Passage To India

A very merry un-un-birthday to Shalin, Mr. Luther, myself and many others who share this birthday. Phases Crossed is back with its longest installment ever, after observing two days of radio silence, for a special birthday edition.

I have trouble with dates, as some of you know, and my birthday kind of snuck up on me. Sometimes it's hard to remember how old I am; usually there's an off by one error. Although fully prepared, another event that surprised me is my flight from the land of milk & honey to the land of chai & chutney. Israel to India, tomorrow, in search of warmer weather, among other things. Dan & Sarah have checked out the Samosas in Goa for us, and assure Yotam & me that they are of the highest quality. I'm arranging to import several thousand of them to Tel-Aviv, where they will be enjoyed in a large festival.

I originally intended to title this blog Passage to India, but that turned out to be someone else's travel blog about backpacking India. So, in the way that those who search for unique domain names search, I tried every variation of the title, only to find that each one had already been though of, and populated with chronicles of sub-continental adventure. So it goes. But what, you ask, does Phases Crossed refer to? As should be clear to anyone with the world's information at their fingertips (a.k.a. Google), it is a communications term, but our exact namesake will remain a mystery for now.

I love Walt Whitman's poem Passage to India, and believe it is an absolute pre-requisite for the readers of this blog. Otherwise you might drown in what is sure to become endless and senseless sea of literary references, similes, and circumlocutions.

At no extra charge, here's a free sample from the second verse:

Passage to India!
Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann'd, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross'd, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.

A worship new I sing,
You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,
You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours,
You, not for trade or transportation only,
But in God's name, and for thy sake O soul.

full poem...

But we're getting ahead of ourselves... We haven't left Israel yet, and our embedded correspondents still have much to report. First, some narrative is required to connect our readers with our adventurers' present locations. Our fellowship has been officially, and tearfully, disbanded. Nadav & Anya have returned to The States (which is how we refer to the US here, at least in my incomplete understanding of Hebrew), and Aaron has returned to Belgium. A note to future generations: don't attempt to pick up a rental car in Tel-Aviv during rush hour on the eve of Shabbat 30 minutes before the office closes. This is made doubly bad if you are rushing to the wrong address. Noted, and we are so much wiser. The next day, Nadav drops Aaron and me off at 5am in the airport, where I get a another rental, and drive to Haifa to stay with my aunt Rina.

In order to recover from this exhausting ordeal, and the exciting traveling that preceded it, Rina (my aunt) and I spend the next two days eating, napping, and feeding stray & adopted neighborhood cats. Actually she feeds them, I just terrorize them, as my very image is enough to strike mortal terror into the heart of any stray Israeli feline. One of my superpowers, it turns out, and very handy when trying to clear the house of cats for an outing.



This is part of the living room. My father built much of this house with his own hands, so he tells me. Note the orange tree that can be reached by sliding the window open. Best orange I've ever had in my entire life was eaten this week, in this house, from one of these trees. All other oranges are merely shadows of the pure platonic ideal orange that I consumed.

Before we left the house for lunch, Rina and I cleared the house of cats. I surprised one cat on this couch, and he attempted, in his panic to flee me, to leap through the closed window pictured above, and persisted, like a bird trying to fly through glass, to leap three or four feet in the air, his paws scrambling all over the glass, to get outside. He mewed and jumped and jumped and mewed, and I backed off, giving him enough room to make an escape out of the room. It's a strange superpower to have, this effect on these cats, and I will make it my lifelong goal to use it for good and not evil.



Here is Rina feeding some cats, and the two of us on a beach in Haifa, during a rare outing. Paparazzi are everywhere, and it is most unusual that someone caught us unawares in this act.

After spending a couple days with Rina, I head back to Jerusalem to see some family I missed earlier in my busy travels. Israel is a small country, and bouncing between Tel-Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem is a matter of hours. I meet my effervescent great-aunt Dina, who takes me to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial on Mt. Herzl.



This is a really beautiful memorial/museum, and it was redone in the last few years, so while I had been here before, I had not seen the new museum. The museum stresses not just the magnitude of death that occurred, but also the life that was wiped out, in a way that stresses the unique lives of the individuals who perished and endured it. Video testimonials by survivors, art & poetry by victims, and artifacts from pre-WWII Jewish life in Europe create a very unique experience. We spent two and a half hours there, only to be kicked out because they were closing.

