Ten Things About Jerusalem

Our apartment is surrounded by gardens, including an orchard with various fruit trees, grapevines and roses. When we arrived, we found two grapefruit-sized tortoises, which we named Shelley (self-explanatory) and Diesel (lives near the fuel tank). After a month, Shelly and Diesel – who rarely moved at all – suddenly disappeared. A month later, they returned and we started spotting tiny, chicken egg-sized tortoises crawling around the property. After a few were spotted, Maleaha collected them and tagged them with nail polish. So far, we’ve tagged six baby tortoises and more may be hiding out there. As pets go, they’re not terribly exciting, but it makes visiting the garden a daily must. We’ve also brought them inside the apartment for a change of scenery and some fresh salad. However, it is best to approach carefully and handle them gently, as their defensive mechanism is to urinate. As for what’s next, who knows? Tortoise petting zoo? Illegal underground tortoise...

Olives are a big deal in the Holy Land, particularly for Palestinians. The trees are everywhere, olive oil is drizzled on everything, olives are served with all meals and tourists purchase olive wood trinkets. Autumn is the harvest period for olives and families will get together to harvest their fields, enjoying a picnic. Joining the harvest is a great way to see rural Palestinian culture, so an office excursion to an olive grove was organized.       Broadly speaking, olives are harvested the way they have been for thousands of years: by hand, either milking them (pulling) or using a plastic rake to strip the branches of their fruit. This year, it was noted that the farmer used an electric tool with spinning rubber tongs to massage the olives from the tree. (Wikipedia says this is called an oliviera .) The olives are collected in plastic tarps below the trees and then are sorted. Picking olives is not as rewarding as apples or strawberries, where o...

In the Holy Land, Halloween is not a particularly big deal (although we are told that in March, kid will dress up for Purim.) For a North American child, missing a year of trick-or-treating is a big deal. We lucked out doubly. First, the Lutherans held a potluck the weekend prior, including trick-or-treating stations through their grove on the Mount of Olives. Halloween candy in North America is quite standardized (big box stores + rigid peanut requirements), but this yielded strange candies from Israel, Turkey and Ukraine.  The second event was organized by neighborhood parents, with over twenty houses participating. East Jerusalem is quite dark at night, but we quickly found a train of children following the route. Houses featured mostly standard North American candy bowls, but also some baked goods and bobbing for apples. Our neighbors from South Africa had never experienced a Halloween, so Lena trained the kids in the art of trick-or-treating and...