Jerusalem - the old city

For the rest of the time that Sister Claire Edith was in Italy, Francis, his big sister Joyce, and I played in the garden together every day. We played hopscotch, jumped rope, and built castles in a big pile of sand, but our favourite game was Hide and Seek in the herb garden. I won every time!

By the time Sister Claire came home, it was almost time to start school. Francis invited me to help choose his new backpack. We went with Joyce, and their mom, Henriette. Some cousins came too. Back before I started my trip around the world, I'd have just assumed that we'd go to Zellers or Giant Tiger .... but after six months in Latin America, I was pretty sure we were going to a market. I was right!

There are different markets in Jerusalem, but we went to the souk, which is the market in the Arab quarter of the old city. The oldest part of Jerusalem is encircled by a wall, with seven gates in it. To get into the souk, you enter the old city through the Damascus gate. In the olden days, if you wanted to travel to the city of Damascus you left Jerusalem from here. When he built the gate in 1542, the Sultan Suleiman made the Damascus gate as challenging as possible. To pass through it, you have to descend a set of stairs, and then make a sharp turn into a narrow passage which twists this way and that. No enemy soldier would have been able to gallop his horse down the stairs and around those tight corners without getting killed first.

No cars can get through the gate, of course, and so you don't see cars, trucks or buses in the souk. Everybody walks. I couldn't see through all those legs, so Francis gave me a piggy-back ride and then I could see much better. He's only six years old, but he's still much taller than I am!

It seems there have always been soldiers in Jerusalem, either attacking it or defending it. Everywhere we went, we saw soldiers. Some were doing their shopping (you can see a soldier looking at watches), but you can see that their guns are placed so that they can get at them quickly in an emergency. There are some groups of people who don't like each other very much, so they have to be ready for anything. In Israel, once you turn 18 you have to join the army. You serve for 3 years if you're a man and 2 years if you're a woman. After that you still have to go back to the army regularly to help out and stay up-to-date.

In the souk, we bought some bread, spices, a few glasses of pomegranate juice, and some halvah for dessert. Halvah is a delicious candy made of ground sesame seeds and syrup, which you buy in slices. It comes in different flavours, but my favourite was chocolate. We also bought some cubes of lamb to grill kebabs for supper. The lamb carcasses hang in a glass case, and you ask for the part you want. The vendor invited me to pose inside the meat case for this photo, but I said, "No, thanks!!!"

Then we waded through the crowds, deeper and deeper into the souk. First we bought some glow-in-the-dark tops, and then looked for a knapsack store. On a corner we found a little store, which seemed even smaller once Francis, Joyce, Henriette, Sister Claire Edith, and some cousins were all inside. Ramez (a younger cousin) chose a Spiderman bag; he's holding the bag and top in the photo here. Mayliss and Samara (two older cousins) took a long time to choose, so the rest of us played with our tops while we were waiting for them.

After a while everybody had knapsacks except me. I didn't want one, because I still keep

everything in the basket that Erasmo's Aunt Mary made for me. We kept walking through the souk, and came to a souvenir store. If you were a tourist in Jerusalem, what souvenir would you choose? I really wanted to take home one of the wooden Nativity scenes, but it wouldn't fit inside Aunt Mary's basket or even in my envelope.

Remember how I said that it seemed that there had always been soldiers in Jerusalem? Nine hundred years ago, soldiers from across Europe captured Jerusalem. (This was before the Sultan built those tricky gates.) The soldiers, who called themselves the Crusaders, killed over 30,000 Muslim men, women and children in the city. That's more people than in all of Brockville. They also built a hospital for their injured fighters. Do you see that archway? That's what's left of the old hospital. Nowadays, it's a busy market.

From the hospital archway, we walked (and skipped, hopped, and ran backwards) until we came to this building with the arches around all the doors and windows. It doesn't look very special, does it? It's very special, though, and millions of pilgrims come here. That's because this is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It's built over the place where Jesus was crucified and then buried. Actually, this church has two names: the other one is the Basilica of the Resurrection.

We met a friend of Sister Claire Edith's in the courtyard. Her name is Sister Agnes, and I loved her smile. We thought she might like to play with our tops, but she said that we were way too good and she'd just embarass herself. Instead she led us into the basilica, where we lit candles in front of the Empty Tomb. All sorts of people were passing around us: pilgrims and priests and nuns. When I heard that we'd see pilgrims I thought that they'd be wearing old-fashioned black clothes and shoes with buckles on them, but many of them looked like the people we see every day doing their shopping at Purcell's.

A woman whispered that sometimes people get into real honest-to-goodness fights here, but not today - everybody had an almost dreamy expression on their faces.

Outside the basilica, we met Father Angelo, who is from the Phillipines. We showed him and Father Fergus our tops, but for some reason they were just like Sister Agnes, a bit too shy to play with them.

I'm really going to miss Francis and Joyce, especially our games of hide and seek. Perhaps someday I can return to Israel. One place I'd like to visit is the Dead Sea, which is so salty that you just float on the top - you can't sink, no matter how hard you try.

Anyway, the next morning we all walked to the post office. Francis gave me a big good-bye kiss, and then I kissed everybody else and climbed into my envelope so Sister Claire Edith could mail me to Romania. The envelope smells a bit of garlic, but that's fine with me. I dug the garlic out of the hermitage garden before we left. People say vampires still live in Romania, and you just can't be too careful!


shalom (that's Hebrew for "peace"),
Sally