On July 4th, we walked into the souq from our B&B in a Christian guest house on the hill in the Armenian Quarter of Old Jerusalem. Our bedroom is in a stone building with 15’ ceilings, and we eat in one of the compound’s leafy courtyards, on Sunday, listening to the musicians practice for the upcoming church service. It is like a private village, sheltered from the dusty construction-ravaged, teeming street outside. Down the hill and around the corner the Middle Ages lingers in the 4 quarters of Old Jerusalem, the gateway, or gauntlet?, to the holy sites of the 3 Abrahamic religions. By now, I’ve been in a bunch of these souqs and other marketplaces around the world…but the combination of the phantasmagoria of colorful things glittering at all levels, the smells of spices, food, incense…the uneven deeply worn stones of the street…the crooked views of steep stone staircases to residential warrens up the hill… I looked at Jim and just said, “I LOVE this.”
And then the chase begins…a street-corner tour guide promotes the home where Mary (Jesus’ mom) lived and died. Jim said, “I already visited that in Turkey” (Mary’s home near Ephesus). “Oh, that’s the Ottoman Turk’s version…” Yup.
We were fighting jet lag and the cool, dusky labyrinth of the Old City ejected us out into the bright reflective limestone heat of summer at the Damascus Gate. We headed over to the New City to the modern cousin of the old souk, the blocks-long market, Makane Yehuda. The spice guy with the two foot high cones of ground coffee that he scrapes off for customers doled seasoned “salad pistachios” into my hand to taste. Yum. It made me wish for a kitchen in our convent.
Today we took a Jerusalem Reality Tour www.jerusalemtours.blogspot.com led by a young Jewish man who grew up not too far from Jerusalem. His grandfather survived the Holocaust by being shipped to Siberia. His family did not make it, and at the end of the war he met his second wife, emigrated to Israel and raised a new family. When we asked their grandson what he saw 20 years out, he posed two possibilities… are the Jews and Palestinians willing to live as equals, or will they live in two uniform societies? He believes the first possibility could be achieved, but he doesn’t see it taking that shape on the ground today.
My affluent, cosseted American bubble of a reality gets shaken up like a snow globe when I travel… especially to places where I notice stark realities of my country’s role in the world. I remember when Jim and I traveled to El Salvador in 2006, how shocked and appalled I was at the local impact of US proxy wars, and how completely surreal it felt to be a witness to that. At the end of that week-long trip I was mute for 3 days. Well, this region bears its fair share of similar scars, and we saw some of them today. And those stories are for another post…
Then in a jarring transition, we ate lunch on the lush patio of the American Colony Hotel, a special and beautiful place in E. Jerusalem. It had a strange vibe though, with the graciousness of the Palestinian wait staff in crude contrast with the unfriendliness of the guests. I’m used to catching people’s eyes and smiling, certainly as I hold the door open to the ladies room. I don’t know who these women were, but they wouldn’t even look at me. And, I doubt my dress gave me away as either an American or someone who wasn’t staying at the hotel. Weird.
So, walking back through the souk a shopkeeper sitting on a stool asked us how to spell “clearance”. I wrote that, and some other punchy promotional going-out-of-business sayings for him, for which he made me a pair of earrings. Looking around his shop, I completed the Peace Bracelet! http://beirut2cairo.blogspot.com/2009/07/peace-bracelets-and-grab-bags.html. I may have been taken. It is hard to resist being charmed…once they have you talking to them you’ve lost your objectivity. A jewelry store in the Christian quarter of the souq. He’s turning the place into a restaurant, because people need jewelry only during Christmas and Easter. We told him to display his left-over merchandise in the restaurant, that we’d been in the Armenian Tavern next to our hotel and it was more shop than food. He said he was Armenian too, and knew the guy, and would ask him for pointers. He spoke the Queen’s English, having spent 2 years in Campton. We were his first (accidental) customers in 3 days (?), and his first child is about 3 days away from being born by his Russian wife. Her name will be Tamara, inshallah, -- a very good gambit, no? Truthfully, I wouldn’t be surprised if he owned all 5 shops adjacent to him. Then he sold us 2 charms to complete Ute and my peace bracelets.
Shalom and Salam
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