One of the perks of working in the kitchens is being able to smuggle the guards ice cream...
I've finally put up some photos (I got a reel developed, which requires a trip down and then up a small mountain - that's why it took so long) on my flickr site, so now you can all see the vegetables we cut to make dinner look pretty on the first night, what the new beis [study room--Ed] looks like, bus rides and bus stops with Yoface and Yaki, dark tunnels and rabbis' feet, amongst other assorted goodies:
I had forgotten how much I love being here. It's easy to do - I find I usually adjust fairly rapidly to where I am, be it London or Jerusalem, but sometimes when walking around the Old City I stop and look round and think "I live here", and then I end up walking off grinning to wherever it was I was going.
I'm hooked on the wildlife again. True, the cockroaches in our apartment were less than pleasant and I wasn't going to rhapsodise over them (I may be strange, but not THAT strange!), but I've been following the progress of the tiny sandy coloured geckos that run up onto the domed ceilings, but most of all I love the humming birds.
I'd seen them when I was nine, but looking back on those memories I assumed I must have been mistaken and that I'd just seen a very large bee - but no, this shabbes there were several of them all clustered round the red tubular flowers in Hodaya's (one of our new Madrichot) garden. They were beautiful. Jet black with iridescent blue and green feathers around the head and throat.
One of my favourite classes is Siyurim - we get to go around and learn the history of places, what happened there, what their significance is etc etc, and it's just like a weekly field trip. This week we left the confines of the Old City to go just beyond its walls to Ir David, the David Citadel. There are excavations there, so we looked around them, but the main attraction there are Hezkiahu's tunnels. The tunnel diverts a spring, then necessary due to the imminent attack on Jerusalem by Sancheriv [Sennacherib -ed], and was hewn out of the solid limestone from both ends, only meeting up in the middle - a crazy architectural feat. There is virtually no incline, it feels as if it's always level, but at time the walls and ceiling come in close to meet you and tell you that you should be more, well, my height [4'11"--Ed]!
It was pitch black in the tunnels, and what's more, the water from the spring still flows through them, so were were wading in the dark up to our thighs in beautifully clear water. A few of us had brought torches. Rav L was leading us, and I was directly behind him, so I followed his rapidly fading silhouette surrounded by a faint halo of light into the darkness. Halfway through, we began to sing. Songs and harmonies to them echoed down the tunnels and linked the groups that had formed, some girls going faster (myself included) and some slower (the French girls). Finally, the light at the end of the tunnel and we emerged into a shallow pool with pillar stumps in them, the water slowly flowing away through a grate into beyond.
One of my exciting buys recently has been a camera tripod. It came the day before I left, and so I hadn't really had any time to play around with it, plus I'd got it cheap off the internet so didn't know if it was up to much. It looked like it was good stuff though, so on Sunday night I thought I'd go and try it out. Talia asked me where I was rushing off to after sight seder, so I said I was going to go out onto the Ramparts with my tripod and take some long exposures.
"Wow, cool, can I come?!"
"I don't see why not"
So off we went.
"Um, Tilla, how are we going to get onto the Ramparts?"
"You just have to climb out over a drop and round the gate...you can also crawl under the gate if you want..."
I didn't want to give her any false illusions - it was only when we came to the gate that she really grasped what I'd been talking about. It's one of those metal one-way turnstile type gate/doors, with the interlocking bars on one side and a metal grid jutting out over a 20 foot drop. This really annoys me. The only way you can 'legally' get onto this part of the wall is by going round to the Jaffa Gate (dangerous at night), going through, paying a guy 16 shekels and then making your way up and around. It's the wall of the city, the entrance is in another quarter, and he doesn't own the wall! I therefore kicked off my sandals, put everything through the gate and climbed out on the grid over the drop until I was on the other side. Talia crawled underneath.
The tripod worked a treat; it's brilliant, I think it's my new toy. I'll put the photos up as soon as I get them developed, you can see how they turned out. The Old City is really very beautiful at night.
