Some of my final thoughts

It’s taken me a while to get to writing up some final thoughts on our trip to Jerusalem.  I don’t know why, because I have mostly just been sitting around in Amman not doing anything. But sometimes it is when you have the least to do that it is hardest to make yourself think.

I will echo Helen’s assessment of living abroad.  Our time in Jerusalem made me feel like not only could I continue living there, but I could maybe live somewhere else, too.  If it’s that easy to feel at home (maybe “at home” is an exaggeration) in Jerusalem, the weirdest city I have ever been to, then maybe it would be similarly easy to live in Tblisi or Nairobi or Istanbul.  (It may be slightly less easy in Karachi.)

It was interesting to see how my feelings about Jerusalem changed over the month that we were there.  Six months ago, when I first visited the city, I couldn’t stand it.  It felt to me like a place dominated by divisions, cut in half into the Arab East and the Israeli West, with its heart, the Old City, quartered and divided.  This impression wasn’t exactly wrong.  Jerusalem is a divided city.  But it is far more complex than I realized. Jerusalem is at its essence a multicultural place, a city rich in history and mythology and religion that attracts people from around the world. It took me a while to come to appreciate the layering of cultures that makes Jerusalem what it is, but in the end I figured that out.

Spending time in Israel-Palestine did not make me feel more confident in my ability to conceive of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian situation.  If anything, hearing the pessimistic views of all the Israelis I met, views that so tragically reflected the fatalism and pessimism that I’ve heard time and again from Arabs. That said, it did increase my understanding of the situation. I have a better grasp on where the borders stand, what the distances are, what the cities look like, how people live and move and think.

I really enjoyed my job, but I’m not going to bother talking about it.  Suffice to say that it reinforced my desire to be a foreign correspondent, an aspiration I have held since I was in elementary school. I have no complaints at all, except that the trip was far too short.  I hope to be able to return to that bizarre, magical city before too long and experience more of it, though I doubt that I will ever be able to understand Jerusalem.

Some Nice Words About Living Abroad

I started this day, the fourth of July, about 24 hours ago, giving the security officials at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv a full demonstration of how my 4×5 camera works. The camera has no electronic elements—it is essentially an empty metal box with a tiny little hole that clicks open and shut.  But in this digital age, it thoroughly confounded these people who spend their days searching through mountains of underwear and idiosyncratic souvenirs for bombs and guns.  And this was after having to run my film through their gigantic x-ray machine, very probably ruining it and rendering the whole arduous process of carrying this big camera and tripod half-way around the world—not to mention to all corners of the city of Jerusalem on foot in the blazing sun—pointless.

It was a fitting goodbye to a place that, while being comfortable and modern and in that way familiar, exists at a level of tension that can border on absurd.  But Max and I truly became settled in the holy and bizarre city.  I felt as though I could go on living there, going to our market, our pastry shop, our coffee shop, our favorite restaurant whose name we never learned (it was written in Hebrew) but which we referred to as “Mountains of Food,” for quite a while longer.

This past month, while stepping off the bus, or going to the post office I would often look around me and think, “all these people live in Jerusalem.  In Jerusalem!”  The name brings to mind the world’s holiest sites and a long-standing and high-profile conflict.  The walls are steeped in thousands of years of momentous people and events.  But after a few weeks, it started to feel almost humdrum to walk through the old city.  Going to the Western Wall Plaza became just a slightly annoying shortcut, having to wrap a taupe-ish colored cloth around my scandalously exposed knees, even as I walked in one entrance and out the other.

But now I’m sitting in the Detroit Airport, not outside the Damascus Gate as I would normally be at this time of day, and I am trying to decide how to end this blog.  The surreal time created by international air transit, with days stretched and squished to unrecognizable sequences of light and dark, has only added to my current sense that I dreamed I lived in Jerusalem, on Klein St., in the German Colony.  But once I’ve slept and showered, I’ll realize that I didn’t make any of it up.  What’s more, I could go back to that life in Jerusalem whenever I want.  Or, if I were to choose a new city, life would be waiting for me to start there, too.  Slowly but surely, I am becoming comfortable and familiar with the world.  Cities with outlandish names are no longer abstract collections of foreign associations, but real places that can be visited, that are lived in.  There might very well be a little apartment in Tbilisi or Nairobi that will someday be my home.

Alive?

I saw this cat and took about six pictures of it.  All the while the cat just stared at me, not blinking, not turning its head.