Exploring (from June 10th)

Today is Sunday, and it feels so strange not to be heading out to church. My husband had to go in to work for a little bit this morning, but we did have the afternoon and evening all to ourselves. We’ve found the church that we would like to go to – on the map. The streets here are unbelievable! Most city streets have some sort of rhyme or reason to them. You usually have a lot of perpendicular and parallel streets that make some sense if you’re trying to find your way around. Not here. The streets are crazy, with no method besides chaos. They twist and turn and just make no sense. Plus, the name on the street sign doesn’t match the one on the map, and each map has a different name or at least spelling; so it’s a real challenge. I will have to say though, compared to Okinawa the streets are more chaotic, but it is nice to have a street sign for a change – even if they are messed up! The drivers here are very rude, impatient, fast, and dangerous. The horn gets used a lot, and the “rules” here are more like suggestions that nobody seems to take. Having said all of that maybe you can understand why we did not feel confident enough to go searching for this church just yet; which is on the other side of town. We did decide to do some exploring near our home and we are getting more comfortable with the city. We tried to go to the Jerusalem Mall, but we didn’t actually make it inside. Parking is difficult here, but we thought we’d be okay here because there was a three story parking garage. Before you can enter the parking garage you are stopped by armed guards who check your car and trunk. We only have a “loaner” car from the consulate so we weren’t very familiar with it, and couldn’t find the trunk release. We had to turn the car off and use the key – how embarrassing. We made it through and started fighting the chaos in the parking garage trying to find a space. Nothing was open. We were going to keep circling around until one opened up, but instead we got in the wrong lane and exited the parking garage. So we said, “Goodbye, Mall, we’ll see you another day,” and headed out on our next adventure. Driving around these neighborhoods I saw some pretty alarming sights. Every now and then we’d see a young man from the Israeli Army walking down the street carrying a machine gun. That’s definitely not an everyday sight in America. My husband assures me that this is just a way of life for them here but that we are perfectly safe. I’ll choose to believe that; even if it’s not true. We see a lot of Ultra-Orthodox Jews walking around as well. I’ve been warned that they tend to spit on people that they don’t approve of – so there’s something to look forward to! The traffic was getting to us by this time, so we decided to head home for dinner and a break, but I convinced my husband to head out once more in the evening to get a few groceries. We found a grocery store that was much more modern than the one I went to yesterday (I was so relieved). Most of the products at this store were local Israeli items so we didn’t know what everything was, and the Jewish people were not as friendly and helpful as the Palestinians, but we managed. All in all, it was a good day and we’re starting to feel a lot more comfortable with our surroundings.