adventures and advents

Hey, everyone. I'm sitting here on Shabbat, very sunburned from an adventure at the beach yesterday, and I decided to relax today and blog. This blog post may be a little unusually written, because on the Friday on which it took place, I decided to journal about the whole day the same night (as I very rarely do) to avoid forgetting it. For the blog, I've tried to edit it and find places to insert pictures, but the integration might not be seamless.

[P.S. Funny story: I came to the computer lab and sat down. There was a bag near the computer, but the computer was off, and knowing that they automatically shut down after a certain amount of inactivity, I moved the bag. But soon enough, a woman entered the lab, came up to me, and said, "Slikha, mah atah oseh?!" ("Excuse me, what are you doing?!") The rest of her rant in Hebrew I couldn't understand, except that she seemed to think I was browsing through her Facebook account. Luckily a Hebrew-speaking man beside me was able to explain to her that the computers shut down by themselves, and I moved over in any case. Anyway, it was kind of nice to understand the first few words of what was being shouted at me.]

[P.P.S. Often, the most time-consuming part of writing this blog is selecting the best pictures -- each post has hundreds of candidates from the days it covers -- to tell the story. This time Caper offered her much-appreciated help to counteract my indecision. Thanks, Caper.]

Okay, without further ado...

I woke up at about six-thirty, as I usually do -- everyone likes the apartment to be so warm that in order to sleep with the necessary blanketing I have to open my window, which lets in the sounds of the birds in the morning -- and tried to get back to sleep. When I couldn’t, I reached for the tablet I’ve been lent for the trip and checked Facebook. Thanks to a post from Lyera, I read about Modern Hebrew and ancient Mesopotamian languages on Wikipedia for a long time. I also set up this comparison of Canadian money and Israeli money, although I wish we had a penny (there's one more Israeli coin to match it, too).

By nine-thirty the others still weren’t up, so I went to get some juice (three litres for ten shekels -- can you beat that?!) and a small tablecloth for our coffee table and a dish-drying rack. For the latter two I went to a new student-oriented store nearby, and the very nice store assistant, Shani the Polyglot, cut me a lovely crooked piece of tablecloth and promised to order the rack by Monday. She also gave me her number and asked me to like the Facebook page. Including mine, it has twelve likes.

We were going to cook the bacon for breakfast, but the occasion didn't seem special enough, so we mostly had oatmeal. The day's plans were to visit the City of David, an archaeological park where they've uncovered bits of the city older than the Old City, to see Hezekiah's Tunnel. Everyone took so long to get ready, including Paul's visit to the student centre to research a Shabbat dinner he was supposed to attend that night at a rabbi’s house, that we were only out the door after one.

Cas, Paul, Larissa, and I light-railed it to Damascus Gate (so named for facing north to Damascus; the Hebrew name is Sha'ar Shekhem, which means Nablus Gate -- a bit moe accurate). Paul had discovered some seven-shekel falafel in the area earlier, and we made a brief detour to find it. The layout of this stand, by the by, is extremely typical of the many falafel shops around town.

Photo credit: Lars

It was surprisingly excellent considering it was the cheapest we’ve seen here. An Arab woman passing by advised Larissa to step into the shade to save herself from the heat, and Cas washed his toe, which had mysteriously begun bleeding earlier.

As with last Friday, Damascus Gate was massively overcrowded. Even so, we got through it faster this time, mostly with lots of pushing (by us and of us), and we made a beeline southwards through the Western Wall plaza and out again. We realized that we’d only have about an hour before it closed, which is barely enough to go through the whole tunnel. That reminds me: Caper revealed that the word that we kept hearing the stall-owners shout -- "ashara" -- is Arabic for "ten".

Paul wanted to stop and return an item along the way. While he was investigating this, I saw a gelatin candy booth. “Sheqel?” I asked, holding up two of them to the shopkeeper. That "q" is supposed to indicate that I was pronouncing it with a Hebrew accent rather than a Canadian one -- not very well, though, since he replied, "No, no, each one is two shekels. Three, five shekels."

