Hot Dog and a Pepsi

So, I'm leaving Jerusalem and going to Ram'allah tomorrow, so I can stop playing tourist and start playing researcher. Ram'allah is about 12-15 miles north of Jerusalem, but the bigger issue is the Qalandia checkpoint: following the 2000 Al Aqsa intifadeh--a Palestinian protest/insurrection movement spurred by Ariel Sharon's assertion of Israeli rule over the Temple Mount--and subsequent suicide bombings in Israel, the Israeli government decided to seal off the Palestinian population in the West Bank by building a wall/fence around it. There's a lot more to it than that, but I'm going to leave it at that for the moment because my point is trying to get through this barrier--which, depending on where you are, is fence, 24-ft tall concrete wall, and/or border crossings with tighter security than you find at the airport--is a pain. Not so much for me, but for whomever is transporting me.

I've arranged for one cab to drop me off at the Qalandia checkpoint, then I walk across, and will pick up another cab (hopefully) to take me the rest of the way to Ram'allah--or, specifically, to the Episcopal Technological and Vocational Training Center guest house, where I'll be staying for the next five weeks.

How does this have anything to do with the title of this post? Well, after talking with Mary, I decided to go on a quick shopping trip in the "New City" area of Jerusalem--the part of town on the exact opposite side of the Old City from where the Mount of Olives (and my hotel) is located. And rather than tromp through the Old City crowds and congested, convoluted streets, I walked around the Old City, to an outdoor shopping mall I had seen a few days back. That trip was a total bust; the only places open on a Friday afternoon (post-noon is the Muslim sabbath, while sunset on Friday marks the beginning of the Jewish sabbath) were restaurants and one art gallery. So I turned around and headed back, only to find a hot dog stand. The guy running it had what I like to call a "desperation ponytail," so naturally I assumed he was an immigrant from America. He wasn't, and so he didn't understand (nor had the ingredients to make) a "Chicago style" hot dog. But that didn't matter much--it's not every day that you get to have a hot dog in Jerusalem on the sabbath, and so I very much enjoyed my hot dog & pepsi.

Today: hot dogs in Jerusalem. Tomorrow: felafel in Ram'allah.

Inshallah

The Muzzein Belched

I think the muzzeins of different mosques sometimes try to out-muzzein each other. The other morning, one mosque belted out the pre-dawn call to prayer at 4am. Then every mosque in the area did the call for prayer at 4:30. Then, the first mosque--the one right outside my window, of course--did another call at 5am. I dunno--maybe no one came to the first two calls? I think there have been at least three different muzzeins doing the call to prayer at the mosque nearest me (the Mosque of the Ascension), and one of them definitely sounds like an older guy: his voice sometimes squeaks, and he sometimes clears his throat into the mike. But one of the younger-sounding ones was doing the afternoon call to prayer, and in the middle of it--between "God is Greatest" and "There is no god but God," he belched. Not very loudly, and not a long belch--but loud enough that everyone within earshot heard it.

Keeping on the religious topic, I visited places holy to the three great monotheistic religions. The Western Wall (aka the 'Wailing Wall') of the Second Temple, the holiest place for Jews--though technically, the Temple Mount itself is holier... but Jews are forbidden to go there. Or so I thought, as when I visited the Temple Mount, there were some IDF soldiers up there. The books I have read on the subject have misinformed me.

As I just noted, I went up to the Temple Mount--or, to Muslims, the Haram ash-Sharif (the 'Noble Sanctuary')--site of the Al Aqsa Mosque (mentioned in the Qur'an), and the Dome of the Rock. The Rock in the Dome is believed by Jews to be the stone upon which Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son to prove his dedication to God. To Muslims, Abraham was in Arabia for this event, and the Rock in the Dome is instead the point from which Muhammad ascended to heaven. All in all, a pretty holy place--the site of the Second Temple of the Jews, and the third-holiest site in Islam.

But wait--there's more holiness! On the way to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, I stopped at the Garden of Gethsemane, which according to Christian tradition, is where Jesus spent the last night before his crucifixion. There are olive trees in the Garden, several of which have been scientifically dated to be more than 2000 years old. I took pictures of them (and will post them later). Is that enough holiness for you? Because there's more!

I also went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher--the church built (by the Emperor Constantine's mother) on Golgatha (where Christ was crucified), and containing the crypt where Jesus was interred.

