to report.
On Wednesday Paul was feeling a lot better -- the dietary recommendations really helped -- and Lars and Ivony were still in Haifa, having stayed the night. I begin with a little demonstration of the piano room on campus, one of my favourite places to spend breaks (Caper plays too, and sometimes we take turns). This video is just a short improvisation on a tune by Jeremy Soule.
My camera ran out of battery again after that, so this day doesn't have any pictures. Also, I won't deprive Cas of the pleasure of telling his own story and more accurately than I could remember it anyway, but this being his second-last full day here, he wanted to spend it doing things. He stayed an extra week after the end of his course for just such explorations, and where he was when I was able to join him that day was Gethsemane. So I made my way there and joined him.
We looked around the Basilica of the Agony and the olive trees at the supposed location of the garden -- Cas took a little of the soil -- and then we decided to walk to Machne Yehuda (a long walk) in the cool of the evening. What can I say? It was a very pleasant walk all through downtown Jerusalem. By the time we got there, though, I was almost too tired to do anything else. We bought some more halva from one of those excellent cakes for Cas to bring back home. (I was a little sceptical of its shelf life, but the shopkeeper said it would last over a year with no refridgeration!)
We also saw this unsettling sign (click to expand if it's too blurry):
And many other things happened that day, but the world has too little space to discuss them. Also, my memory is largely jogged by pictures. In any case, we returned home and rested up for tomorrow.
Our next day and Cas's last was Thursday. We planned to do three things in it (together -- Cas was also exploring while I was in class): Yad Vashem, the Biblical Zoo, and dinner at an Armenian restaurant with Caper. (The others were on a field trip to the Golan Heights hiking area at this point.)
Yad Vashem is a Holocaust memorial museum, and an extremely good one. It's very dense with all kinds of things, and by the time you go through its linear course you have experienced all the emotions associated with that part of history: the fascination, the horror, the grief, the hope, the liberation, and the grim realization that things didn't immediately get all better when the war ended, and so forth. The most striking thing for me this time around was a poem by a Jewish girl in a ghetto. I wish I could remember the exact wording, but it described how she would nimbly dart through the streets to steal bread to feed her and her aging mother, and if she were to die doing it, her mother should not worry, except to ask: where will I get my bread from now?
There's never enough time to absorb everything in that museum, especially if it's only one of three things you want to do that evening, but the effect is still very strong. I recommend to everyone who visits Israel to go to Yad Vashem for this powerful education.
Soon we were off to the happier part of the evening, i.e. the zoo. It's called the Biblical Zoo because part of it is dedicated just to animals mentioned in the Bible (with accompanying verses on the signage), but for the most part it's an ordinary zoo. In fact, Cas remarked on its similarity to the Toronto Zoo right from the outset.
Anyway, because I assume that (a) everyone loves pictures of animals and (b) nobody needs pictures of animals explained to them, I'll write only minimally for this part. (Note that Cas was in charge of the camera for most of this trip, so the pictures are his.) We begin with some freakishly gigantic snails -- Lyera, I thought of you and the likelihood that you'd be delighted:
Right after the baby crocodile in the small animals building, we came across the real settling of the challenge at last: ISRAELI SQUIRRELS.
This sign suggests there's at least a possibility that they weren't brought in from anywhere else, unlike those Mayan carvings I mentioned earlier, and settles the question of whether this rare creature exists:
So it's not likely you'll ever spot one in Jerusalem, but at least the country has them.
I was amused by this penguin-related sign whose header reads, "Mi hem hapenguinim?" ("Who are they, the penguins?") I wonder if the creature is not as well-known in Israel.
"Why," you might ask, "are there no fewer than two twelve-second penguin-themed videos?" I cannot answer you. All I can say is Caper was so amused by them while we were screening the videos that I thought, "Why not." Anyway, on we go.
This little park, especially its vegetation, reminded us uncannily of degree of Canadian parks.
Did you know that there is such a creature as a "serval"?
This is not a serval, but it is an equally impressive beast.
These bears seemed so tiny:
According to a sign, all of Israel's own lions were killed off, the last one in the Crusader period in the eleventh century. This is an Asian lion, I believe. See how black it is.
Around Jerusalem they have a brilliant synthesis of cool water and fans:
On reflection, this sign is not actually engrish if you read it properly ("this is waste water -- do not drink it"), but the way we instinctively read it was quite funny:
Even better was this hilariously poor educational book on the difficulties of being a vulture.
To be fair, the vulture does look a little grumpy.
Just like the lions, the elephants here are not full-size.
This peacock was not fenced in in any way. It could come and go as it pleased. Very unusual.
