Friday, October 31, 2008
Kitty Update
Ramsey(most votes )/Woodstock/Tarzan/Palestine/one-eyed Jack/Guthrie/Nemesis/Herod/Barak/Gusto/Cannoli/Bureka/Ew/Magoo/Chutzpah/Shepherd's Pie/Calzone/Blintz...thanks for all your suggestions! Any way, we could never decide (although we started calling him Velcro because we would have to peel his little paws off of our clothing ) and now it is up to his new parents to formally name him. We took him to an adoption day put on by the local SPCA and luckily we found a lovely couple who fell in love with him instantly. It was a match made in heaven: Adira is from Winnipeg, Elle happens to know her brother (of course) and she has beautiful red hair which matched little what's-his-face perfectly. Mike is her sweet rabbinical school husband and they promised to give him a good home either here in Jerusalem or back to the US. He came a long way in the past few days; his eyes cleared up, he was de-flead, de-wormed and he even started normal kitty behaviour of batting around dustballs and twist-ties. We miss the little guy (official gender determination from the vet) but we know he is well looked after and we are now free to adopt new Ramallah kitties!
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Name this kitty
Ok, so we're stuck with this little flea-infested, pus-filled orange tabby we scooped off the road in Ramallah yesterday. Probably a mistake, considering how we already have an overly lesbian attachment to Katie, our cat back home and we won't be bringing KittyX home with us. Any way, we had to pick him (we're pretty sure) up because he is a real contender for the cover of our 'Scrappy Cats 2009' calendar we are working on. He does need name though, and so far we have:a) Woodstock b) Osama c) Tarzan d) Ramsey
Please pick one of the following or feel free to suggest another. This cat must be named by the end of the week. Thanks and please vote either on the blog, on Facebook or to my gmail!
The Tour - Part 2
Back to the tour....
After taking my Dad to Ramallah, we realized we were almost halfway through his week and we had a lot to cover. We sat down and organized some sightseeing which basically involved non-stop touring for the next four days, whether he liked it or not. His one request was that he spend some time in the Old City in Jerusalem, so we allowed him a few hours between Yad Vachem[1] and Masada. We wandered around getting lost and getting ripped off in the market (“Tam, first he said shekels, then he said dollars, can you believe it!”) and trying to figure our how old everything was. As I was beginning to realize, with a place full of history spanning thousands of years, there are few sites which are genuinely singular in their description. For example, David’s Citadel is basically a combination of Hasmonean, Herodian, Byzantine, Mameluke, Islamic and Crusader architecture. Once I understood this, I felt much better about not understanding it. Elle would usually read to us a passage from our guidebook before we would enter yet another ancient massive arched structure but Dad and I would promptly forget and wander around just enjoying all the old stone. We also made it over to the Western Wall where it was really busy because it was the last day of Sukkot and it was the place to be for all religious Jews. Dad made it down to the wall and was happy he got a blessing from a Rabbi (for $10).
The highlight of this day however, was the The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Once again, this is no simple church of one denomination, and it shows. Somehow shared between Armenians, Greeks, Copts, Roman Catholics, Ethiopians and Syrians, it seems everyone has a piece of it and nobody wants to pay for it (and it needs a bit of TLC if I may say). Strange how the apparent site of where the crucifixion ‘all went down’ with hundreds of pilgrims pouring in and out, is lit with bare fluorescent bulbs! Any way, we skipped the big line-up for Christ’s tomb, but saw the apparent prison where he was held, and the rock where he body was laid. Well, it’s not the real rock, a substitute, but that didn’t stop those crazy Christians from throwing themselves on it. [2] One nun suddenly started pouring ‘Christ’s blood’, which looked more like Strawberry Fruitopia on it and nobody even seemed to mind if they got splashed! Dad and I were shocked, our quiet protestant sensibilities had never experienced such visceral Christianity. We shook our heads and went home.