I had some very tasty Armenian food for lunch, too.

I mentioned yesterday that I'd post more about politics, but I spent way too much time working on some of these photos for posting, and so you're just going to have to wait for more political ranting.

The pictures are in reverse-order of how I should've loaded them, and I'm not going to mess with moving stuff, as the last time I tried that, the blog crashed.


First up, the rotunda inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This isn't a HDR composite--just a regular shot with very little post-processing. I love my IS lens: I hand-held a 1/5 second exposure and it's sharp as a tack.

Next, a hallway in the back of the church. This is a HDR composite of two images--the third was too long of an exposure for even the image stabilizer to keep steady (2.5 seconds). Honestly, I don't think it needs the third.

This is in the front-ish of the church, near the shrine to the left of the entrance. This frescoe is from the Byzantine era. In the right of the frame, you can see the people lining up to go into the shrine. I got berated by a priest for wearing a hat inside; I guess it's OK to wear a hat if you're standing in line for the shrine? This is another 2-shot HDR composite.

This is looking back towards the entrance. This is a 3-shot HDR composite, which results in "ghosting" of multiple images of the same person as they move through the three exposures.

This shot is in basically the same location, but rotated 180 degrees--so this is the view directly behind where I was standing in the last shot. It's a 3-exposure composite HDR image, but the light streaks were not added--it was pretty smoky inside, due to all the votives and tapers that were burning. This is one of my favorite images from the trip so far, if I do say so myself.

This is "extreme close-up" detail on the Dome of the Rock, so you can see all the calligraphy and tile work. The larger image is below.

The entire image of the Dome of the Rock. This is a single exposure--not HDR--but I did some considerable tweaking (correcting the perspective, saturating the blue sky) to make the image more vivid--the light was pretty harsh when I took the picture. If you look closely, you can see the moon right next to the dome (if the dome was a clock face, look at about 2:00).

Again, the order on these pictures is all messed up: this is some stained glass from inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

I had forgotten to post this one earlier: this is a view of the Old City at night. You can see the Dome of the Rock on the right, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque just left-of-center. This is another HDR composite of three photos, shot on a tripod from the Mount of Olives, near where I was staying.

"the lost post"

Well, isn't this odd? I found this post sitting in the "saved" area, where it must've went went Blogpost crashed. I'll post it, not because it's anything novel, but just so it looks like I'm posting more often. It's a little bit different than the other political rant I posted.

I've fallen a bit behind, partly due to having walked about 30 miles over the past two days, partly due to having shot almost 300 photos over the past two days, but mainly because my Firefox browser is acting up and wasn't letting me do much of anything online. So I've switched back to Evil Empire™ Internet Explorer, and I think that this will work until I figure out what Firefox was doing wrong and how to fix it.

It's too bad, really, because I was fired up to do a big political post based on some casual observations I made yesterday. Well, the rage has cooled, but I still want to relate the glimpses of Palestinian life under Israeli rule that I saw yesterday:

In the bustling David St. Market in the Old City, a Palestinian merchant was getting hassled by two IDF soldiers and an Israeli police officer; from what I gleaned from the conversation and the gesticulation, the merchant had left stuff (probably trash?) out in front of his shuttered store when he went to afternoon prayers. When he came back, the Israelis--armed with automatic weapons and dressed in body armor, by the way--made sure he knew the price for violating the law.

• Later, in a nearby and similar market area, another trio of armed Israelis (two IDF, backing up a Israeli police commander) were hassling another Palestinian merchant because the scarves he had hanging out in front of his stall were dangling too low--a tall man would have to duck his head to avoid the scarves brushing against his hair.


• Earlier in the day, I took a bus tour of greater Jerusalem. On the bus, you get a pair of headphones you can plug in to get a pre-recorded narration (in your choice of eight languages) of all the sights the bus passes on its route. Time and time again, the narrator mentioned where brave Israeli soldiers "took" locations in combat--never mentioning that they "took" these locations from the Palestinians who owned the land--or where ruthless Arabs (Jordanians, most typically) mercilessly slaughtered innocent Jews/Israelis. There's that saying about how history is written by conquerors; it's not just history--it's tour guide narration, too. Palestinians do not exist on that tour; they were the previous occupants, who somehow left no forwarding address. I was half-tempted to switch to the Arabic language version, in hopes that the Palestinians would exist there, but listening to the English narrative was like watching faceplant videos on Youtube: you're horrified by it, but you can't stop.