I know these candies are very cheap, so I pressed again, "Sheqel, shteim?" ("A shekel, two [candies]?") and he replied similarly, again in English. So I put one back and said, "Sheqel, akhat?" ("A shekel, one [candy]?") and he gave in and replied, "Ken, ken" ("Okay, okay"). We also passed Ramdan’s shop, where I secured Paul’s replacement rosary last year.

When we finally got to the City of David, it was about three. They were no longer selling tickets to the park itself, and they'd actually stopped selling tickets to the tunnel an hour ago since people need time to get out. Also, the water level was supposed to be higher than we expected, as depicted on this ridiculous sign:

After disappointedly spending a little time hesitating about whether or not to go to Gethsemane (our second planned stop of the day) and buying a panoramic postcard, we accidentally discovered some steps down to a Large Stone Structure that required no ticket, so we went down.

I was reminded of the proverb that a cat may look at a king:

From here we were able to follow some more steps down to a vantage point of the fascinating Stepped Stone Structure.

The structure apparently supported a number of houses at the time...

...including one belonging to someone named Ahiel. His house consisted of three parallel rooms closed off and connected by a fourth -- a “typical Israeli house” at the time.

The sign said that since he had a stone toilet seat just outside his house, he must have been a person of considerable status. Cas balanced on a most precarious precipice in order to get a picture of the luxury amenity:

Eventually, after wandering around and checking out everything that was free, we came to this overlook of the Kidron Valley. This merits a brief aside that even for those who are disillusioned by the touristy, unauthentic feeling of the holy sites today, there are still features of the landscape that recall verses about them and stir up the imagination.

A sign there pointed out some ancient tomb entrances on the rock face across the valley. Actually, that sign is kind of interesting in itself, since it shows how Hebrew writing once looked:

Very different in design from the printed alphabet today. The inscription was translated as something like "Here lies someone-or-other, who is over the tomb, buried with his wife someone-or-other; there is no gold or silver here, and cursed be the man who opens this tomb." Last year my Biblical Hebrew professor actually mentioned this inscription, and joked that the last bit probably means there was in fact treasure in there.

Anyway, we decided to check the tombs out. How to do this was not clear. We could see that there was a road down at the bottom of the valley and a neighbourhood of some kind, but we realized we'd have to go a long way back up and over before we could get down to it properly.

This was when Cas decided to scout ahead a bit and see if there wasn't a way down the mountainside. He returned and reported that it looked like it was possible to climb over the fence of the park and get down the scruffy, rocky mountainside to the valley. So we went with him to the point of the fence had discovered, and he climbed over safely.

Then Paul tried to hoist Larissa over, but had to set her down in a second: "Squealing and screaming won't help us, Larissa!" I climbed over, and then Paul helped Larissa over and Cas received her on the other hand. Finally Paul came over. It was about this time that we wondered whether leaving the park by this means was legal.

Descending the mountainside was not easy. There were many prickly plants, and much of the ground was sand that slipped away when stepped on. I found a long bamboo stick that Larissa called a "shepherd's crook", and that helped. Grabbing onto trees and watching our footing carefully, we made our way down. Paul found a series of step-like grooves and got ahead of us, and when we got up he said he had made an interesting archaeological find.

He pointed it out: a little ways over to the right, we could see a set of perfectly usable stairs that seemed to be coming down from where we’d been before! It was too late to cross over to them easily, so we continued our painstakingly slow journey. At one point a plant left two long darts in my foot that drew blood when I pulled them out, and we suffered many other afflictions as well.

Finally we reached a point where the stairs were close enough to cross to, and we did. We found ourselves beside a large tan house.

Paul had already reached the bottom when we got there and was talking with a middle-aged Arab man and his friend. "Where did you come from?" the man asked us. He looked a little confused when we gestured vaguely up the slope towards the City of David.