So the next day, we headed to the desert. The first time I was in Israel, Elle took me to the Dead Sea and we drove to Masada, but were short on time so we never went up. [3] Masada is an archeological ruin excavated in the 1960s, built as a fortress/palace by King Herod around the 1st century BC.[4] We had an option: to walk up the Snake Path, which is an hour of vertical climbing, or take the cable car. Considering how cranky I get in the heat on horizontal surfaces, I thought the cable car might be best for all. Luckily we got there early because the throngs of tourists were right behind us. The money shots at Masada are on the northern side, where Herod built his ‘hanging palace’, Roman baths etc. I was interested in a cistern on the south side which was really just a huge hole in the ground, but it had an opening at one end to let in light and the picture in our guidebook looked interesting as a space. Next to the cistern was the swimming pool, which at this point really was a rectangular pit with a stone fence (I think it was a 4-lane). Considering that water had to be carried up about 1000 ft. by donkeys or slaves or whatever, the swimming pool next to the cistern is just plain mean. Then again, Herod apparently wasn’t the most sensitive of kings. In any case, the whole complex is pretty amazing; you just need to go to your special place when you find yourself pinned against a rock by a mass of passing tourists.
Footnotes
1. Yad Vachem is the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.
2. Considering all the time I spent in Sunday School I feel entitled to a little blasphemy.
3. My sister-in-law was unimpressed with the drive-by Masada trip. To go there, but not go up was just lame.
4. The other story of Masada was the mass suicide in the 1st century A.D of a group of Jewish revolutionaries who had won Masada back from the Romans but were under siege. Having clearly no way out as the Romans built a massive ramp up the cliff and eventually broke through, they drew lots to kill each other rather than surrender.
Next up: Nazareth and Akko plus a bonus: name-the-kitty contest
After taking my Dad to Ramallah, we realized we were almost halfway through his week and we had a lot to cover. We sat down and organized some sightseeing which basically involved non-stop touring for the next four days, whether he liked it or not. His one request was that he spend some time in the Old City in Jerusalem, so we allowed him a few hours between Yad Vachem[1] and Masada. We wandered around getting lost and getting ripped off in the market (“Tam, first he said shekels, then he said dollars, can you believe it!”) and trying to figure our how old everything was. As I was beginning to realize, with a place full of history spanning thousands of years, there are few sites which are genuinely singular in their description. For example, David’s Citadel is basically a combination of Hasmonean, Herodian, Byzantine, Mameluke, Islamic and Crusader architecture. Once I understood this, I felt much better about not understanding it. Elle would usually read to us a passage from our guidebook before we would enter yet another ancient massive arched structure but Dad and I would promptly forget and wander around just enjoying all the old stone. We also made it over to the Western Wall where it was really busy because it was the last day of Sukkot and it was the place to be for all religious Jews. Dad made it down to the wall and was happy he got a blessing from a Rabbi (for $10).
The highlight of this day however, was the The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Once again, this is no simple church of one denomination, and it shows. Somehow shared between Armenians, Greeks, Copts, Roman Catholics, Ethiopians and Syrians, it seems everyone has a piece of it and nobody wants to pay for it (and it needs a bit of TLC if I may say). Strange how the apparent site of where the crucifixion ‘all went down’ with hundreds of pilgrims pouring in and out, is lit with bare fluorescent bulbs! Any way, we skipped the big line-up for Christ’s tomb, but saw the apparent prison where he was held, and the rock where he body was laid. Well, it’s not the real rock, a substitute, but that didn’t stop those crazy Christians from throwing themselves on it. [2] One nun suddenly started pouring ‘Christ’s blood’, which looked more like Strawberry Fruitopia on it and nobody even seemed to mind if they got splashed! Dad and I were shocked, our quiet protestant sensibilities had never experienced such visceral Christianity. We shook our heads and went home.
So the next day, we headed to the desert. The first time I was in Israel, Elle took me to the Dead Sea and we drove to Masada, but were short on time so we never went up. [3] Masada is an archeological ruin excavated in the 1960s, built as a fortress/palace by King Herod around the 1st century BC.[4] We had an option: to walk up the Snake Path, which is an hour of vertical climbing, or take the cable car. Considering how cranky I get in the heat on horizontal surfaces, I thought the cable car might be best for all. Luckily we got there early because the throngs of tourists were right behind us. The money shots at Masada are on the northern side, where Herod built his ‘hanging palace’, Roman baths etc. I was interested in a cistern on the south side which was really just a huge hole in the ground, but it had an opening at one end to let in light and the picture in our guidebook looked interesting as a space. Next to the cistern was the swimming pool, which at this point really was a rectangular pit with a stone fence (I think it was a 4-lane). Considering that water had to be carried up about 1000 ft. by donkeys or slaves or whatever, the swimming pool next to the cistern is just plain mean. Then again, Herod apparently wasn’t the most sensitive of kings. In any case, the whole complex is pretty amazing; you just need to go to your special place when you find yourself pinned against a rock by a mass of passing tourists.