The architecture of the building is also very interesting. The entire museum is structured as a long triangular tunnel that slowly rises onto the space pictured above. The entire time, you are moving towards the light, only to have your path blocked repeatedly by ruptures that send you zigzagging through the exhibits that chronicle the journey of European Jewry through WWII. At the start is an incredible video montage made from photographs and video images of pre-WWII European Jewish life, so you begin to feel, in a macro sort of way, the immensity of what was lost. The Nazis, after all, basically succeeded in destroying Jewish life in Europe.

One room, where the Warsaw Ghetto is discussed, has train tracks and bricks from the original ghetto in the floor, lampposts overhead, and speakers playing these uncomfortable sounds of crowds and noise overhead. Without quite realizing how you are being worked upon, or what this space represents, you find yourself hurrying into and out of this main space into side rooms, where you get the intimate, painful, details of what was happening there. Architecturally, what the space is doing to you, is making you feel very uneasy in the main space, so you rush from room to room, which makes you feel weak and vulnerable. Another example of their exhibit design is a spot where survivors tell, through video, of surviving a mass murder in a big pit, where people were lined up, shot, and pushed in. The video screens face upward, forcing you to come really close to the screens to see the people telling their story. As you come close, you see this big concrete hole behind the screens, so you are forced to stand next to this dark pit in order to hear its story.

On with life. Dina and I head over to her brother's apartment in Jerusalem (my great-uncle), where we spend some time with some of his kids & grandkids. Here are the twins Ron & Ora, the aforementioned grandkids.



Too bad humans aren't eligible for Cute Overload. (How can it be that a mouse overstimulates the triggers we have for baby cuteness more than an actual baby?)

Afterwards, Dina takes Imri, her son, and me out for Turkish food in honor of my birthday. Next to us, though not present at the meal in physical form, is my grand-grand-father, Dina's father, who made aliyah to Israel with his 2nd family (Dina's).



I crash at Devora's, and continue to Tel-Aviv the next day, to meet Itzik. Afterwards, I go for a walk along the beach. Tel-Aviv is a really hip city. Nadav says Tel-Aviv : Los Angeles :: Haifa : San Francisco, but I'm not entirely sure I agree. Some streets of Tel-Aviv feel like the best of both San Francisco's cute shops and architecture, plus the urban-rural neighborhood quality Berkeley can have. In any case, I walk along the sunny beach, wearing a hat and coat (it's cold!), and watch the seagulls, sand, and water. It felt especially good because the cafe was playing this album of languid, trip-hop-like, jazzy, cover of all of my favorite Pink Floyd songs.



Boy, it sure is nice to just write without worrying about style, due dates, topics, coherency, grammar, spelling, facts, proof-reading, prior work, excess flowery language, or anything, really. And why not? As long as we don't do permanent harm to anyone's personae, future career, friendships, or marriage, it's all good.

25 Horses

We decide to visit Jerusalem the same day Mr. Bush does; we suspect a leak somewhere in our party. Apparently, this is a terrible idea, as the entire city has had its bus lines rearranged, streets closed, buildings moved, and the like. So, we bus in instead of driving. This turns out to not be such a stupid idea, as the city is pretty quiet -- nobody goes out for fear of getting stuck in traffic, and we have no problem getting around. Here is Anya and Nadav on the bus.



Speaking of horses, Nadav throws out a problem from the Microsoft/Google computational interview canon. More interesting than the problem, perhaps, is the ensuing joke: A physicist, lawyer, designer, and mathematician get on a bus to Jerusalem and discuss a math riddle. No rabbis or priests here. Luckily, we're all still friends. We discuss the following problem: You have 25 horses, and each runs at a constant speed, but each horse can have a unique speed. So, these horses never get tired or anything. You can't know the absolute speed of the horses, but you can race up to 5 horses at a time, and learn their relative speeds. So, given 25 of these horses, what's the minimum number of races you need in order to find the 5 fastest horses, ranked in order of speed? Email me if you think you have the answer.

Our cast today is the regulars, Nadav, Anya, Aaron, and Chaim. Later in the program we'll have a cameo appearance by Devora and David, who we've already met, plus Michelle, whom we haven't. Various strangers will wander into and out of our photographs as well, but we can't be expected to know them all by name.

On our way to meet David for a tour of the Western Wall Tunnels, we walk by Ben-Yehuda Street, and find a larger than normal number of soldiers guarding. Some of them are braiding each other's hair (look closely at the below picture). I ask permission to snap a photo, and they agree and smile, commenting that I am chamud (cute). Well, we all are, I guess.