"This guy can get us into Hezekiah's Tunnel," Paul reported.

That sounded promising, so we made our introductions. His name was Shadi (his spelling, even though he pronounced it like "shady"). He had lived in Minnesota for a while and married a Mexican woman, from whom he had learned some Spanish in addition to his Arabic and passable English.

He showed us one of the entrances to Hezekiah's Tunnel, which it turned out was quite close to his house. A large locked grille covered the entrance at the bottom of a few steps, and we went down where it was very cool. He couldn't open the grille, but he was able to point out some features while he explained the procedure to us.

We would enter the tunnel at the other end, by the Pool of Siloam, and go through the water until we came to the gate that we were standing at now. "You know, I once did the tunnel with no light, just touching." Then we would turn around and exit back at the pool. "So you are getting it twice!"

We settled on paying him about $15 a person, after his original suggestion of $20 a person (the actual tickets were about $10). It was such an unusual offer that I didn't see how we could refuse. Cas was equally intrigued. Larissa and Paul were mildly hesitant -- Paul because he was remembering the water level on the sign, Larissa because she wasn’t sure she trusted the stranger. But in the end we all agreed to it. Shadi gave a command in Arabic to his friend to run ahead, or something similar, and we started walking.

The entrance by the Pool of Siloam was a few blocks away through the streets of the Arab district of Silwan (if you can spot the likely cognate with Siloam, excellent) in the base of the valley. We talked with Shadi as we went. He told us about his wife (he has now remarried) and their child and his "poquito Espanol". We saw a house whose extension was more or less wholly wooden, which was odd because everything here is stone:

Caper later translated the Arabic graffiti on this concrete block as well as she could given that it was difficult to read; it's a typical political message:

I asked Shadi about the ripening times of olives and pomegranates. "They always pick the olives one or two days after it rains," he explained.

"Why’s that?"

"Ehhh... I don’t know."

We had to climb back up a slope to get the entrance of the pool. Shadi explained that this location was the accepted location until sometime in the last decade, when the plumbing of a house in the area required digging to fix and another potential pool was accidentally discovered.

When we got there, Shadi opened the gate and Larissa and Paul followed him down the long set of stairs. The pool is very oblong, and is fed directly by the running water of the Gihon Spring channeled through the tunnel. At the bottom, a few Arabs and some Jews in Orthodox garb were tending to something or other, and at the top one of them stopped Cas and me to say it was closed. "We’re with him," I said, pointing to Shadi, and we were let through like magic.

We unloaded our pockets into our bags and removed our sandals. Cas and I had to use the washroom (it was going to be a long time underground), and a very short, dignified old Arab man led us back up to a little stone balcony overlooking a garden, with grapevines growing on a trellis above it.

It also included a view of what Shadi later explained was called the King's Garden.

The washroom itself was a tiny box with a hole in the floor and a rudimentary sink; it was pioneerish, and seemed more or less impossible for women to use (as Larissa commented, "Thank God I didn't have to go!"). And yet it seemed to be the house's actual washroom. Speaking of which, Hebrew's euphemism of choice is "sherutim", or "services".

Eventually we were led back to the pool. Oddly enough, Paul, who is not a smoker, was smoking a cigarette Shadi had apparently given him.

Also, a young boy had joined us for our adventure in the tunnel. We removed our sandals again (Larissa had brilliantly brought crocs), retrieved a flashlight and camera from our bags, and journeyed in after Shadi.

The whole tunnel is pitch-black, and the water was at first deep up to our shins and ice-cold. The walls are barely farther apart than the width of a person, and the roof begins quite high. Cas's flashlight headed up the rear and Shadi's phone light led the way forward. Our voices echoed almost to the point of unintelligibility as Shadi pointed out various aspects of the tunnel to us, including the place where they'd found an ancient Hebrew inscription describing the making of the tunnel, and a copy of the inscription (the original is now in a museum in Istanbul for some reason). As we walked and the water level dropped (or rather the floor raised) to about our ankles, we also explained the history to Larissa, who had never heard of it. I've written about it last year, so quite summarily, it was dug during a siege in order to bring Jerusalem's only water source at the time within the walls.