Footnotes
1. Yad Vachem is the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.
2. Considering all the time I spent in Sunday School I feel entitled to a little blasphemy.
3. My sister-in-law was unimpressed with the drive-by Masada trip. To go there, but not go up was just lame.
4. The other story of Masada was the mass suicide in the 1st century A.D of a group of Jewish revolutionaries who had won Masada back from the Romans but were under siege. Having clearly no way out as the Romans built a massive ramp up the cliff and eventually broke through, they drew lots to kill each other rather than surrender.
Next up: Nazareth and Akko plus a bonus: name-the-kitty contest
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Olive Harvest
I intended to keep writing about the tour we made with Dad through The Holy Land, but was sidetracked by yesterdays events:
A few days ago we met Ezra [1] in our neighbourhood because we literally live one street away. He had been working all day but invited us in for tea because he hadn’t see Elle in probably 2 years. He told us of the work he was doing around Hebron, which is in Palestine, south of Bethlehem. He explained that he had been trying to work with Palestinians and Bedouins on the water problem in the South which was becoming more and more serious for the poor who simply didn’t have enough for their livestock, olive trees or drinking. He was fairly unimpressed with our plan to live in Ramallah, as it wasn’t the “real Palestine” but agreed to take us along with him on Saturday as that was his usual day of causing trouble in the Occupied Territories.
We left this morning, and picked up Nissim, yet another filmmaker who has made a film about Ezra and set off for Hebron. We didn’t really know what we were going to do this day and soon realized the day would just unfold with Ezra the way it would. I thought we were going to look at some dry wells but it seemed we were going to help some Palestinian villagers harvest their olives. Not knowing anything about how to pick olives, I asked the stupid question as to how this was done and he said, “olive by olive”, which apparently was some kind of dirty joke in Hebrew because they all started laughing.
It was olive season and we had heard through Neta, that various peace activist groups had organized around helping Palestinians in areas where their groves were close to settlements. Despite the fact that Palestinians owned the land, settlers were harassing them when they went anywhere near them. We had read about an incident a week ago, where some settlers beat up a Palestinian journalist who was reporting at one of these harvests. The government had been getting some bad press for essentially letting these situations get out of control so the army was apparently now taking a greater interest in keeping the peace.
We ended in a tiny village (which I couldn’t find on the map) next to a small village called Beit Amra. The settlement next door was called Otni’el and we made our way into the olive groves in the valley between the village and settlement. The villagers had picked the trees closest to their village but were afraid to go to their other grove, which was in the shadow of the settlement. There ended up being approx. 15 of us ‘whiteys’, who, through our presence alone, was hopefully going to deter the settlers from behaving badly.
Well, nobody was beaten but it didn’t exactly stop them from descending on us before we could even reach for an olive. I quickly understood why the old men were hustling us along to pick those olives toute suite, as we were suddenly being yelled at by lot of young settler guys, most of whom were carrying very large guns. There was one soldier who seemed fairly nervous about the increasingly tense situation, and another guy, a.k.a ‘big asshole’, who seemed to be the self-appointed authority, who we learned was the ‘security officer’ from the settlement. The general argument being yelled by the big asshole was that this was a military zone and we needed authorization to be there. The argument being yelled back by the old Palestinian man was that this was his land and he didn’t need anyone’s permission to be on it. [2] So this went back and forth as the rest of us tried to get those damn olives off the trees, meanwhile more soldiers were showing up and more settlers were coming down from the settlement. The soldiers were trying to calm everyone down but were making it clear that we weren’t going to be able to cross the road to pick the last grove. Things were fairly tense with all the yelling and the large weapons but I weirdly wasn’t that scared and admittedly a little excited by all the action. The person I wanted to yell at was this annoying activist who was playing some kind of ‘Friendly Giant’ music on her lute when I think she could have been more useful filling up pails of olives like the rest of us. Apparently this was some kind of political statement because you weren’t supposed to play music on Shabbat.[3] To be honest I thought this kind of provocation was unnecessary.
