Jerusalem. Looking back (part one)

“Arafat said ‘it is the job of every (Palestinian) woman to have 14 children. 4 for themselves and 10 for the cause,” said the woman to me as she was crossing over the manic road, taking me to a street-side falafel stand. Her eyes were filled with the horror of the idea that one could invoke such an idea of violence from fertility. The 10 were to provide the raw meat, the mules, of the suicide bombings. It’s not a quote I know, but apocryphal or not it parallels quotes he made at other times. Yet he also won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzak Rabin. But Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli, Sadat by an Egyptian; Kennedy and King by Americans; Gandhi by an Indian. We feed on our own.

She was not native Israeli nor native Palestinian. She had been born in what was then Rhodesia, a fertile agricultural heartland, into the white minority that finally relented the power it had not earned, turning the country over to Robert Mugabe, who hurled it so far back into the stone age that it is, even from a distance, a tragic scar instead of a thriving heartland. Her family fled as so many white Rhodesian/Zimbabweans did as things went badly for that community, as Mugabe took greater and more accurate aim at the tragedy of his policies through the invocation of a race card, a land card and a power card by zeroing in on the most virulent symbol of Colonialism, skin color. She had taken a circuitous route to end up in Israel, in Jerusalem, another city wrenched by the barriers of color, faith and a desire for the land upon which others stood.

A charming, urbane and endlessly curious woman, she showed me the grace of the region, whether from a treat of a curbside meal or the kindness implicit in being an elegant, wandering host. We had met briefly in Washington, but became more truly acquainted in a day of meetings, touring from success story to success story there in West Jerusalem. Those success stories are of peace, of common purpose to teach, to lift up, to invite dialogue and invent possibility from the ether. All in the deep shadow of fear, which casts about in Jerusalem seemingly at will and alive, spreading and receding, somehow infused into every single heart and mind I encountered, a living thing, a violent emotional thing that upends conversation and takes root in that part of the brain that controls the “fight or flight” response.

“Jerusalem is dying,” an Israeli artist said in mid conversation. “Culturally it is dying. The art which was central to the city 20 years ago is being forcibly migrated out, polarized and pulled apart, Israeli to the West in Tel Aviv, Palestinian to the East and North to Ramallah. If we don’t find a way to change it, the city will be dead of all culture save religious culture, and then where will be find any common ground?”

Jerusalem is only now emerging from the grip of a religiously conservative mayor, a man who ground the secular art of the city down.

We think of Israelis as very westernized, and of course we think of their dance as among the finest, if not the finest, in the world (which in my view it absolutely is). Yet there are now just two professional modern companies in Jerusalem. They occupy different floors of the same building, and do so in a strangely symbolic way, one at ground level, exposed to the world and to the street, buffeted by that experience, the other below ground, working on many levels, and working the land literally at a farm outside the city, taking root, a plant, at first underground and then emerging from below to create something wondrous.

Amir Kolben’s studio stands at ground level of the plaza. To enter his workspace you enter his studio. It’s a grand tradition, really, that you must walk through the workspace to get to the changing space and sitting space and reflecting space. It reminds me of the old Feet First in DC, and there’s something very inviting about it. Art exposed, really. His studio is compact, but enough to generate large, deep and devilishly hard choreography. The company, like ours, is 8 or 9 dancers, and like ours they are full of that life, and that banter, that implies a healthy inquiry and deep passion for the work.

Coming in as a guest the hospitality was wonderful, though embarrassing as I disrupted their entire process and got a treat in seeing some of the material performed. Captivating hardly describes it. Such invention.

The door to the studio stands at the far right corner of the room. All the rest is windows. Mid run of an excerpt from “Interface” I glanced at the windows and saw a young and exquisitely beautiful woman with her young son. They were peering through the space where the shades were open between the small footing wall and the space about 3 feet above the ground. She was electric in her energy and he was fascinated, smiling and absorbing the mad energy of the work.

At the end of the run I asked Amir if he had seen them there. “Yes,” he said. “A few months ago that would have been impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because the religious restrictions of the last Mayor made it a requirement that we close those shades completely. Our work was indecent and people had to be shielded from seeing it. Too immodest.”

But this was Israel I thought. Israel is a liberal voice in the arts and I was so startled by the idea that what I was watching was only months before unacceptable to peer at through a window. So much human beauty hidden from sight when it should be celebrated.

It reminded me of the challenges I had been advised of in terms of Cultural Sensitivity when coming to the region. But those warnings had been for Arab societies. Yet again, these two sides were not so very different.

“You know I used to go to Ramallah all the time to listen to jazz. It’s illegal for me to go there now.”

I never asked him which side had made that law.

The sound of oranges

Abu Dhabi, Tuesday morning, the 12th of May.

From the marble flooring to the wood arm chairs to the business man in his two button, two piece deep brown suit and not-too-matching tie to the insane price for internet access here in the Novotel one could close his eyes and be anywhere in the States. Except he’s talking on his cell to someone who is, apparently, “the guy” to the Sheikh, which he says just loud enough to make sure that everyone knows its an impressive call. “So, should I just grab the Sheikh at the end of the wedding, in the reception line, and ask him for a few minutes then?”