Shadi wanted to take a group picture. Can you identify everyone in the dark?

Also, here's a rather ghostly closeup of Cas and Larissa.

The tunnel went on for a long distance, but it was a surprisingly short time before our feet were too numb to mind the water much. Cas and Shadi and I were barefoot, and the ground was a little rough. Presently the ceiling lowered, so much that I had to bend almost in half and Paul’s back was no doubt aching. There were a few little stubs of tunnels that had been abandoned, and here and there a hole in the wall that seemed to go far up. Now and then Shadi took a picture of us or we of the water. The young boy was with us the whole time, grinning and helping Shadi in pointing out this or that danger to watch out for.

After perhaps twenty minutes we came to a part that zig-zagged, and Shadi explained that it meant it was the middle, near the meeting point of the two teams digging from opposite directions. If they had dug straight, "They miss for sure." But zig-zagging, they were likely to hit each other.

After that, we encountered a metal gate that was shut and that occupied the whole width of the tunnel. It was locked, and Paul managed to wrench it open a bit, but the squeeze through, he reported, would be very difficult. Finally we gave up and decided to turn around early. This is what happens when you go in the Shadi way rather than the normal way.

For much of the return journey, in honour of Shadi's trip, we turned off our lights and proceeded by touch. If you held one hand above your head to test the ceiling’s height and the other against a wall to keep your distance from any toe-stubbing, it was feasible. It was in fact quite peaceful, often with no sound but that of numb feet driving through the clear water.

Now and then Shadi or Cas would turn on their light for a second to make sure we could see where we were in a difficult passage.

The tunnel is only half a kilometre long, but because you have to go so slowly, it usually takes over half an hour. (Shadi said he was able to run through it in fifteen minutes once -- no doubt badly bruised afterwards!)

After a long stretch of darkness I saw Shadi's light turn on ahead, except he was keeping it on for a very long time. I expected he was waiting for us to catch up. But as we came nearer, I saw that it was not in fact his light but, as Larissa and Cas put it, literally the light at the end of the tunnel.

We took pictures again at the exit and paid Shadi. He also encouraged us to buy widows’ mites, but we only took one (and didn’t much want it, but oh well). It took a lot of convincing for him to believe that Canadian money was almost as good as American money.

Photo credit: Shadi on Lars's camera

Before the walk back, the short, elderly man who had led us to the restroom took us back up to his vineyard and gave us all some of his grapes. "Not ripe. A month and a half," he said, but we ate them all the same.

Larissa wanted to pay the young boy ten shekels for his guidance and take a picture with him, and asked his name: Wassim. Shadi joked that he was up for adoption, and he told Larissa that yes, he would like to go to Canada!

Shadi, always friendly but a little pushy, tried to sell us a guidebook about the area -- it included a picture that he claimed was of him at age ten -- but it was clearly not very scholarly, so we passed it up.

On the walk back I mentioned the university’s warning to us to avoid Arab areas. Shadi was surprised to learn of this, but reasoned that this was why business had been bad. He said he wanted to raise the money to return to the US and finish his schooling in biomedical engineering. Wassim tagged along with us, and Larissa saw him point to a four-year-old boy in the street and say, "He is my uncle."

Photo credit: Lars

Shadi joked that he could cook us up a chicken if we liked.

We asked him about the tombs we had seen. "No, don’t go there," he said. "There are kids who throw stones. See, when there is any trouble, like they warn you about at the university, what it is, it’s kids. They throw stones."