At a certain point, once the police from Hebron came, Ezra decided it was time for us to call it quits. We walked back to the village and were invited to tea. A bunch of little kids came out and instructed us to take their pictures. They were very cute and excited to see us until one of the men beat them off with a stick. Apparently he was from the child rearing school of ‘not seen and not heard’. Sigh. Anyway, we had our tea, took our photos and then left. We stopped at another harvest site where there was a large group of Israelis and foreigners helping out but it was already over. At this point Ezra had bigger fish to fry at some mysterious ‘situation’ and didn’t want us around so he packed us off on the do-gooder bus and back we went to Jerusalem.
Footnotes
1. Ezra is the star of the award-winning documentary Zero Degrees of Separation by Elle Flanders. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it.
2. Palestinians around Hebron refuse to apply for permits in these situations because in doing so, it would be some kind of acknowledgment that the land is somehow not theirs, when in fact it is. Even the settlers today did not take issue with the ownership of the land.
3. Saturday, the Sabbath.
Friday, October 24, 2008
The Tour – Part 1
My Dad had decided a long time ago he was going to come and visit us while we were in Ramallah so he added a week onto his trip of ‘The Old Country’ – that being Mennonite villages in the Ukraine – to see Israel and Palestine with us. So we planned a tour trying to basically cover off the entire country in terms of both geography and religion in a week. I think we pretty much covered everything, except the Dome of the Rock, but only because Elle was unsuccessful in convincing the security guard she was half Muslim (and half Christian). Her heart just wasn’t in it.
So we started in Tel Aviv. I first had some trouble convincing Dad to leave the apartment not because he had jet lag, but because he wanted to fix a few things up. “Look Tam, if I just had a caulking gun I could at least make sure the shower curtain doesn’t fall down anymore”. We walked all day, looking for sandals in the market, introducing falafel to him for lunch and ending up in Jaffa. Old Jaffa felt a bit sad, a beautiful Arab city with apparently the oldest port in the world, which now felt a bit like Harbourfront Centre in Toronto (minus the beautiful stone, architecture and ancient ruins), full of touristy Israeli shops selling ‘certified’ antiques and crazy macramé.
The next day we drove to Jerusalem, and were met by our new landlords, who we liked instantly not only because they were newly minted lesbians, but because they had fresh laundry and bought us cake. They invited us for lunch, and Dad gave them the history of the Mennonites while we tried to figure out our next destination. (“Mennonite?” they asked. “Anabaptists”, Dad clarified. Blank stare.) Jerusalem was crazy busy at the time, with the beginning of Sukkot(1), and the roads and streets were both packed. So we planned to go into Ramallah the next day to check out an apartment we heard about that was available for November 1st. Ramallah was on our itinerary for Dad so we drove in the next day, but only after we spent the morning in the market, helping Yael (2) with a project she had been planning but needed a bold Hebrew speaker. Elle volunteered and asked people on the street to finish the sentence, “The end of Israel is the beginning of _________”. Thinking this question may be slightly provocative, I felt we should bring Dad along for protection; he may be 66 but he is quite fit. As it turned out, nobody was really offended by this question, but many were more baffled at the notion of an end to Israel, which just didn’t seem plausible. One ultra-orthodox guy seemed quite okay with the concept though, because it meant the coming of the Messiah.
Waved through the checkpoint, we made a stop first at the Moqata, Arafat's tomb, and drove to Ramallah to pick up Reem, a friend of Yael’s, who had arranged the apartment viewing. As we waited for her in her living room, we watched an Arabic version of “The Biggest Loser” which apparently was produced out of Dubai. Funny how through the tears, music and supersize graphics broadcasting their weight loss, we were able to understand everything perfectly. In fact, we had to pull ourselves away from the TV once it was time to go. The apartment was in a great area, was a great price and only needs a bit of “freshening-up” (and is a bit dark…) but it has fig trees in the yard so I was sold and convinced Elle it “didn’t need much work at all”. We were then invited in for our first of many cups of tea for the day by Huda, the landlady, and when an elderly Palestinian woman invites you for tea, you don’t say no! As we found out, Huda is one of Ramallah’s 1500 original residents, the other approx. 175,000(3) being Palestinians from other villages. All of Huda’s kids are in the US.