The western wall tunnel tour is really really cool. As with most larger than life phenomena, the model (below) is often cooler than the real thing, which is too big to comprehend. The model is huge and mechanically transforms to reveal various moments in time. It's truly cool.



Before I explain what we're looking at, some background is in order. The twisty roads and traffic of Jerusalem, the fighting, the political stuff -- it's all a surface manifestation of these intersecting stories and impacted architecture that spans the course of thousands of years.



I have this profoundly obvious realization as we exit into the Muslim quarter, and find ourselves in front of an ancient, bone white, church. Of course, someone else's tour stops at this church, and it's a really important point on their journey, but for us, it's just one of a thousand patches on a quilt that compose our Jerusalem's background, and we think nothing of them. They are simply color, texture, and space. These patches, however, are tiny sidelong glimpses into other worlds, and other people's stories.



People have been building on top of, inside of, and between one another here for thousands of years. The tunnel tour takes us underneath the Muslim quarter, and travels an extensive buried length of the Western Wall, letting us see just how huge and expansive the temple mount was. It also comes as close as possible to the ancient Jewish Temple's most holy location on the temple mount, which is, naturally, underneath an important Muslim site. Silly of the Jews to build something so important underneath someone else's really important something.



Next, we go to this wacky interpretive art Jewish history experience thing. The glass sculpture below is part of it. It's a veritable aural womb we enter, very high tech, full of interesting glass art, DMX lighting, and lots of narration by the guy who must do all the movie trailers. By the end, we understand why he just does trailers, and not full length film narration, and have a similar feeling about the entire installation. It's like a really good soup made into a 12 course meal.



We complete our party by meeting Michelle and Devora. We now have a sizable Berkeley-Jerusalem contingent, and we raid several respectable locations, such as a cafe, restaurant, and bar.



The next morning, Nadav, Aaron, and I go to Nadav's favorite Tel-Aviv breakfast place. We meet a crazy man waving a glass of coke from a neighboring restaurant, who demands we bring him ice from the one we're waiting in a queue for. He goes ballistic when we explain that we won't do that. Luckily, I don't understand enough Hebrew to comprehend the depth of his anger and insanity.



I believe that this is some kind of hybrid French-Israeli place, and it totally kills La Note in Berkeley. We can't locate the impressionistic landscapes on the wall anywhere in Israel. Plus it has that certain jen a se qua. The food and place is still totally Israeli. This meal changes our lives a little bit for the better, and we get philosophical.



First, Nadav's theory on Israeli fruits and vegetables. People eat a lot of them here, and they are so fresh and good, it's hard to explain. Nadav thinks that this is due to the size of Israel -- it's so tiny, that all produce is basically local and super fresh. The worst case food transportation scenario is probably the best case in a typical American city. If America had such good tomatoes, cucumbers, and more, people might actually like to eat them.

My entire life my father, who grew up in Israel, called sour cream shamenet. He loves it. The white dollop on our plates is in fact this magical substance, seasoned with Za'atar. It doesn't taste like sour cream, since it's not bitter, but it's the closest approximation one can get in America. Shamenet tastes like true love, and it literally translates to something like "fatty". The cottage cheese available here, also, is just one of many life changing dairy products available for purchase in any holy land corner store. After eating the real shamenet, I feel like I understand my father more.

This brings us to our last food related point. The portions here are insane. If you thought American was bad, corporate America putting piles of corn derived products in front of us to maximize their revenue, owing to minimal marginal costs, Israel will blow your mind. Nadav calls Israeli food portions the post-Holocaust sized meal. Nadav thinks it's this multi-generational neurosis that creates these meals. Throw in some Jewish parents, and you have culinary absurdity. We order two meals for the three of us, and can't finish it. And we were terribly hungry. The time before, we order one meal for the three of us, and it's about right.

Oh yes, careful readers have found numerous factual errors relating to dates, locations, and even, at times, identities. As a consequence, our entire fact checking department has been let go. We apologize for the inconvenience. As for the future, we make no guarantees as to the correctness of any information contained in this blog.

Northwest Passage

Salaam and good evening, morning, or X, where X = time of day at your geographic locale! In our marvel filled world of fast chattering devices, one can never be certain.



This issue of Phases Crossed takes us to northern Israel. Our trip begins in Haifa, where we'll return in a week for more activities. Here is a photograph of the B'hai gardens in Haifa. Nice, no?

