Interesting Wake Up Call in New Apt

We moved into our August apartment yesterday morning on Tisha B'av. Upon our arrival, the cute couple whom we are renting from had brought us fresh fruit, honey, flat bread, oil and juices! Our apartment is located at 29 Hamadregot, in the neighborhood of Nachla'ot, which is just northwest of city center and about a 15 min walk from where we had been staying. Within several streets, it seems that thousands of people are living - apartments are all on top of one another and many of the streets (including sections of ours) don't even allow cars, only paths for people to access their homes. The majority of the neighborhood is built from a white stone, which seems to make-up much of the architecture of the city.

After 2 quite stressful days of searching, we were thrilled to find an apartment nearby our ulpan. And compared to many apartments we looked at, this one was luckily larger and somewhat nicer. We seemed to find that apartments in Jerusalem on average are much more rundown and outdated than those in Chicago (and sometimes even more expensive to rent!). In some ways, during our apartment search, we were shocked at how old the furniture was and how rundown the appliances were. Many units did not have full kitchens (no stoves or ovens) or real beds (only pull out high risers) and many literally seemed to be falling apart at the seems.

Our goal was to find something for August in the areas nearby our ulpan (which is located near city center in Jerusalem), so that we could be close to the old city and to our classes. This way, if we decide to move further south closer to Pardes for the school year, we will still have had the opportunity to live right in the center of Jerusalem. However, we became very worried that we wouldn't be able to find anything suitable that wouldn't cost us tons of money in these areas. Part of the problem was that since we were only interested in renting for August, the prices went up considerably. Mostly though, the quality was just really poor, which as materialistic as it sounds, was really a challenge for us. What was interesting though, was that for all apartments we looked at, the owners were very proud of their properties - almost to a point that we wondered if we were really seeing what they were seeing. It seems that living in Jerusalem is enough for many of these residents, and that many of the standards of US living are just not possible here. Of course, there are modernized and newly built apartments too, but just not the majority and not the ones that were available for rent.

Our apartment has a full kitchen, full bathroom and even a real bed!! The furniture is mostly older or from IKEA and there is no A/C, but overall, it will do for the month. We even managed to negotiate the price a bit, so we feel that this was really the best deal for us upon such short notice. If you would like a tour, please click on the link below:



After getting settled-in, we decided to make our first trip to the Old City to visit the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall. Our apartment is about a 25-30 minute walk from the walls of the old city. Just to note, the streets of Jerusalem do not seem to have any order about them - they are all curved, they all change names many times, and they are almost all at an incline. So, what may look like a quick walk on the map actually takes longer than expected because we usually get lost at least once and we end up hiking up and down hill quite a bit. Needlesstosay, we are getting our exercise and we are sure to never leave without our good old Streetwise map of Jerusalem! The old city was about as we remembered, lots of tunnel streets packed with shops and lots of people walking to get to the wall. ( Just for reference, the wall is recognized as the only remainder of the outside wall that stood around the 2nd Temple, build in about 530 BCE.) The areas around and next to the Wall were filled with people praying ... and on such a mourning day as Tisha B'av, which is the day we mourn the destruction of the temples as well as other sad times in Jewish history, there were many literally shedding tears at the Wall. It was an interesting experience. Mostly, I just sat and wondered that if there is a God, whether he/she can really be reached more effectively at the Wall than anywhere else - of course, many believe the answer to this question is yes, and their devotion to prayer was inspriring and broadening to say the least.

This morning, after a somewhat restless first night, we were first awoken to the very loud honking of a car, literally right outside our window. We sort-of shrugged and tried to go back to sleep, although of course the honking just continued. (As a side note, the street noises are very loud here - seems much worse than Chicago, NY or Madrid - guess that's just part of driving in Israel!) Anyway, the next thing we knew, there was a man making an announcement on a loud speaker from the street, saying "BOKER TOV (good morning) - and then a lot of Hebrew we couldn't understand, followed by a series of numbers. For all we knew, we could have been being summoned out of our apartment or the message could have been a warning of some type ... it was a bit worrisome not to understand. So Max quickly got up and went out to our porch to see if any of our new neighbors spoke English. Luckily, one did and she relayed that the fuss had been about an illegally parked car on our street that was blocking traffic. The woman who had honked incessantly earlier had called the police. And the policeman had been speaking about the car - reading the license plate number - so that the owner could move it. We both kind of just laughed at the ruckus ... and we thought the cops were tough on parking in Chicago!

We spent our morning at the main Shuk (market) in the city in order to shop for Shabbat and begin to stock our kitchen. On a Friday morning, the market streets were crowded with all types of shoppers. We were amazed at the variety of fruits, veggies, nuts, cheeses, meats, fish, spices, olives and more that lined the many streets. And the prices on may items were really inexpensive - like we got 2 beautiful peppers for just under 2 sheckels - which is like 40 cents!! And we bought onions, garlic, cheese, challah, a bottle of wine, a bottle of olive oil and some other extras all for much less than in the states. Of course, there was very little prepared food, everything was sold from scratch, so we will surely be cooking more! There are also grocery stores too, where we picked up juice and pop and pasta sauce, but the market was really a neat experience!

Now we are off to prepare for Shabbat - we plan to visit a conservative synagogue for services - thought we would keep it as simple as possible and stick with something that should be familiar!

Lots of love from Jerusalem - Shabbat Shalom!