Thursday, May 17, 2007

We got a brand new camera; we love to take a photograph...


Well, our new camera arrived this week and you know what that means ... no more grainy pictures on cheap, aging disposable cameras! To test out our new toy, we spent the day touring the sites on the Mount of Olives - like the Church of the Pater Noster and the candlelit Tomb of the Prophets - and, of course, the all-important Temple Mount. (Did you know that technically Jews are not supposed to go to the Temple Mount, because of the risk of inadvertently stepping on the Holy of Holies which is never to be approached until the end of days? There's actually a warning to this effect at the entrance, signed by the chief rabbi of Israel.)





































On the way home, we did a little shopping at the Mahaneh Yehuda market where we've been buying most of our food, braving the crowds and the brutal old ladies to partake in the glossy piles of olives and nuts, the sumptuous strawberries (shoveled into bags by a grinning kid using a dustpan) and the still-hot bread.


This was Jerusalem Week, a lengthy, parade-heavy, flag-waving celebration of the "unification" of Jerusalem in 1967 - an ironic turn of phrase to describe the most rigidly segregated city either of us has ever visited. The parades featured thousands of schoolchildren singing vaguely pitched nationalist songs, and tractors ... lots and lots of tractors. A reference to the kibbutz movement, perhaps?


More (sometimes grainy) pictures of our exciting adventure in Israel (so far) are available here:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hooray! Nice pics.
P