A word on pacing. This trip, so far, has been action packed rapid fire never a dull moment for anybody anyhow anywhere. It's not about the email, though. It's about Aaron. This trip is a go-get-em compressed top hits of the past three thousand years Israel tour, and soon that comes to an end, as we leave the comfort of Nadav's parents' Tel-Aviv apartment (Thanks Ora & Yoram! xoxo!), Anya and Nadav return to the states, and Aaron, who has never seen any of Israel, heads back to Belgium to continue his groundbreaking legal research on the Belgian deep frying system, and its effect on North American culinary attitudes, and tort reform.

What I'm trying to say here, but having trouble, is that this trip will soon slow down to a more leisurely, less type A sort of experience soon. Which is good news for the company of writers who are editing, writing, and formulating the text of this publication. They're about to go on strike.



Here we are posing for an Ars Electronique publicity photo for the fall 2008 SEC filing, travel swimsuit edition. This is the Tiberias bus depot, a necessary logistical stop on our tour north. As the guidebooks might say: fans of rustic linens, and students of the algebra of desire look no further -- this city has it all, just bring your own soap and a desire for adventure. Feels like Nevada to me. Devora, our travel buddy and incorrigable tour guide, buses in from Jerusalem and meets Aaron, Nadav, and myself in the city, where we have spent the night in anticipation of a full day of travel into barren contested territories and more.



This is a really interesting graveyard on the shore of the Kinneret, or The Sea of Galilee, where 1/3 of Israel's water comes from. The lake is an important place, and it sits under the Golan heights, which we'll get to later. This area is the site of some of Israel's first Kibbutzes. This graveyard is where many early settlers to Israel from Russia and Eastern Europe are buried. They came early in the 20th century, most of them very young and idealistic.

There were all kinds of problems and wackiness like Malaria we won't get into. Naomi Shemer, who wrote Jerusalem of Gold, is buried here, along with lots of other interesting people and interesting stories. One interesting story Devora told us, is that there was a small splinter group of devil worshippers here that were booted out of the main camp of Zionists, who found them a bit too weird for their taste. Recently, a really unusual buried grave was found, from the early 20th century, and it looks really really devilish and punk rock. Creepy. Apparently, the guy was one of these outcasts, and killed himself (which is not Kosher, but the graveyard technically isn't). One historian thinks he was sacrificed to the devil. You can see and read more here. Creep-tastic.



This is the Kinneret, which has a dangerously low water level right now. Lots of shells abound, but most Jews don't go for that kind of fish.



Next, we drive up into the Golan (below), which Israel captured from Syria in 1967. It's hard to describe how high this high ground is. It just goes straight up from the eastern shore of the Kinneret, and over into Syria. It's cold, and we see very little human stuff, except a few farms, some military installations, and an abandoned Mosque.



We go up to what is probably one of the highest points, to an old military bunker overlooking Syria. There's a delightfully named coffee shop here, and not much else. In Hebrew Annan is cloud, so the name of the shop, on the one hand, is "Cloud Coffee," which is apt. It's also a reference to Kofi Annan, a former secretary general of the UN.



Bunkers are cool, and you can kind of get a sense of how high up we are, and the stuff below is actually quite high as well.



I was the last one to leave, I think, and I had to emphasize that this stuff (military fortifications) is really cool for boys. Click through for more pictures.



Here is our entire expedition team at this point:



No bunker would be complete with a maze of tunnels and rooms below ground. Fa. Above ground trenches are so world war one. Dahling, you wouldn't want to be caught dead in one.



We discuss the history of the 1967 war in a museum inside the bunker, and Devora makes the point that one doesn't really win a war. It's people dying and territory moving around from a country to the next, but to speak of winning and losing is actually a bit weird. Strip away the national aspects, and it's just disaster accounting.

Leaving the Golan Heights, we go to an excellent restaurant called Dag on the Dan, and meet this guy. Fowl of all kind abound.



We go to the old Jewish mystical city Tsfat, and walk around. We find a Cafe Baghdad. There's also one in San Francisco.



Nadav and I bet one another 10 dollars that we will go to Baghdad in our lifetime. I forget who bets which way. So concludes our tour. This was, in fact, one of the longest days of the trip, and we even go to bed after 10pm, incredibly. Night night.

Negev my Negev

Yo, what's up? For this leg of our trip we be taken it south, to the Negev desert, where we be sporting sunglasses and funny hats. The word Negev could use verbification in my opinion. Where is Negevize, Negevate, for example? The Negev is where it's at, the hotness, the coldness, the dryness. There be dead seas, mountains, craters that aren't craters, and food that make you the happiest eaters alive. We hope you enjoy. The actors this time around are Nadav, Aaron, Chaim, and our ever-energetic tour guide Devora. Notably absent is Anya, who is spending time in Russian with her relatives.