He offered to drive us a bit further, but we wanted to pass various things on the way to Gethsemane (where this same road happened to lead), so we declined. He invited us to return to his house and drink tea whenever we liked. And then we were off.

This boy didn't respond when we greeted him with "Salaam", but he turned and smiled when we said "Hello". I suppose it's much more exciting to meet a stranger from across the world than just another neighbourhood person.

As we walked up the road, we saw some of the tombs in the rock face perhaps a couple dozen metres up on our right, under some houses, so we climbed up there as well, by now feeling a little tired.

From here we had an excellent view of the Old City across the valley. Cas decided to climb into a tomb entrance and explore, but he found only garbage and a sour smell.

As he was emerging there was a sudden rush of cheering and drumbeats from the streets across the valley, towards the Old City. We were trying to figure out what was going on up there when a huge explosion of balloons went up, the colours of the Palestinian flag, and flew over the valley towards us. It was at least as good a show as Up.

Paul's theory was that there was a demonstration, and mine was that it had something to do with Shabbat, since last week near this same place we had seen singing and dancing and partying to welcome Shabbat. The seeming conviviality made Paul's theory somewhat unlikely, but the Palestinian balloon colours more or less ruled out mine.

As we watched, a band of Arab children came walking over the hill towards us. We tried to ask them what it was. One of them gave the disclaimer that “Me no English!”, but then he said, "Yah Yisrael!" and sang and did a dance to the improvised lyrics “Okay! Okay! O, o, okay!” to demonstrate. We weren't entirely sure we understood.

A crowd began filing down one of the streets across the valley, singing and drumming as if it were a triumphal march, some of them carrying flags or banners. (This picture is not great; one of the children declared, "No picture! No picture!" and I had to stop after only one take.)

A second wave of children arrived and stopped by to look at us. It was surprisingly relaxing; we all watched it together, and one of the boys introduced himself as Muhammad.

After a brief failed exchange in English, I asked him, "Atah mevin ivrit?" ("Do you understand Hebrew?") He nodded.

I pointed across the way and asked, "Atah yode’a ma zeh?" ("Do you know what that is?") He nodded again.

I laughed and repeated, "Ma zeh?!" ("What is it?")

He grinned and loudly replied, "Ramadan!"

We stayed up there for a while and observed the march with the children, now and then making comments to them. At one point Muhammad helped Larissa brush some beige bugs off her.

Cas asked when Ramadan was to begin, and Muhammad said only, "Sheva." It was hard to interpret this. Seven o'clock? The seventh of July? Seven hours from now? Seven days? He and Cas made gestures concerning Cas's watch, but we couldn't be sure. Some random goats passed by below and the boys threw pebbles at them.

Then, below us, another band of children walked by in the somewhat deserted little stretch of valley. Sure enough, Muhammad reached down, picked up a stone, and hurled it at them! It didn't hit anyone, but it bounced and they looked up and kept going. Some of the other children up there with us were looking at them too and talking.

Muhammad picked up another handful of stones and was about to throw them when I asked, "Lama?" ("Why?")

He turned and replied what sounded like "khaverim" ("friends"), but it was unclear. He saw that I was confused, so he pointed to them and repeated "kelev" ("dog").

As the march moved on to another street somewhat out of our field of view, Muhammad produced a younger brother named Mahmoud and said to Larissa, in an accent good enough to reveal this was a memorized phrase, "Give me money. Give me money." We were stunned. "Sheqel." Larissa observed that this was probably the price for brushing the bugs off her earlier; every favour, as we were to learn later, comes with an implied fee. I reached into my wallet and gave him one.

An older boy (perhaps a teenager) whispered in his ear, and he declared, "Actually two sheqel! Actually two sheqel!", holding out his hand. It was far too cheeky, and by now it was about time we moved on anyway, so we laughed, said bye, and descended again, glancing behind us to make sure no stones were being thrown at us.

Along the road we came to some monumental tombs and caves and watched the sun lowering in the sky.

