9 November 2006

As I haven't written in some time, on account of both not having an internet connection in my apartment and the encroaching cold outside, I thought I'd restart this blog with two vignettes.

(1)

Jerusalem is burning, literally. For the past week, there have been riots in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea She`arim every night. Every night, regardless of when I left campus, the ritual was the same: My bus would approach the neighborhood from across the intersection, only to make a sharp detour around the entire area. Only once did the bus driver announce the change; otherwise, as the bus was filled with college students going home for the night, there was an unspoken understanding of what was going on. Police cars and red tape would block every street entering the neighborhood, and if one looked hard enough beyond the barricades, one could see dispersing hordes of males of all ages. The detour was abnormally packed, making an already long trip even more unbearable.
In the morning, so long as there wasn't another riot, the bus would take its original route and showcase the events of last night to all its passengers: Garbage either in large piles, or strewn about in stream-like lines alongside the curbs; Green garbage cans turned black from the smoke of burning trash, some still smoldering with thick black smoke; And the occasional fire, still raging, with pedestrians quickly walking by without a notice. The bus passengers would be glued to the windows, astounded at the third-world setting they were witnessing.
The smell of the smoke from the riots has engulfed the entire city, even on days with the bluest of skies. If one left a window open, whether on the west side of town or all the way on the east side up on Mount Scopus, the pungent smell was impossible to ignore. The association with something pleasant began to change in me, not entirely, but slowly reaching a darker period of history: September 12-14, 2001. When the smoke from the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the two planes changed direction, all of lower Manhattan (and my apartment at the time) was permeated with the smell of Burnt. This week couldn't be over sooner, because the smell is getting intolerable.

(2)

Bus 28 from Mount Scopus on a Thursday night is a sight to be seen. I had to go to the phone company's store to pick up an external modem, which is by the central bus station, and thus a different bus line from my normal one. I'm one of the first to get on, which means I have a window seat. Slowly but surely, the bus fills with students with duffel bags. The majority of students at Hebrew U are not locals, so they live in the dorms or in town. As this is somewhat of an elite university, there are no classes on Friday and few activities on Thursday night, meaning students can go home. At each bus stop the bus picks up more and more students with duffel bags, to the point where the bus is just as stuffed as the bags. Most people have two bags, one of clothes to be worn and one to be washed. People are crawling into the bus at this point, gasping with the contortions of their bodies for the last cubic centimeters of space to claim as their own. The sight of all these students, grungy guys and headscarved Muslim women alike, going home for the weekend was very sweet, even if they were clamoring about the bus.
The bus entered the main streets of Mea She`arim, but went through similar neighborhoods. At one point, in the middle of one of Jerusalem's many steep hills, an ultra-Orthodox man pushed his way onto the bus. I could clearly see him from my seat, and from his body movements it was clear he knew there was little chance of him entering; yet something internal made him try. He forced the bus doors to open to such an extent that the bus' engine shut down. The students are obviously not happy, and all I think of is walking in the middle of this neighborhood and getting attacked just for not wearing a 17th century Polish fashion trend (a friend of mine, only hours before, was on a bus that was stopped by protesters, when they hurled a flaming garbage can into the streets. The passengers were forced off the bus and my friend safely got home on foot). I gave the guy such a dirty look, hopefully it was part of the reason he didn't get on the bus.

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The rest of this story has to do with getting an internet connection, which I'll detail in its absurdity here very soon