All travelers need food, and in our case we need Jachnun. We stop at a family restaurant in a small village off the highway for this traditional Yemenite dish. Shunning the more modern Israeli cafe food, we follow a series of hand written signs for many kilometers, and eat the most delicious meal ever prepared for any king, ceo, or traveler. It is, as I make sure everyone understands, the happiest day of my life.



This is the cutest restaurant in the world. Click through for more pictures of what it looks like, and the happy eaters contained.



We go next to Mitzpe Ramon, where we crash at Nadav's aunt's house. Here are our intrepid explorers daring the mild desert climate for a photograph at an important geological site. A site of geopolitical geological importance. That's right, here we are at the Ramon Crater. As should be obvious to any skilled observer of tourist photographs, it's not a crater at all, it's a maktesh, or an erosion cirque. The thing is so big you wouldn't even know you were in it, since it just kind of goes off the horizon in multiple directions.



There's all this cool desert art sculpture near Mitzpe. It's like burning man, but without the burning, the man, or the people. Just the desert and the art. Aaron and Nadav are pictured here doing their part in the fight against gravity.



Not far away is Ben-Gurion's grave, the first prime minister of Israel. The architecture is interesting, and it overlooks a magnificent desert vista. It feels like you are being swept by a stream down into this location, and everything is the height of a man, making you feel neither small or large. Ben-Gurion has some interesting history with the Negev you can read about if you follow the link.



We drive from Mitzpe to the Dead Sea. I share the driving. Incredible how quickly my inner Israeli driver shows himself. We drop off Devora for a job interview, and say goodbye to her for now.



Our room in the field school in En Gedi.



An important part of any Israel trip is hiking up Masada, where a bunch of Israelites killed themselves around 66 BC. They called themselves Zealots, and defended a desert fortress built on a mountain top from the Romans for a siege which lasted many months. It is from them that we get the words zealot and zeal. Zeal is truly a terrific word!



I run into a few of these animals on the way up. One of them, with big horns, waits in my path. Thinking back to a monkey troop Yotam and I once encountered in Malaysia, I decide it's best to not get in its way. I wait a while, then make some noise, he runs off, and nobody is gored. Pictured above is one of the fairer sex.



The American team, represented by Nadav, Aaron, and Chaim (above) reaches the top of Masada first, before sunrise. A formative experience in Chaim's earlier years creates a deep need to get up at 4am and be the first to the top on this day. A team of Russian climbers poses a slight challenge, but is easily overcome when they take a wrong turn.



Here is the world's earliest known photograph. It was uncovered in the Dead Sea Negatives, and is reproduced here for all the world to see. In it, you can clearly see a Roman siege tower which was rolled up an earthen ramp (up the side of a tall mountain), attacking the fortress. The next day, the Romans knock, but nobody answers. Everyone here is dead via a complicated form of suicide, except a few people who tell the story. Two women of above average intelligence, according to Josephus Flavius, and some children.



Yours truly in the hot bath room. I can never say no to a sauna. A set of baths up here? Yes, the fortress is huge, and my small camera can barely suggest how massive this mountain is. There are multiple palaces up here, baths, a large set of water cisterns. Next door is the frigidarium, but this picture was taken in the hotatorium.



We go next to En Gedi, an oasis in the middle of this desert. It's hard to believe that all you can see in every direction is totally and completely dry, and yet you have these waterfalls and lush growth. Complete with animatronic looking mammals. We figure they just move slow, since they are more like lizards in habitat.



We don some sun screen in the parking lot, much to the delight of some college age tourists, and show some skin. The water is cold, and it's not a particularly hot day. But, this is a fashion magazine, after all, and we can't bare to disappoint our readers.



I climb over for a photo op with the waterfall, but the climbing photos are totally cooler than the product.



Here are the desert gentlemen, in a hot & salty picture, by request, at the world famous Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is very salty, and actually has bacteria living in it, so it isn't totally dead. It's so salty you float with no effort. You can stand in the water and just bob there. On your back. On your front. In a box. With a fish, on a dish, with a mouse. It's fun you see, you should try it sometime, and be like us & me!

Ah Jerusalem!