• Later on, I was walking through another market area, and in a bigger stall that looked like some sort of tailored-goods store, an altercation had started up between several IDF soldiers and one of the merchants. Again, the IDF soldiers are armed, and an older guy--some sort of officer--had intervened and things weren't looking very promising for the merchant. I have no clue what was going on, or why, but for the third time in the day, I wondered what it would be like to scrape by as a lower-class merchant at the whim of guys with guns who can cause you all sorts of problems if they don't like the way you dispose of your trash, or how you display your merchandise, etc.


• Finally, I was walking back to the hotel past the Damascus Gate--which is the entrance to the Old City that butts up against Arab East Jerusalem. There is a taxi stand there, and then a whole bunch of signs that I interpret as "no parking" or "no stopping" signs, and as I was walking past, a Palestinian teenager runs up and yells to another guy in front of me (all I caught was "yulla! yulla!" = "go! go!"). The guy runs to a cab--parked in what must be the no parking area--and fires up the engine to make a quick getaway... too late. A pickup truck with three Israeli police screeched to a stop, boxing in the cab. The Palestinian driver tried to sneak past the truck, whereupon one of the Israeli police jumped out and angrily started shouting and pointing at the Palestinian, one hand on his gun. The incident ended with the cops pulling the guy out of his cab and writing up some sort of documentation--a ticket, or a court summons, or something. Like the tailor incident, I surreptitiously took some pictures, but another touristy-looking guy wasn't so circumspect--he was blatantly photographing the whole incident. The cops didn't seem to care.

So there you have it; in a day when I wasn't looking for evidence of the grinding oppression that Palestinians experience on a day-to-day basis, I had it thrown in front of me, several times. The Israelis have the guns, and the power, and if they don't like something a Palestinian is doing, they intervene. And they don't care who sees it.

If you have any questions why I do what I do, hopefully this post will be something of an answer.
And so you have something to look at after reading all that politically-charged observation, here are some pretty (and a couple not-so-pretty) pictures:


(well, blogspot has a pretty awkward way of adding & moving around pictures in posts, and I just lost one of the ones I had posted. I'm not going to mess with trying to fix it now, so here's the rest)

I call this one "This is not your land"--this was the police intervention on the illegal parking

This is the Western Wall plaza. All the cleared ground in this area was, before the 1967 Six-Days War, a Palestinian neighborhood. That neighborhood was bulldozed to make the plaza. I'm sure the Palestinians got over it--hey, Israel even built a nice, wooden ramp so all the non-Muslims who want to visit the Temple Mount can do so!


The order of these pictures got messed up, as I wanted this picture to be before the previous one. Anyway, this is a HDR-composite photo of the Western Wall. The people look ghostly not because they're ghosts, but because I put three exposures together in order to get the dramatic sky and saturated color tones.

The entrance to the David St. Market, just east of the Jaffa Gate into the Old City.

Zion Gate, on the southeast side of the city. The only post-processing I did on this picture was to correct some perspective distortion--I did nothing to the woman sitting; she was stock-still long enough so that her image is razor-sharp, while the woman walking past is merely a blur. Pretty cool of her to model like that for me.

Monday (alternatively, "This Land is Not Your Land")

OK, blogspot is a pain in the neck for posting pictures, and when I tried to publish my last post, it lost the whole thing--pictures, text, and all. This annoyed me greatly, because I had spent a good amount of time writing up that post.

So I'm going to compose stuff offline, and then try to upload it later. If it doesn't work, I'll just go back to the livejournal blog I used in Damascus three years ago.

Here's my attempt at the post that blogspot vaporized.


Time is flying by, and I'm not getting stuff posted as quickly as I'd like. Of course, having taken over 300 photos so far is slowing me down--spending a few minutes editing each picture takes some time. But in someways, this is a good thing. After walking around on Monday, I saw somethings that got me really riled up, and had I posted to this blog right away, it probably would've come across as an angry political rant.