Our next cup of tea was at Sonia’s, another friend of Yael’s who is a tough, wonderful woman we hope to get know better once we are living in Ramallah. She had been thrown in jail in her youth for her anti-Israel activities and told us how they showed them holocaust films in jail. It was interesting though, because unlike Ibrahim, another young activist we met, who had lots to say about the Occupation, Sonia used one simple word: It is ‘unfair’—‘unfair that my son cannot be a regular scout and camp outdoors, too dangerous, unfair that we cannot move around’. Ibrahim was a young guy who came hobbling into the restaurant on crutches. He claimed he had been injured 81 times as a peaceful resister in the village of Na’alin, and wouldn’t stop until the Occupation was over. He and Neta(4) got into a passionate argument (in Arabic) on the finer points of what effective resistance was, but quite honestly, despite the translation, it was beyond me. I was simultaneously drawn to his passion, admired his commitment yet felt somehow unsure of this guy who seemed to wear his injuries like badges. It felt confused. I suddenly understoof our “vacation" was about to end. I looked over at my Dad smoking perhaps too much narghila. We still had to finish our tour.
Footnotes
1. Sukkot – Jewish festival of ‘booths’ (aka The Feast of Tabernacles—not to be confused with Quebecois ‘tabernac!’). It involves building a ‘Sukkah’ in which you have your meals for the week. Sukkot and various other holidays all just finished on the 22nd.
2. b.h yael – friend of elle’s, and mine who happened to be in Jerusalem at this time.
3. Huda told us the population of Ramallah was approx. 180,000 but I can’t seem to find any real statistics.
4. Neta Golan – friend of ours who we have visited in Ramallah before. She is an Israeli activist who lives with her Palestinian husband and two children.
So we started in Tel Aviv. I first had some trouble convincing Dad to leave the apartment not because he had jet lag, but because he wanted to fix a few things up. “Look Tam, if I just had a caulking gun I could at least make sure the shower curtain doesn’t fall down anymore”. We walked all day, looking for sandals in the market, introducing falafel to him for lunch and ending up in Jaffa. Old Jaffa felt a bit sad, a beautiful Arab city with apparently the oldest port in the world, which now felt a bit like Harbourfront Centre in Toronto (minus the beautiful stone, architecture and ancient ruins), full of touristy Israeli shops selling ‘certified’ antiques and crazy macramé.
The next day we drove to Jerusalem, and were met by our new landlords, who we liked instantly not only because they were newly minted lesbians, but because they had fresh laundry and bought us cake. They invited us for lunch, and Dad gave them the history of the Mennonites while we tried to figure out our next destination. (“Mennonite?” they asked. “Anabaptists”, Dad clarified. Blank stare.) Jerusalem was crazy busy at the time, with the beginning of Sukkot(1), and the roads and streets were both packed. So we planned to go into Ramallah the next day to check out an apartment we heard about that was available for November 1st. Ramallah was on our itinerary for Dad so we drove in the next day, but only after we spent the morning in the market, helping Yael (2) with a project she had been planning but needed a bold Hebrew speaker. Elle volunteered and asked people on the street to finish the sentence, “The end of Israel is the beginning of _________”. Thinking this question may be slightly provocative, I felt we should bring Dad along for protection; he may be 66 but he is quite fit. As it turned out, nobody was really offended by this question, but many were more baffled at the notion of an end to Israel, which just didn’t seem plausible. One ultra-orthodox guy seemed quite okay with the concept though, because it meant the coming of the Messiah.
Waved through the checkpoint, we made a stop first at the Moqata, Arafat's tomb, and drove to Ramallah to pick up Reem, a friend of Yael’s, who had arranged the apartment viewing. As we waited for her in her living room, we watched an Arabic version of “The Biggest Loser” which apparently was produced out of Dubai. Funny how through the tears, music and supersize graphics broadcasting their weight loss, we were able to understand everything perfectly. In fact, we had to pull ourselves away from the TV once it was time to go. The apartment was in a great area, was a great price and only needs a bit of “freshening-up” (and is a bit dark…) but it has fig trees in the yard so I was sold and convinced Elle it “didn’t need much work at all”. We were then invited in for our first of many cups of tea for the day by Huda, the landlady, and when an elderly Palestinian woman invites you for tea, you don’t say no! As we found out, Huda is one of Ramallah’s 1500 original residents, the other approx. 175,000(3) being Palestinians from other villages. All of Huda’s kids are in the US.
