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ravenSo, I went to Israel! And it was lovely. Last year, while I was doing my nth batch of law school finals, Shim went to Gdansk for a Wikipedia conference. (In his defence, he had said, I don't want to go on a trip when you're revising, will you be okay? And I said, don't be ridiculous darling, go to Gdansk and have a lovely time.)
By the time he got back, though, I was sufficiently flipped to declare then and there if he must needs go to a Wikipedia conference again, then I was damn well coming with him. And then they decided to hold it in Haifa in the north of Israel, and I was sold. Israel is one of those places I have always wanted to go to because of my longstanding quest to travel around looking for non-Western visions of modernity. Y'see, I have a theory that one of the major obstacles standing in the way of development in India is a lack of a clear sense of what modernity is, if not Western. I mean, how can we be Indian and grown-up and modern and developed and still be Indian, and not a kind of Anglo-American? I dunno. But I went to Hong Kong, and saw how they do it, and this was why I wanted to go to Israel.
And thus, we went. It took a taxi, a very long bus journey, five hours on a plane, an intercity train, an underground funicular and a bit of getting lost, and leaving the house at threee in the morning, but we got to Haifa, and I proceeded to fall in love with the whole country instantly and decide I wanted to stay there forever. In Haifa, we were staying on the top of Mount Carmel, in a hotel surrounded by trees and flowers and an army of what would be feral cats if they were not perpetually dazed by the sun, and it was a delight. It was just the right side of warm - thirty degrees; you need suncream and lots of water but it's not unbearable to go out in - and Wikimedia Israel believe in feeding people a lot. I ate a lot of salad and pita and hummus and was very happy.
I'm not going to write much about the conference - it was interesting and I'm glad I went to it, but is not my fandom - but it did finish on a beach party, which was totally marvellous. Shim and I wandered down the beach beforehand, and it was perfectly warm and brilliant in all senses of the word, you know, with an actual blue sky and bright blue water, and the sun set into the sea and there was dancing and an open bar and glowsticks and acrobats and paper garlands and it was just perfect.
Oh, also, I got to hang out with fannish people! On the first day of the conference, I was enjoying myself but like I said it's not my fandom; on the second day we bunked off, and went to Tel Aviv to meetroga and marina. They were such a delight, and so good to us; we went to the beach, and wandered craft markets and had lunch in the open air. In some ways Israel reminded me of India: the glare of the sun, and the way the paint is bleached and peeling, and there's an intensity to the light - but at the same time everything is how I wish India was, sometimes, clean and comfortable and wheelchair-accessible. We saw the tent protests, as well, in Tel Aviv for the most part but they were also in Jerusalem and in Haifa, right outside the conference venue, and I found them very interesting, even though reading Hebrew placards is utterly beyond me.
(I learned how to say "shalom" and about four other words while I was in Israel, and that was the limit of my language acquisition. That said, I said shalom to a waitress in Tel Aviv and she brought me a Hebrew menu, which I was charmed by; in Europe, in Swizerland and France, no one who speaks English addresses me in French or German or whatever, because obviously brown people don't speak those languages (I found this infuriating in France, because I am no native speaker but I can order a damn coffee). But in Israel, I was constantly read as Israeli. It was nice. Language is funny, anyhow; English isn't my native language, but it's the only one I'm native fluent in, and I speak enough Hindi and French to feel a resonant familiarity with Indo-European languages - it was very startling to be surrounded by a language I genuinely couldn't understand a word of.)
That evening, we returned to Haifa and I also met![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nogah and tieleen - hi, guys! - and had a lovely time wandering the boardwalk and peering out over the view of the city and harbour laid out below. It was lovely. I also spent some time making fun of the Mayor of Haifa, who was very excited that there was a conference going on in Haifa, and on the first night of the conference delivered a half-hour preroration on nothing in particular, clearly having had an encounter with the open bar. He also bears a startling resemblance to William Shatner. What a wonderful country.
On the final day, we piled on a bus for a very whirlwind tour of Jerusalem. (The tour guide was informative but idiosyncratic; he jerked several people out of a sound sleep by saying, "We are now by the West Bank" - and I was startled, myself, by the sight of the separation wall by the side of the road, with dust-swirls and minarets behind.)