Instead, I've had some time to cool down, and reflect. So this won't be as emotionally-charged as it could have been. But to the point--Monday I took a long tour around Jerusalem. I saw lots of ancient buildings, religious landmarks, and Palestinians being routinely abused in a casual, careless way by Israelis. A few 'narrative' snapshots, followed by some photographic ones:

In the morning, I took a bus tour around Jerusalem. You get on the bus for the two-hour loop around the city, and they give you a pair of headphones you can plug in, to listen to a pre-recorded narration of the various points of interest--in your choice of eight different languages. The thing that struck me most about the narration was the complete erasure of Palestinians from the landscape. The narration at various points discussed cooperation and peace between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but never once did it mention Palestinians. Landmarks were noted as places captured by valiant IDF soldiers, or places where Arabs (or Jordanians) committed some murderous crime against peace-loving Jews/Israelis. A plot of land outside the Old City, purchased by a Jewish immigrant during the British Mandate period, was mentioned as the first site of Jewish residence outside of the Old City--but it was never mentioned that the Jew had purchased the land from its Palestinian owner. Over and over again, the presence of Palestinians was elided. The narrative established Jews/Israelis as heroic conquerors or liberators or entrepreneurs, and enemy Arab/Jordanian forces as the bad guys. But Palestinians? They didn't exist. I was tempted to switch to the Arabic version of the narration to hear how that represented things. The bus tour was very unfulfilling. There's that old saying about how history is written by the conquerors... I guess tour bus narration is the same way.

After the bus tour, I was walking through the David St. Market in the Old City, and I saw a Palestinian merchant being accosted by a trio of Israelis. Two of the Israelis were IDF soldiers, with automatic weapons and body armor; the third was an Israeli police commander--also with an automatic weapon and body armor. I wasn't entirely sure of what the dispute was, but it seemed that when the Palestinian had left for afternoon prayers, he had left something--trash, I'm guessing--outside his shuttered stall, and this apparently warranted the intervention by three heavily-armed Israelis to set this shopkeeper right.

Later, I saw this same trio outside another Palestinian merchant's stall--they were giving him a hard time because some of the scarves he had hanging up outside his store were low enough that a tall man might brush his head against the scarves as he walked past. Apparently, hanging your merchandise a few inches too low merits an angry berating from armed Israelis.

Then in a suq in another part of the Old City, I walked past an escalating argument between a Palestinian merchant (running some sort of clothing/tailor shop) and some IDF soldiers. Whatever the dispute was, an IDF officer had just gotten there as I was passing, and was intervening--on the soldiers' behalf, of course. I surreptitiously snapped a picture of the scene.

As my day was winding down and I was tiring out, I headed back to my hotel, going the long way around the city walls, through East Jerusalem. The Damascus Gate leads from the Old City to East Jerusalem (the Palestinian area of the metropolitan area), and outside the Gate is a taxi stand. As you progress east from the taxi stand, there are signs along the road that are either "no parking" or "no taxi idling" type of signs, and as I was walking along one of these areas, there were plenty of taxis pulled up alongside the roadside, looking for fares. Suddenly a teenager yells something in Arabic--all I caught was "yalla! yalla!" ("go! go!")--and a young Palestinian guy goes running past me and jumps into one of the parked cabs, quickly starting it up and trying to drive away. A white pickup truck with three Israeli police screeches up and boxes in the taxi. The driver tried to sneak the taxi past the truck, but an Israeli cop jumps out of the pickup and starts pointing and yelling at the driver, and then puts his hand on the pistol on his hip. The incident ended with the cops pulling the taxi driver out of the cab and taking him off to the side to write up some paperwork--a ticket, or a court summons. Again, I took some surreptitious pictures, but at the same time, there was an older tourist with a digital camera, brazenly taking pictures of the whole incident from just a few feet away. The Israeli cops didn't seem to care. They got their man: the parking ticket was issued and order was restored to East Jerusalem.

So I didn't go looking for it, but I got a very clear picture of what life can be like for Palestinians in Israel. The Israelis have the power and the guns, and I saw several exercises in authority that seemed quite arbitrary and petty. From the merchants whose zoning infractions were addressed by rifle-wielding soldiers, to the taxi driver who was nearly pulled from his cab at gunpoint for a parking ticket, to the erasure of Palestinian presence from narratives about Jerusalem's environs, it was pretty disturbing.

Sadly, the political realities stayed in my face the next day--which I'll post about tomorrow. Right now I've got to try to get this to work on blogspot. Pictures & captions below.

The Russian Orthodox church on the slopes of the Mount of Olives. This is a HDR (high dyanmic range) composite of three separate exposures.

From An American Geographer...