We found a chick waddling along at random, too. Perhaps this is what the Beatles meant when they sang about being "free as a bird".
It did have a family, though.
The view of the forested hills from the zoo has always been a favourite of mine. The whole of western Jerusalem seems so different from the eastern part of the city, which abuts the desert. Here you feel like Israel's terrain is almost habitable.
We got a little lost among a sort of fish display called "Wet Side Story". It's very interesting how they stretched "lo", the Hebrew word for "no", in the top left panel of this sign. If this were Ancient Hebrew and that second letter still made a glottal stop, it would be a funny pronunciation indeed. "Lo'o'o'o'o'o'o'o'o'o'o!"
After exiting the musical pun, we were in the Bible-based section. It features a lot of deer-type creatures.
Also some African animals you don't really associate with the Bible:
We couldn't quite finish the trail because they turned us away due to it being closing time. (This reminds me that I heard a lot of Hebrew spoken by adorable children that evening. I think one of these videos includes a mother saying, "Yalla, bo!", which means "C'mon, come!") We still had time to see some meerkats...
...some absurdly ugly sculptures that double as playgrounds...
...khamor (a donkey)...
...a batch (herd? flock?) of flamingoes that, explained a sign, lose their pink colour in captivity unless they are fed carrots, beets, and paprika...
...and some live music on the lawn.
So not that much different from the average zoo, but a very nice, relaxing time. Quite a good way to slow down from a busy last few days, I think, for Cas.
Then it was off to dinner with Caper at an Armenian restaurant Cas had picked out earlier. We were to meet her at a light rail station just beside it.
However nice such times might be, what can you say about eating and talking? Not much. The food was good (not as good as that day in Tel Aviv, but still), and we mostly discussed our respective futures, looking out over the street from the upper dining room. I was mostly thinking about Cas's imminent departure. Also the difference between a "lung dish" and a "dish lung".
And so the quiet night resolved, as Bruce Cockburn sings, into dew.
The next morning I accompanied Cas to his pickup by the sherut to the airport. The sheruts are operated by a company called Nesher ("vulture", as it happens), and they're a grumpy bunch. Cas got there on time, but the van pulled up and the guy got out and started shouting at Cas to move it. At least it's better than their habit of repeatedly hanging up in disgust when you try to call them to order their services! Anyway, that was the last we were to see of him until our return to Canada.
Since this was a Friday on which I had class -- perhaps they scheduled it thus so as to avenge our having gotten a holiday on Tuesday -- the last hour and a half was Hebrew singing. This time I managed to record it (and have set it to a semi-appropriate picture). This doesn't include all our practicing with the choir leader/pianist/soloist, just the finished product.
His instructions at the beginning are to sing from the song "Kol ha'olam kulo gesher tsar me'od" ("The Whole Word is a Very Narrow Bridge") through to something I can't make out, without a break. So this is not one song but, if I recall correctly, seven.
The last event to tell about is the stroll Lars and I took down the light rail tracks (on Shabbat the station noticeboards just read "SERVICE FINISHED") to the Old City to eat at an Arab restaurant.
It felt so like home -- not in the sense that it felt like Canada, but that it felt like this was something I'd do on an evening if Jerusalem were my home.
Except these cat sculptures. They throw off the effect.
But then you're back to the regular-looking streets, the ones whose appearance is now so familiar that it's hard to remember exactly what will differ back in Canada.
Even outside Damascus Gate, I've become so used to the scenery.
One unusual thing was they were now covering the plaza in front of it. I've never seen that before.
We ended up at David's Kitchen, a restaurant run by his son (can you guess the name?) Solomon. David was an established chef, but six months after they opened the restaurant, says his son, he passed away, and now his son is left to carry on the business.
This is actually the same restaurant where Lyera arranged for tilapia to made just for us five apartmentmates last year for my birthday. Even great times are sometimes sad through the medium of memory.
A curiosity or two: they really don't have normal can sizes here. They have the short, fat one and the so-called "sleek" one. Both are 25 mL short of the standard North American can. The explanations are few.
I tried quite an unusual thing: an actual dish of the typical "salat" that they always put in falafel pitas. It was surprisingly good on its own.
We walked all the way back, too. We saw a large number of lumps, which reminds me that Caper discovered the purpose of the lumps by asking an Israeli. They're meant not to prevent cars passing them but to prevent cars from parking on the curb. Because that is a thing here.
And to finish this ambitiously long post, I present to you the only thing that happened to me last Saturday -- like the Saturday before it and, so far, like this one: blogging and breakfast.
Your closing picture is a closeup of a time- and space-defying wormhole I found in the neck of that bottle.