I loved Jerusalem. Our tour guide was a professional tour guide, but also a Hebrew Wikipedia contributor who had been press-ganged into it, and she strode magnificently around the Old City with twenty-five foreigners in tow and a seven-week-old baby. I was very very impressed. And, oh, I adored Jerusalem. I'm not Jewish, Christian or Muslim, nor very religious, but I loved the architecture and history oozing out of the walls. And you can't walk in the footsteps of pilgrims and not be affected in some way; we began at the Tomb of David (I was mostly totally delighted that David has a tomb; I mean, it may not be clear if he really was buried on Mount Zion, but that there should be a serious contender appeals to my sense of history and continuity), and went onwards from there. We went around the Armenian Quarter, which is closed to non-Armenians, something I never knew, and through into the Jewish Quarter, which is more open to the sky than the others, and has a kind of residential bustle to it which again, makes me wonder anew at people living in the same places they have always lived for thousands and thousands of years.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre does not look very impressive from the outside. You get to it through a door with a wooden sign on top which has "holy sepulchre" in white chalk. Nonetheless, it's the best candidate for the site of the crucifixion - and despite the fact that Golgotha was supposed to be a hill outside the city, the city has grown out to meet it so now it's surrounded on all sides by ordinary artefacts of a city, markets and bazaars and stalls selling brilliant religious tat. Inside, though - well, I suppose part of it was because the church by its very nature must be multi-denominational, and it has Eastern Orthodox incense and the sort of rich gold-leaf decoration I tend to associate with Catholicism, and so it was very unlike the sort of dull Protestantism I went to school with. I mean, generally I am never very struck with any kind of spirituality in that. But I remember saying to Shim, "This is like a temple." And it is - it has that richness, that sense of otherness. And then, as we walked through, under swinging red lamps and lights shining up into the stones and rafters, and surrounded by people transported: "There's something there there." We came out into the light and I was glad we'd gone.
The tour finished at the Western Wall, and I didn't actually want to get too close to it - I didn't want to stand on, literally, other people's religious tradition - but I really enjoyed the short detour into the archaeological site ajoining it, where there are people investigating the destruction of the Second Temple, digging down to the Roman road at the base of the wall, and original piles of stones left where the Romans pushed them. (It was two days before the ninth of Av, the day in the Jewish calendar which marks the event.) Among the stones, the archaeologists had discovered a stone fallen from the corner of the Temple, marking in Hebrew the point where the trumpeters had stood to call the faithful to prayer. One of the Hebrew-speaking guys on the tour was looking at the inscription on the stone, and then at the little sign telling us in Hebrew and English which way was out and not to litter, and saying, a little choked up, "They're in the same font."
Someone else asked the tour guide what the diggers on site were doing with the blocks of Roman-pushed stones they were digging up. The tour guide told us that the archaeologist in chief had chosen to have them buried elsewhere on the site, out of the way, but had worried: what if archaeologists two thousand years from now dig them up and think that's where the Romans left them? To avert the possibility, before covering them over he had sprinkled them with coins - modern 2010 Israeli shekels. I was completely delighted by this.
Afterwards we went back to Haifa and had a very nice dinner somewhere, and headed back to Tel Aviv in the morning, to a brilliant B 'n' B somewhere near the water. It's a rambling out-of-the-way place called Kehilat Aden, run by a lovely couple who are self-confessedly on a quest to run the best gay-run establishment in Tel Aviv, and as far as I'm concerned they've succeeded. Everything is ramshackle but sparkling clean, full of colours and flowers and guarded by a chocolate Lab puppy, who loves everyone with a deep and pure love. Shim and I spent that last evening having a drink withroga and then sleepily on a garden swing, surrounded by flowers and quiet night-time summer noises, using the free wireless, learning there were riots at home. We left the following day, got through security at Ben Gurion with a lot less trouble than expected - the authorities wanted to know why I had been to the UAE so many times, which startled me, because I've never been through immigration there - but we took off on time and arrived on time and survived Heathrow and the three-hour coach home.