This is the inside of the Zion Gate on the south side of the Old City. The only post-production manipulation was my (partially successful) attempt to straighten out the perspective issues from shooting wide-angle--the woman in the foreground was sitting very still, so that the 1/15th-second exposure left her really sharp and distinct, while the woman walking through the arch was blurred. Kinda cool, eh?

From An American Geographer...

Looking east from the Jaffa Gate, into the David St. Market. No post-processing other than some minor contrast/brightness tweaks

From An American Geographer...

The Western Wall. Another HDR composite of three exposures, to bring out the details in the sky and the colors in the wall. The "ghosting" produced by compositing three images with moving people is intentional. Before Israel took this part of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Days' War, this entire area was Palestinian apartment buildings. The Israelis bulldozed the apartments to make the plaza.

From An American Geographer...

Another view of the Western Wall and the plaza. The golden dome in the background is the top of the Dome of the Rock--the third holiest site in Islam--and the wooden walkway is the Bab al-Maghariba, the entrance for non-Muslims to access the Temple Mount / Haram ash-Sharif.

From An American Geographer...

"This is Not Your Land" (part one). The IDF soldiers were arguing with the Palestinian merchant, and more IDF were coming to back them up in the argument. I snapped this picture from the hip, not wanting to draw attention to myself and make anything worse.

From An American Geographer...

"This is Not Your Land" (part two). Another quick shot of Palestinians at the mercy of the Israelis with guns. I didn't need to be so circumspect--another guy was openly taking pictures and the Israeli police didn't seem to care at all.

From An American Geographer...

P.S. Let me know if the pictures don't come through. I did something weird, and am hoping it works.

More to come...

I took a lot of pictures today, and will be uploading some of the interesting ones... but I'm going to have to re-install Firefox on my laptop, as there's something wrong with the installation I have now. Be patient.

I was going to post a picture to spice things up a bit, but for some reason (probably the aforementioned browser issues), I can't.

Weird

So I'm not sure, when you go to my issmeeyusuf.blogspot.com page, it only shows you the first post I made. I'll work on fixing it when I have more time & energy & posts.

OK, maybe it was just my browser cache needing to be cleared. That's probably a sign I should get some sleep.

Day One

I've arrived in Israel. I've been catching up on my sleep--I typically am not able to sleep much on flights--and haven't done anything exciting yet. I've noticed some interesting sights, but have yet to use my camera a lot:

• Waiting for the bus from the airport to Jerusalem was a young Orthodox couple; the husband was dressed in dark khakis and a white button-down shirt, with his fringes hanging out and his kibbe on his head, he looked like a younger version of Joel Wainwright (well, the picture of Joel without the beard). The guy had some massive holes in the soles of his shoes, but his cell phone was quite spiffy.
• On the road down the Mount of Olives this morning, I noted pilgrims from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Canada, Korea, and India. Mobs and mobs of tourists, stomping down the road, crowding into the religious sites, haggling with the local Palestinians for souvenirs. One group couldn't read the English (or Hebrew) sign on the arch to the Jewish cemetery, and stomped in there to take unobstructed pictures of the Temple Mount.
• At nearly the top of the Mount of Olives, there is a block of apartments that looks relatively new. Certainly less than 30 years old. Before those apartment buildings was there, you could stand at the top of the Mount of Olives and look down on all of the Old City, including the Temple Mount. Now, if you stand at the top of the Mount of Olives, you get a marvelous view of these apartment buildings, one with a massive Israeli flag fluttering from the top of a 30-foot pole attached to the top of the building.

Many thanks to Michael Ewers, by the way, who just by hanging out with me in Damascus taught me some useful Arabic that I would've otherwise not picked up. I even avoided telling the desk clerk at the hotel that I had a "machine" instead of a "reservation."

I did take a couple photos today, and with one shot did some tricky photo manipulation. The picture below is a HDR composite of three separate exposures, tone-mapped and then manipulated in Photoshop to mimic the appearance of Fuji Velvia film. Turned out pretty good for a spontaneous shot that was fiddled around with in post-production. I need to figure out blogger a bit more so I can do fancier stuff with my photo-posting (right, Cheryl? I aspire to your level of blog-art).

Leaving on a jet plane... or not.

Well, leave it to US Airways to throw a monkey wrench into my plans. My flight departing Columbus was delayed so much that I had no chance of getting any flight to Israel.

So, tomorrow is the new date of departure.