International travel does strange things to time, and jet lag is just one type of time distortion possible. There is also the experience-photograph-upload-blog time delay phenomena. For example, yesterday Nadav, Aaron, and I woke at 4am to hike up Masada, an ancient desert fortress, to watch the sunrise. But today I will write about the events of Jan 3. An upcoming edition will chronicle everything between then and that.



Careful readers will remember I landed in Tel Aviv on Jan 3 at 3am. Anya and Nadav, pictured above in all their awesome cuteness, picked me up at the airport. Earlier that day they picked up Aaron, and they had only arrived a day earlier. We returned home to sleep for a few hours, to comfort our circadian rhythms, since they were all rattling from stress and confusion, and we had a long day ahead of us.

First order of business was an awesome Israeli breakfast, not pictured above or below. Cucumbers here are a force to be reckoned with. Their crispness knows no bounds, and I now understand what it is that Nadav is always trying to approximate back in the bay area. Brokers and farmers take note: Nadav is willing to trade various parts of his body for such cucumbers in the united states.



Today was Devora's tour of Jerusalem. First, we had to find Devora's place, which turned out to be quite hard. Anya, Nadav's co-pilot and navigator, despite numerous hardships, managed to get us there. It took a while, and that night she literally had nightmares about navigating Jerusalem, and rebuilding the city on a grid.

Jerusalem, you see, just like San Francisco, is built on this absurdly hilly terrain. SF is a grid, making it pretty navigable, but the roads often take these crazy slopes, like Lombard. In Jerusalem the roads follow the contours of the topography, making them vertically less comical, but navigationally absurd. It's like a city planner sat down with a spirograph, a french curve, and a six pack. Throw in some construction and traffic, and you have all the makings of a blockbuster traffic thriller. Voila!



Devora, true to form, had a scholarly and entertaining tour for us on the theme of wall building in Jerusalem. Pictured above and below is the simple barrier that blocks some gunfire angles from an Arab part of town into Gilo, which is a Jewish development across the 1948 cease fire lines. During the last Intifada, there was gunfire directed at the houses here, and the government dropped these blocks into place to protect the residents.



It's interesting that to make it less ugly, the people who live in Gilo painted a mural of what is on the other side. The picture, of course, is not as pretty as what was originally there, but it was a lot friendlier too, I suppose.



Devora then pointed out that the ancient walls of Jerusalem were also built as a security measure, just like the separation barrier pictured above that intends (and seems to) block suicide bombers from entering Israel from the West Bank. So, walls and security is an old obsession. I think that membranes, walls, and dividers of all kinds is fundamental to the shape of the universe and all living things. This wall is not nearly as gentle to the landscape as the ancient walls of Jerusalem, or even the simple blocks that protected Gilo. It's pretty ugly, but seems to get the job done.



Here is an open air market in Jerusalem. Well, I thought the Berkeley Bowl was the best grocery store in the world, with the Lonely Planet backing me up, but there's simply no contest.



Here are some delicious borekas, food of champions. Devora took us, along with David (pictured below), to an awesome Iraqi Jewish restaurant in the market. There wasn't much veggie fare, but it was awesome. Who would have thought that matza ball soup, for example, could be improved upon? Put meat inside, and you have Jewish dumplings.



This is the first Jewish settlement outside of the old city. Nobody lived outside the old city until the last hundred some years, it turns out, and the Jews were particularly reluctant to leave the familiar, comfortable, and secure enclave inside. Old habits die hard.



Next, we said goodbye to Devora and David, and headed towards the old city. Behind Anya you can see the walls that enclose old Jerusalem.



We walked through an Arab market towards the Western Wall, but got lost. A nice Arab kid pointed out where we had gone wrong.



I can't help it, here's another picture of Nadav and Anya:



Here is the Western Wall, and, new for us, some new Israeli Army pledges doing some kind of institutional ritual. The Wall is the last remaining wall of a large support structure, on top of which was the ancient Jewish Temple that figures centrally in all kinds of Jewish belief and ritual. That Temple was last destroyed by the Romans. Now, on top of the Temple Mount, is a very old Mosque that is is very important to Muslims and the Palestinians. Nothing is simple here.



Some Jews come here to pray, and some put little notes on pieces of paper that they slide into the cracks between the stones. The Army pledge thing was new to us. Boys, about 18 years old, seemed to be getting inaugurated into the Army. There wasn't much wind, so the Israeli flag had some kind of rod in it to keep it up. Like Prozac, but for flags.

That's all for now. More pictures and adventures coming soon.