It is nice to be back - the flat now looks almost habitable, which is good, asgavagai is coming to visit today - but I had a real glimpse into something different this week, and I didn't really want to come back.
By the time he got back, though, I was sufficiently flipped to declare then and there if he must needs go to a Wikipedia conference again, then I was damn well coming with him. And then they decided to hold it in Haifa in the north of Israel, and I was sold. Israel is one of those places I have always wanted to go to because of my longstanding quest to travel around looking for non-Western visions of modernity. Y'see, I have a theory that one of the major obstacles standing in the way of development in India is a lack of a clear sense of what modernity is, if not Western. I mean, how can we be Indian and grown-up and modern and developed and still be Indian, and not a kind of Anglo-American? I dunno. But I went to Hong Kong, and saw how they do it, and this was why I wanted to go to Israel.
And thus, we went. It took a taxi, a very long bus journey, five hours on a plane, an intercity train, an underground funicular and a bit of getting lost, and leaving the house at threee in the morning, but we got to Haifa, and I proceeded to fall in love with the whole country instantly and decide I wanted to stay there forever. In Haifa, we were staying on the top of Mount Carmel, in a hotel surrounded by trees and flowers and an army of what would be feral cats if they were not perpetually dazed by the sun, and it was a delight. It was just the right side of warm - thirty degrees; you need suncream and lots of water but it's not unbearable to go out in - and Wikimedia Israel believe in feeding people a lot. I ate a lot of salad and pita and hummus and was very happy.
I'm not going to write much about the conference - it was interesting and I'm glad I went to it, but is not my fandom - but it did finish on a beach party, which was totally marvellous. Shim and I wandered down the beach beforehand, and it was perfectly warm and brilliant in all senses of the word, you know, with an actual blue sky and bright blue water, and the sun set into the sea and there was dancing and an open bar and glowsticks and acrobats and paper garlands and it was just perfect.
Oh, also, I got to hang out with fannish people! On the first day of the conference, I was enjoying myself but like I said it's not my fandom; on the second day we bunked off, and went to Tel Aviv to meet
roga and marina. They were such a delight, and so good to us; we went to the beach, and wandered craft markets and had lunch in the open air. In some ways Israel reminded me of India: the glare of the sun, and the way the paint is bleached and peeling, and there's an intensity to the light - but at the same time everything is how I wish India was, sometimes, clean and comfortable and wheelchair-accessible. We saw the tent protests, as well, in Tel Aviv for the most part but they were also in Jerusalem and in Haifa, right outside the conference venue, and I found them very interesting, even though reading Hebrew placards is utterly beyond me. (I learned how to say "shalom" and about four other words while I was in Israel, and that was the limit of my language acquisition. That said, I said shalom to a waitress in Tel Aviv and she brought me a Hebrew menu, which I was charmed by; in Europe, in Swizerland and France, no one who speaks English addresses me in French or German or whatever, because obviously brown people don't speak those languages (I found this infuriating in France, because I am no native speaker but I can order a damn coffee). But in Israel, I was constantly read as Israeli. It was nice. Language is funny, anyhow; English isn't my native language, but it's the only one I'm native fluent in, and I speak enough Hindi and French to feel a resonant familiarity with Indo-European languages - it was very startling to be surrounded by a language I genuinely couldn't understand a word of.)
That evening, we returned to Haifa and I also met
nogah and tieleen - hi, guys! - and had a lovely time wandering the boardwalk and peering out over the view of the city and harbour laid out below. It was lovely. I also spent some time making fun of the Mayor of Haifa, who was very excited that there was a conference going on in Haifa, and on the first night of the conference delivered a half-hour preroration on nothing in particular, clearly having had an encounter with the open bar. He also bears a startling resemblance to William Shatner. What a wonderful country.On the final day, we piled on a bus for a very whirlwind tour of Jerusalem. (The tour guide was informative but idiosyncratic; he jerked several people out of a sound sleep by saying, "We are now by the West Bank" - and I was startled, myself, by the sight of the separation wall by the side of the road, with dust-swirls and minarets behind.)
