Two moments in Utrecht

One

I am sitting at a bar, the equivalent of a Northern English local, on the Canal. My glasses are rained on, I am waiting for them to dry as the bartender did not understand that I needed a napkin to wipe them clean. Through the window I can see a blurry dance of candlelight and shadows at a window in a building on the other side of the Canal.

I put on my glasses. The window belongs to a flat. Large window, the room must be cold. The glass pane is all clouded from the inside. The shadow dance is of a piece of cloth, like a partial curtain, against the flickering of two candles or, perhaps, a fireplace. The shadows themselves are non-distinct and coloured.

Two

I am standing near the entrance of the great België bar. A couple is embracing standing next to me. A Santa Claus figure walks into the bar. He walks straight towards me and with his two thumbs he lifts up the edges of my tight downward pointing smile. “Better now”, he says in English (?) and disappears inside the establishment. The couple next to me talk softly to each other in Compatridese.

Jerusalem Day 6

We met our generous host for a tour of the Old City at 8.30 this morning. We walked through a hillside neighbourhood of ‘luxury apartments’ facing it, mostly bought out by rich Jews abroad who visit twice a year and hope they will eventually come to retire here, within sight of it.

The tour was exhaustive but very pleasant. Through the Jewish Quarter first, with its brand new rebuilt Ramban Synagogue, a very large one, and (very) devout Jews going about their daily pre-Sabbath business. The Jewish Quarter has been very extensively renovated, excavated, rebuilt, restored, scraped clean, and signposted. It feels like one of those European medieval towns in that everything has been carefully (or not so carefully) restored back to its former glory (Ottoman glory, in many cases here). The Western Wall plaza, where a neighbourhood was razed to make room for pilgrims, is what one expects it to be. There was no question about visiting the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, this being Friday and us being non-Muslim. We wandered inside the Muslim Quarter and then we visited the very chic Bethesda site (complete with a basilica and excavations, run by the French), the Lithostrotos (and the associated underground waterless cisterns) up Via Dolorosa and to the Holy Sepulchre. Between these we experienced the crowds in the Christian Quarter and the after-prayer ones in the Muslim Quarter, had hoummous for lunch (nothing like the hoummous elsewhere) and Arabic coffee, scented with cardamom.

The place is — predictably –madness. Everyone seems to hold on to a piece of it, from the Ethiopian Church and the Copts on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre, to the Austrians and their convent, to Greeks and Russians, the French, the Germans, the Syriac Christians and the Orthodox Christians and the Orhtodox Jews and the Conservative Jews and the Hassidim, from Orthodox Palestinians to Armenians, from Poles to Ukrainian Greek Catholics, from street sellers to shop owners to women with their head wrapped: nuns in black, nuns in white, nuns in grey, orthodox Jewish women, Muslim women, Russian women in pilgrimage and prayer. A place where sense does not matter, in the name of God. A place of archeological battlegrounds and fake monuments, of displaced places and revamped facts. A soberingly unstable playground for the Devout, where God only matters and where homes and bodies are usurped, bulldozed, evacuated, longed for, exchanged. In life and in death, like the Jewish tombs on the Mount of Olives bulldozed by the Jordanians to make way for a swanky hotel. A place where people chose to be buried: Jews in the Mount of Olives, Christians on Mount Zion, so as to be close to their respective Messiah when he comes to raise them for the dead. Amen.

Tonight I might try to go to the American Colony and East Jerusalem, to get away from the Sabbath stillness falling here as the sun goes down.

Jerusalem Day 5

A very special day. After “almost a triumph”, we walked to the market, Mahane Yehuda. I finally saw the city centre, which gives the impression of an urban network of streets and buildings, unlike the insular leafy-suburbs-on-hilltops we were getting during the previous days. We walked along the pedestrianised Yafo Street, where brand new trams run empty, seats still wrapped in bubble wrap. The area felt like an English market town (with Yafo Street like a High Street of sorts), albeit with rather unassuming and almost ugly buildings of a middle-eastern rhythm, despite made of the famous stone. We had dinner at the spectacularly good Mahne-Yuda restaurant, an amazing experience (and a very fullfilling, too).

Tomorrow I will see more of the city.

Jerusalem Day 4

Did not see much today, I spent all day at work.

It seems that Jerusalem freaks Israelis out with its religious fanatics and the overall focus on religion. Jerusalemites love their city but feel it is being overrun by the rich, by poverty and by religious fanatics and right-wingers. These matters eventually emerge, even in polite conversation.

