sipurim sheli

As of when I last wrote...

on Saturday, Aurora and I walked around the Old City. We went through every quarter. In the Armenian quarter we saw part of the Armenian monastery which is gorgeous. I'd like to go back. There is an Armenian museum (I think it's about the genocide) and we saw a few monks (score twenty points). Then it was off to the Muslim quarter where we wandered through the souq, which is very intense because of all the raw meat hanging on hooks in narrow, damp quarters. I could smell pickled turnips, fava beans, all kinds of mezze, lemons. Wandering over to the Christian quarter, at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre I ran into one of my Micah campers, there with her parents because her dad is a rabbi and was leading a congregational trip to Israel. Small world, really. The church is beautiful and haunted and full of conflict and shrines and pilgrims and candles. I want to go on a pilgrimage. This country makes me wonder about spirituality; what is it that makes people feel so intensely about an ideology, a dogma? I see so many people who outwardly show their religious practices with the way they dress and the way they sit on the bus fervently muttering prayers under their breath from small worn books. I watch them buy cheap modest clothes from streetside stalls and discount loaves of bread and think and think. On Sunday I went a photography exhibition of an alternative magazine, Eretz Acheret. The exhibition was called "Mashiach Lo Ba" which means "The Messiah Isn't Coming." It's a parody on all the Lubavitch Hasidic posters that say "Baruch Haba Melech HaMashiach," meaning "Welcome, the King Messiah." I started classes this week. Well...sort of. I may not even be in 2 of my classes because the school is so disorganized. All I've had so far is Hebrew. Tonight I had a really nice dinner with our family friends, the Brautbars. We went to a great classic Middle eastern restaurant with oven-fired pita and lots of babaganoush and baklava to go around. People here sure know how to eat. I love the freshness of the produce. Well, hopefully tomorrow I'll have my environmental science class and get my internship interview. More to come, probably post-Petra...