Our next cup of tea was at Sonia’s, another friend of Yael’s who is a tough, wonderful woman we hope to get know better once we are living in Ramallah. She had been thrown in jail in her youth for her anti-Israel activities and told us how they showed them holocaust films in jail. It was interesting though, because unlike Ibrahim, another young activist we met, who had lots to say about the Occupation, Sonia used one simple word: It is ‘unfair’—‘unfair that my son cannot be a regular scout and camp outdoors, too dangerous, unfair that we cannot move around’. Ibrahim was a young guy who came hobbling into the restaurant on crutches. He claimed he had been injured 81 times as a peaceful resister in the village of Na’alin, and wouldn’t stop until the Occupation was over. He and Neta(4) got into a passionate argument (in Arabic) on the finer points of what effective resistance was, but quite honestly, despite the translation, it was beyond me. I was simultaneously drawn to his passion, admired his commitment yet felt somehow unsure of this guy who seemed to wear his injuries like badges. It felt confused. I suddenly understoof our “vacation" was about to end. I looked over at my Dad smoking perhaps too much narghila. We still had to finish our tour.
Footnotes
1. Sukkot – Jewish festival of ‘booths’ (aka The Feast of Tabernacles—not to be confused with Quebecois ‘tabernac!’). It involves building a ‘Sukkah’ in which you have your meals for the week. Sukkot and various other holidays all just finished on the 22nd.
2. b.h yael – friend of elle’s, and mine who happened to be in Jerusalem at this time.
3. Huda told us the population of Ramallah was approx. 180,000 but I can’t seem to find any real statistics.
4. Neta Golan – friend of ours who we have visited in Ramallah before. She is an Israeli activist who lives with her Palestinian husband and two children.
Tel Aviv: the bad luck, sticky streets and the yelling
We started off continuing a string of bad luck which really began before we left. “Have we done the right thing?” we asked ourselves as the seemingly hostile crew of movers mashed our stuff into the storage locker, intent on placing 50 lb. boxes of books on top of anything marked ‘fragile’. Maybe we were overly sensitive, but we had just said goodbye to the pets and were feeling a bit vulnerable. I didn’t really make too much of it but after the car broke down on the way to Montreal (having paid $3000 to service it before we left), being nearly struck by a falling tree branch in Ottawa on a ‘nature walk’ and getting charged another $250 by Continental for extra bags (we did have a lot, but it was the first day of Rosh Hashana so the plane was empty!) it started to seem like we were maybe being given some kind of sign—a sign like this was a stupid idea.
I had been really looking forward to Tel Aviv. We were there last March and had a great time with Elle’s friends, who were now my friends, hanging out at cafes and strolling along the tree-lined boulevards. Tel Aviv is called ‘the bubble’ as it is geographically removed from the ever-present political issues existing everywhere else in Israel, as well as largely secular, as compared to Jerusalem. It was to be our vacation before we got serious about our work. I imagined our flat which we had rented through a friend, in one of those beautiful light-filled Bauhaus buildings with a groovy curved balcony. Unfortunately, the only thing that matched my fantasy was the part about the building being built in the Bauhaus era. I think Dad summed it up best when he said that he had seen Soviet era apartments in the Ukraine that beat this dump. We could have lived with the student-like amenities and the musty smell, and even the woman next door who yelled at when we ate breakfast on the balcony (the only place we could see what we were eating), but when Eli the super came to fix the plumbing and left us with a kitchen flooded with a black puddle, no more hot water (an issue described as a ‘Pandora’s box’—‘impossible to fix’ he explained as he asked if we had a cigarette) and the cupboards ripped out. It seemed things had reached an all time low. You see, there were a few other things which had brought us to this point, the point where we almost turned around and headed home, even though we have no home to go to. I won’t get into all of it (losing a cellphone, being charged by UPS another $1200 in VAT taxes to bring in the video camera) but there was the incident the very first day we arrived, where we found ourselves held captive by a hotelier (perhaps a slightly loft title for a man who lived on a hobby farm and rented out a Bavarian style cabin…of sorts) who demanded an additional 400 shekels from us before he moved his car so we could actually leave (we actually ended up at the police station where we met a very nice policeman who told us we were the first married lesbian couple he had ever met and that we should have children - right away).