Total eclipse of the moon tonight.

Jerusalem Day 3

A local by the name of Noam took us to Shalom Falafel to get some lunch: exquisite. Then we wondered in this neighbourhood: rows of low two-storey houses flanking a pedestrian area. On a hill, as customary.

The whole city occupies hilltops. The city is just patches of built areas on hilltops, leaving to roads and parks all the low-lying areas. It is fragmented. It shines like warm gold in the beautifully dry air of a summer dusk, as it is all built of this Jerusalem stone.

It is fragmented and it feels magical. The Old City is a textbook orientalist city landscape, with covered cobbled streets and innumerable Palestinian shop owners. The Tomb of Christ is guarded by a rude and abrasive Greek Cerberus, a rough and harrassing Greek monk, of the petty type that Greeks would call ‘stern’ or ‘strict’, a character ultimately disrespectful of what he was doing, i.e. guarding the entrance to the holiest shrine of his faith. Next to me was standing a Russian woman of an unworldly beauty, with a beatific expression all over her but desirable at the same time. The Sepulchre itself is an Experience.

A propos, Israeli women are stunning in the literal sense: they stun you and you cannot help looking at them.

And I understand why one could love this city, even if one does not care about religion and mass delusions.

Jerusalem Day 2

left the others and walked to the Old City, through Jaffa Gate and along David Street (the Suq). Iwalked back through this pedestrianised street / Mall.

Enchanting and incoherent, confusing and muted, this place is nothing like any place I have seen before.

I am going back there again tomorrow.

Jerusalem Day 1

The first thing I saw in the Tel Aviv airport was a mosaic, with a personalised Fair Weather in Greek: ΚΑΛΟΚΕΡΙΑ. I was expectedly touched. Tel Aviv airport is possibly the prettiest airport I have been through.

As the cab started ascending from the outskirts of Tel Aviv I could immediately smell the freshness and the altitude. All sorts of villages in the woods, dramatically clinging on the top of cliffs. Then Jerusalem: chaotic street plan, if any, lots of trees everywhere and a chilly breeze.

More to come.

Jogging

Tonight I went jogging for the second time in my life. The first was last week.

I was, more or less, going to the gym from 2004 until April 2010. Lately the lack of (almost) systematic exercise has started to show but there is simply no time for gym, not even the practice of these six years: twice a week. So, last week I took my iPod and went for a thirty minute jog. Not only did I survive it stroke-free and without a heart-attack, not only did I manage not to destroy or damage my kneecaps, but I also actually enjoyed it. Both times. If you know me, you know how tedious I find any strictly physical exercise, including team sports. However, jogging does have some advantages over all other strictly physical exercise: it is a bit like fast forward flâner. Let me explain:

I have to jog at night, for the obvious weather-related reasons. The first time I had a choice between jogging into the nearby park and turning left and back to the residential areas opposite it. I chose the second option. Dusk was falling, lights were going on, I had the opportunity to get glimpses of the lifes of others, always something I find touching. Against the blue dusk and, alter, the blue-black night I could see the silhouettes of buildings, urban skyline fragments. And all that with the iPod playing non-stop. Except the eighth minute (when everything feels in pain) and the 20th (when you think you are going to drop on the pavement there and then), that is.

So, let’s see whether this catches on.

Satisfaction and wonder

In the morning I went out to shop for a couple of things. It was cloudy, or perhaps dusty, but breezy, with intervals of gentle sunshine. Philip Glass’s Protest from Satyagraha on the iPod. The new neighbourhood looked even more likeable than usual: urban, with trees in the pavement, calm, clean. For the first or, maybe, the second time in the Outpost, I felt like I were home. That I belonged. It was a feeling to treasure. The bitter Loxias mental comment came shortly afterwards “If one must be exiled from the cities, this can be a good place to be exiled in”. It was somehow facetious and contrived, however: I was feeling light.

In the late afternoon, after a nap, we went to Dancer’s place for coffee. We went through his bedroom to the little rooftop terrace, which gave a very interesting view of the old part of the city he lives in: three palm trees, house rooftops complete with water tanks, solar heaters and satellite dishes, neighbours’ walled backyards — a clearly middle eastern vista but not without charm: it looked sweet, in the ‘doux’ sense of the word.

Missed

I miss a city. Maybe Paris, maybe New York. But I am happy to be on my sofa in my Outpost home. And I miss the snow.