There were also some tomb-caves, which we explored a little. There was some perplexing Hebrew graffiti (as far as I know, this isn't a possible word):

We came to a little outlook a few metres above the ground, and realized we had lost Paul. After a bit of searching we saw that he was down below and about to practice his rock-climbing up the fairly sheer face. I went down again to take pictures. This is just the top of the climb; it's at least another Paul-length down to the bottom:

Sure enough, he made it, although I think one would have to be as tall as him to span the distance between some of those holds he had.

Then Paul left us to visit some people in the Old City we’d passed earlier before making his way to the Shabbat dinner. We continued up the road...

...past more tombs...

...spotting the onion-towered Church of Mary Magdalene...

...the Mount of Olives information centre...

...and eventually the Basilica of the Agony, which was both closed and under some kind of repair.

We stopped at a little café and decided that we would climb the Mount of Olives and get to a vantage point with a panorama of the Old City before going back home (which one can do along a road through an Arab settlement from the top). The going was very steep and long, and by now we were exhausted.

We passed several closed churches and signs and the dank, uninteresting Tomb of the Prophets (Malachi and Haggai). At one point a taxi honked and sped upwards through the extraordinarily narrow road. We were surprised that it was physically possible for it to make it up, not to mention at such speeds.

There's a huge Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives (in the tradition of the tombs in the valley earlier, perhaps?), where many famous builders of the nation are buried. It's amazing how many of these similarly shaped stone coffins adorn the slope; here's a small cutout of the whole scene:

Apparently it rains a lot there in the winter, because this storm drain -- I think it's the first I've seen here -- reminded me of home.

Finally we achieved the summit. We were feeling quite pleased with ourselves for having survived.

At the entrance of the short road to the vantage point, a young Arab boy hailed us and said, "Come this way! Come, it’s a nice photo. Beautiful!" Even if we didn’t want his direction -- which, already knowing the way, we didn't --we couldn’t have avoided his talking about it and walking along with us, saying, "This way, over here, it's a beautiful picture," and so on. On the surface such gestures as this are friendly, but in reality it's roundabout begging. Uneasily seeking to avoid this, I told him, "Ein kessef" ("There's no money"), but I knew he would ask anyway, so I gave him a couple of shekels.

"No, no, is for you," he said, extending his hand to me, but then he recalled it again, saying, "But... if you really want…" He kept explaining the place to me in very obvious terms and I said in vain, "This isn't my first time here!"

At the vantage point the view was nice, and the sun was low over the city. We and the boy stood there for a second and watched. Another boy approached us, and Cas or Larissa exclaimed, "Wassim!"

Now, I didn't remember Wassim's face exactly, but I kind of doubted he would randomly be up here after we had left him down in the valley an hour ago -- especially when the other boy teased him, "Anta Wassim?" ("You're Wassim?").

PseudoWassim offered to show me a view of the Dead Sea, and I walked with him over to a little gate that led onto another street, a narrow one with a fence to the right overlooking the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea and the wall of the West Bank. Little fenced-in sections lined the right side of the street, and as PseudoWassim was pointing out the wall and saying, "That side Palestinian, this side Israeli," I stepped into one such box for a better look. "You can’t go in there," he added.

"No? Actually, I’ve been to Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Jericho," I replied.
 
He repeated that I couldn't go in, and I replied again, confused. Then I realized my error: "That’s a Jewish tomb!" he said, pointing to where I was standing. Ah. So he hadn't meant the West Bank.

At least it yielded a slightly better view...

Then PseudoWassim pointed out the Kidron Valley and said, "That's where we went in the tunnel… there," and the fog lifted and I understood that this really was Wassim.

We went back up to the vantage point facing the Old City, where Larissa and Cas had been looking for me. Shadi was there too (he'd reasoned, "Perhaps he took him to the Dead Sea"), and he greeted us all warmly. He pointed to the Old City panorama and said that in twenty minutes we would have a great sunset and a beautiful photo. Currently the exposure was not very good.