Every year the girls volunteer for various charities and organisations as a kind of 'good works' programme. Last year I was in the teacher training programme, so I didn't get to do it. This year however, is an entirely different matter. The choices for what we could do had changed drastically. I put down several choices, the first of which was working on an archaeological dig on the Mount of Olives sifting through excavated material from the Temple Mount itself. My second choice was cleaning gravestones - ok, I like graveyards - and no, not in a morbid "I like graveyards, they're dark....like my soul" kind of a way. I suppose it's because they're restful and feel abandoned most of the time, and they're very reflective places. Ah well.
So, this lunchtime I was waiting in the queue to get whatever they had decided to give the vegetarians (the day before they had decided to give us meat and tell us it was veggie - it was an accident, and they told us about it...but only after we'd eaten them, and mainly because we were suspicious as they tasted VERY real...hmmmm)
One of the madrichot comes up to me and says
"Oh, did you read the notice? I guess not, because you're standing here - we're leaving in five minutes to go to the excavations on Har HaZeitim, make yourself a sandwich and get going!"
"What?!?"
In the panic I made myself a roast potato and shredded carrot sandwich (it was interesting) and ran to the minivan with Bracha who had also only just found out that we needed to be there NOW. More girls arrived surrounded by small clouds of panic, and eventually we left.
We drove up and round to the Arab side of Jerusalem and then up to near where Hebrew University is. On a piece of empty ground they had set up canopies, and under these were the sifting trays and buckets of raw stuff to be sorted through. The archaeologist in charge gave us a brief on what was going on, what to look out for and how to identify it. The things we were sifting through had originally been dumped straight out onto a modern rubbish tip and so there was some modern dump material mixed in amongst the ancient stuff. It had come out from underneath Al Aqsa when they started to dig underneath it - they didn't want the rubble they took out, so just dumped it without sifting through anything, as they hadn't got any credible archaeologists with them.
A group of archaeology students found out about this and started to sift through the dumped material and protest, raising media awareness. The students were promptly charged with looting ancient artefacts. Typical.
We set to work.
The process was this - take a bucket of stuff. This stuff mainly consists of rocks, but you can't tell exactly what's in it. You then pour the stuff out into the sifting tray, spread it out, and blast it with the water jet in order to get the mud off. Don't spray the jet at your friend, no, DON'T...oh well, once you've done that, you can start looking through what you have. The categories to collect are ceramic, bone, metal, glass, mosaic and 'interesting rock'. Anything else is put into wheelbarrows and is carted off.
So, in my first day of the dig what did I find? My haul was:
1 ancient fluorescent plastic ruler (it must have been from the 80s at least)
2 large bone sections, probably from horse of cow, plus lots of little bits
Innumerable bits of ceramic, some ancient from small round glazed pots, large amphora type vessels, bits of oil lamp, etc etc, and my star find, a teacup handle - it was green...and yellow...and very modern, but I still had to put it in the 'finds' bucket.
7 miscellaneous metal objects, a few ancient nails
LOTS of glass, resulting in one cut finger
10 mosaic cubes - these are the most fun, you sort through all of the rubbishy looking rocks to get to these cube shaped ones that are like very large dice and which it's surprisingly easy to miss.
Nothing earth shattering, but I had so much fun, and I really like sifting through it all, it's strangely satisfying, plus the fact that it's from Temple Mount is even better.
And now, it is time to go (I took long enough getting to it!).
Thanks Judy, and Judy's daughter for that wonderful post.
It makes me long to return to Jerusalem, Israel and its wonderful people - I could just see myself walking through the Old City and thinking "Hey, I live here!"
Mental Note "Must go back in 2006"
Posted by: Huldah | September 25, 2005 at 10:53 AM
Thanks for the lovely post!
One point: the birds you mention are not hummingbirds. They're Palestine sunbirds (Nectarinia osea), and you can find out more about them here: http://www.birdingisrael.com/birdNews/inFocus/psb/.
Posted by: Rahel | October 06, 2005 at 02:14 PM