I loved Jerusalem. Our tour guide was a professional tour guide, but also a Hebrew Wikipedia contributor who had been press-ganged into it, and she strode magnificently around the Old City with twenty-five foreigners in tow and a seven-week-old baby. I was very very impressed. And, oh, I adored Jerusalem. I'm not Jewish, Christian or Muslim, nor very religious, but I loved the architecture and history oozing out of the walls. And you can't walk in the footsteps of pilgrims and not be affected in some way; we began at the Tomb of David (I was mostly totally delighted that David has a tomb; I mean, it may not be clear if he really was buried on Mount Zion, but that there should be a serious contender appeals to my sense of history and continuity), and went onwards from there. We went around the Armenian Quarter, which is closed to non-Armenians, something I never knew, and through into the Jewish Quarter, which is more open to the sky than the others, and has a kind of residential bustle to it which again, makes me wonder anew at people living in the same places they have always lived for thousands and thousands of years.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre does not look very impressive from the outside. You get to it through a door with a wooden sign on top which has "holy sepulchre" in white chalk. Nonetheless, it's the best candidate for the site of the crucifixion - and despite the fact that Golgotha was supposed to be a hill outside the city, the city has grown out to meet it so now it's surrounded on all sides by ordinary artefacts of a city, markets and bazaars and stalls selling brilliant religious tat. Inside, though - well, I suppose part of it was because the church by its very nature must be multi-denominational, and it has Eastern Orthodox incense and the sort of rich gold-leaf decoration I tend to associate with Catholicism, and so it was very unlike the sort of dull Protestantism I went to school with. I mean, generally I am never very struck with any kind of spirituality in that. But I remember saying to Shim, "This is like a temple." And it is - it has that richness, that sense of otherness. And then, as we walked through, under swinging red lamps and lights shining up into the stones and rafters, and surrounded by people transported: "There's something there there." We came out into the light and I was glad we'd gone.
The tour finished at the Western Wall, and I didn't actually want to get too close to it - I didn't want to stand on, literally, other people's religious tradition - but I really enjoyed the short detour into the archaeological site ajoining it, where there are people investigating the destruction of the Second Temple, digging down to the Roman road at the base of the wall, and original piles of stones left where the Romans pushed them. (It was two days before the ninth of Av, the day in the Jewish calendar which marks the event.) Among the stones, the archaeologists had discovered a stone fallen from the corner of the Temple, marking in Hebrew the point where the trumpeters had stood to call the faithful to prayer. One of the Hebrew-speaking guys on the tour was looking at the inscription on the stone, and then at the little sign telling us in Hebrew and English which way was out and not to litter, and saying, a little choked up, "They're in the same font."
Someone else asked the tour guide what the diggers on site were doing with the blocks of Roman-pushed stones they were digging up. The tour guide told us that the archaeologist in chief had chosen to have them buried elsewhere on the site, out of the way, but had worried: what if archaeologists two thousand years from now dig them up and think that's where the Romans left them? To avert the possibility, before covering them over he had sprinkled them with coins - modern 2010 Israeli shekels. I was completely delighted by this.
Afterwards we went back to Haifa and had a very nice dinner somewhere, and headed back to Tel Aviv in the morning, to a brilliant B 'n' B somewhere near the water. It's a rambling out-of-the-way place called Kehilat Aden, run by a lovely couple who are self-confessedly on a quest to run the best gay-run establishment in Tel Aviv, and as far as I'm concerned they've succeeded. Everything is ramshackle but sparkling clean, full of colours and flowers and guarded by a chocolate Lab puppy, who loves everyone with a deep and pure love. Shim and I spent that last evening having a drink with
roga and then sleepily on a garden swing, surrounded by flowers and quiet night-time summer noises, using the free wireless, learning there were riots at home. We left the following day, got through security at Ben Gurion with a lot less trouble than expected - the authorities wanted to know why I had been to the UAE so many times, which startled me, because I've never been through immigration there - but we took off on time and arrived on time and survived Heathrow and the three-hour coach home. It is nice to be back - the flat now looks almost habitable, which is good, as
gavagai is coming to visit today - but I had a real glimpse into something different this week, and I didn't really want to come back.
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on 2011-08-12 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-08-13 08:44 pm (UTC)