Photo credit: Shadi

We discussed among ourselves whether we wanted to hang around for twenty minutes, and then had the idea of asking Shadi whether there was a coffee place nearby. He thought about it and then took us to his car to drive us up the mountain a bit.

We talked about Ramadan, which he explained was to start in four days, and his studies and the hazardous driving in Israel. He preferred Minnesota's roads. Eventually we found a little restaurant where we decided to get falafel and bring it back to eat while watching the sunset -- "Mount of Olives Restaurant", creatively enough.

Caper has since recognized this restaurant decoration as a verse from the Qur'an:

We ordered and received our food, and the restaurant owner said that for coffee, a zero-alcohol apple beer/juice, and two falafel plates, it was a hundred and ten shekels, but because we were with Shadi, a hundred. In reality this should probably have come to about forty, so we balked at the price, but since the food had already been made we settled for the ridiculously pricey eighty. Even Shadi said while driving back that it was too expensive. He explained that the restaurant owner didn't know him, just his brothers.

We got out again at the vantage point. "How much should I give you for gas?" I asked Shadi (and you can see my struggle to put the inevitable favour-fee in terms of an actual cost). He said it wasn't actually his car but a friend's, and directed me to another man. I asked Shadi what was an appropriate tip, and he replied, "Whatever you think." So I took out a twenty, but the man told me it was too little. I handed him another ten shekels, and he said it should be fifty. Thirty, I said! It's not my first time here! Thirty-five, he said. I left it at thirty. After all, there'd only been about ten minutes of driving.

We ate the falafel (besides pita and hummus, it came with a really good sauce we'd never had before) and watched the sunset.

You can hear Wassim saying that he's here every morning and every evening, "helping people". I sadly realized that this was probably his primary occupation and some of the family's income.

As we ate, we talked about this kind of tipping. Larissa revealed that the boy who led us up the road to the vantage point had approached her, waving my two shekels angrily, and said, "Look what your brother gave me! What is this? What is this?! It’s nothing!" (Incidentally, he also assumed that Cas was her husband.) She said, "You never said anything about money!" And he replied, "Yes, but you know. You know."

How differently things work in the Middle East! She gave him another two shekels.

I felt kind of bad for underestimating and haggling down prices all the time, so when Shadi headed our way to say goodbye, I offered him two hundred more shekels for all his trouble and for his studies. He refused at first, but in the end he took a hundred, and asked what we were doing tomorrow. We told him we were taking a tour of the West Bank, and he asked about the details and the price, and commented that it was too much. It was too late to cancel it, but he offered to drive us around wherever we liked next time. I took his number and he said we should call him to come over to his house for tea and to talk about whether a trip to Galilee that we were planning was feasible.

He also offered to drive us back, but we walked.

We saw a camel on the way, contained in a very loosely fenced field, and Cas went up to greet it.

It seemed a little too risky to try petting it.

Our way back took us through an Arab neighbourhood (there was a store named "Bake and Cake"), and saw what must have been Ramadan lights strung up on the trees at a playground where children were playing.

We passed the university; we passed an overlook of the dark Judean Desert, speckled with the lights of settlements; we passed the road we take every morning; we talked about the Arab children whom we had seen in the streets without their parents a few days ago, and wondered whether it was safer or less safe to let them do so than in North America.

We finally returned, and I came to write this journal, and the lab was full. While waiting, I ran into a girl named Jaclyn from my Hebrew class, and we walked around the village and talked for a while. She said she didn't want to go back up to her apartment because it was full of strangers and half-friends who would be talking till midnight, so I invited her up for tea and we talked some more. I reflected: today we made friends both expected and unexpected.

Sadly, unless I make a point of ensuring so, the chances of ending posts on cat pictures will probably only go down. But you can look at this picture and maybe it will remind you of this song (thinking of you, Dad).