There was a lot of yelling during these weeks. I’m not great at yelling, but Elle is well-practiced and seemed to confront Israel the way it was confronting us. It was only after we ended up squealing out of a parking lot after Elle gave some bad driver the finger that we realized things needed to change.
So we calmed down and tried to stop feeling sorry for ourselves. We went to the beach, made fruit salads with guava, persimmons and pomegranates and sat around for hours in cafes with Dorit, drinking coffee and giving her unhelpful relationship advice. We even had a beautiful day on Yom Kippur walking down the streets without any cars. It’s actually an amazing feeling, to have a city literally shut down for a day. Of course we heard the next day that Akko had erupted in flames because a Palestinian man had driven to pick up his daughter and ended up being pelted with rocks for his religious insensitivity. Yet for us, in Tel Aviv, where we didn’t read the paper and played backgammon that day, something felt like it shifted. And for that reason, I have attached photos of some nice things we found in Tel Aviv - see sidebar.
Any way, things have turned around since then. My Dad came to visit and we moved to Jerusalem for the last part of October to tour and find our apartment in Ramallah. I had zero expectations of our Jerusalem rental so when we walked in to our clean, quiet, newly renovated apartment with freshly baked goods on the table, I decided that things were looking up.
I had been really looking forward to Tel Aviv. We were there last March and had a great time with Elle’s friends, who were now my friends, hanging out at cafes and strolling along the tree-lined boulevards. Tel Aviv is called ‘the bubble’ as it is geographically removed from the ever-present political issues existing everywhere else in Israel, as well as largely secular, as compared to Jerusalem. It was to be our vacation before we got serious about our work. I imagined our flat which we had rented through a friend, in one of those beautiful light-filled Bauhaus buildings with a groovy curved balcony. Unfortunately, the only thing that matched my fantasy was the part about the building being built in the Bauhaus era. I think Dad summed it up best when he said that he had seen Soviet era apartments in the Ukraine that beat this dump. We could have lived with the student-like amenities and the musty smell, and even the woman next door who yelled at when we ate breakfast on the balcony (the only place we could see what we were eating), but when Eli the super came to fix the plumbing and left us with a kitchen flooded with a black puddle, no more hot water (an issue described as a ‘Pandora’s box’—‘impossible to fix’ he explained as he asked if we had a cigarette) and the cupboards ripped out. It seemed things had reached an all time low. You see, there were a few other things which had brought us to this point, the point where we almost turned around and headed home, even though we have no home to go to. I won’t get into all of it (losing a cellphone, being charged by UPS another $1200 in VAT taxes to bring in the video camera) but there was the incident the very first day we arrived, where we found ourselves held captive by a hotelier (perhaps a slightly loft title for a man who lived on a hobby farm and rented out a Bavarian style cabin…of sorts) who demanded an additional 400 shekels from us before he moved his car so we could actually leave (we actually ended up at the police station where we met a very nice policeman who told us we were the first married lesbian couple he had ever met and that we should have children - right away).
There was a lot of yelling during these weeks. I’m not great at yelling, but Elle is well-practiced and seemed to confront Israel the way it was confronting us. It was only after we ended up squealing out of a parking lot after Elle gave some bad driver the finger that we realized things needed to change.
So we calmed down and tried to stop feeling sorry for ourselves. We went to the beach, made fruit salads with guava, persimmons and pomegranates and sat around for hours in cafes with Dorit, drinking coffee and giving her unhelpful relationship advice. We even had a beautiful day on Yom Kippur walking down the streets without any cars. It’s actually an amazing feeling, to have a city literally shut down for a day. Of course we heard the next day that Akko had erupted in flames because a Palestinian man had driven to pick up his daughter and ended up being pelted with rocks for his religious insensitivity. Yet for us, in Tel Aviv, where we didn’t read the paper and played backgammon that day, something felt like it shifted. And for that reason, I have attached photos of some nice things we found in Tel Aviv - see sidebar.
Any way, things have turned around since then. My Dad came to visit and we moved to Jerusalem for the last part of October to tour and find our apartment in Ramallah. I had zero expectations of our Jerusalem rental so when we walked in to our clean, quiet, newly renovated apartment with freshly baked goods on the table, I decided that things were looking up.
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