Grab the Sheikh? Really?

The cognitive dissonance of this is impossible to relay. Much as I love words I cannot express the mental confusion of being 8 time zones from Washington and yet surrounded by English, by Western dress, by cappuccino and the chill blast of air from an overactive A/C system. It’s a form of disassociation, challenging you to hold the brain cells together and remind yourself that you are in fact in an utterly other part of the world.

And then there is the sound of shattered oranges. Fruit is ubiquitous in this journey. Far from being a “have to find it” commodity as it is in the States, here it is everywhere, in every restaurant, in every hotel and in every home. Here, at 8:44am, I am on my second glass of fresh squeezed orange juice., doubling my intake in 30 minutes over that of the last six months. The oranges, the carving knives, the grinders, are in each restaurant, and the grating sound of their evisceration is omnipresent, an underlying tempo to the rhythm of the morning. Strange to notice this above all the other sounds in a room.

The Middle East of our experience, Jordan, the West Bank, Israel, is suddenly far distant. The age of a place cannot be invented or invoked (except by the occasional genius who forges 2,000 year old antiquities which end up in great museums until called out with a sigh and a shock), and when that age is of thousands of years the rush of the 10 year old hotel, the 20 year old main thoroughfare, the smell of wet cement and deep humid air is grating.

Step outside the hotel and you are immediately smacked by the thickness of it, of the air, tangible, taste-able, laced not with the tang of salt but the acrid hint of diesel and petrol fumes. Around you are all the trappings of a fully modernized city. More than the trappings. Its an immersion. There is an abundance of everything in a way that parallels, and exceeds, the lack of basics in Ramallah. It is care-free in this sense. Open and alive in the way Miami and Vegas are with motion and activity.

Can’t speak to the culture because it is distant, over the horizon.

Bound for...

...Abu Dhabi. Virtually nothing in these past 16 days has been what we would have guessed it would be. Traveling with this young a group, with several out of the States for the first time, has opened eyes but also revealed the world to be filled with the challenges of inexperience. What is commonplace here is unheard of at home. Flying across the entire length of Saudi Arabia, passing in the setting sun 35,000 feet below us, one thinks of the utter differences in that society and in ours. On the flight we are bound together by identity but more by the simple fact that we are on this one small aircraft and completely dependent upon it for our individual futures. If it were to land in the desert, under Saudi law, what would each of us experience?

The women next to me have come, it appears, from a haaj, from Mecca. They have in their bags a poster of the Great Mosque, picturing the elegant and honored moment when a swirl of black clad pilgrims circle it in an intense and profound ritual of worship. It is not something I would be permitted to see even if I wished to be there. My experience of it will be this one, of two middle aged women, completely inexperienced to flying and to the world at large, with exquisite headwear and down coats (in May) completely baffled by our fast talking, stunning stewardess asking them in lightning fast English whether they want salmon or chicken. The poster, stuffed into their carry on bag, alongside a plastic shopping bag with an inscription in Arabic over a painting of a woman, shoulders bare, black tresses flowing, with an impossibly large red hat looking knowingly towards me, is as close to Mecca as I will ever get. These two women, who complete their meal by opening an enormous canned corn, scooping it out in the only actual flatware I have seen served on an airplane in memory, with the scent of pilgrimage upon them, are my intersection with one of the core duties of being a Muslim – to go at least once to Mecca.

Inside that seductive image is something that is, indeed universal. It contains a tan Teddy Bear, bound, no doubt, for a little one waiting in a home somewhere over the horizon of what I know and possibly what I can imagine. They speak no Arabic and no English, they possess perhaps the worst cabin etiquette I’ve ever experienced, but the are so happy, so chatty, that none of it really matters. The contradictions of the bag, the New Orleans or old Charleston ingénue, and their manner is matched and then completely exceeded by the two women in full Hijab a row behind me.

Sitting in this first row of coach I have the legroom of first class, the seat of coach and a view, through barely closed dividing curtains, of the passengers in first. The newspapers are all in Arabic; the watches worth a years salary. The curtain parts and a man peers through in a classic white dish dash, with sandals and headwear. He is unshaven, with deep eyes, scanning the cabin. In the States he would be both an anomaly and a source of fear. His stepping through that curtain would inflame every stereotypical insecurity of a post 9-11 community on an aircraft.
Here he’s just looking to see if the rear cabin rest room is vacant.

The pilot comes on to say that we’ve just crossed out of Saudi airspace, entering the United Arab Emirates. The time on the clock jumps ahead another hour and we’re 8 hours in front of the States. Here its 8:09pm. An irony of the time zone is that it is used on only a small strip of the world, and the major cities are Muscat, the capital of Oman, Victoria in the Seychelles, and Port Louis in Mauritius (is it any wonder that two of those are utterly Western names?). The world clock skips a beat above Abu Dhabi, jumping not one but two hours ahead for the rest of the world. We are East of the African continent, East of Madagascar. North of us is Iran and Iraq. West of us is the Saudi desert and south of us….nothing below Yemen. To jump off the horn here you would not yet again encounter land until you came, at last, to the ice of Antarctica. We are at this moment closer to Australia than to the United States.

A woman walks by in the traditional black of a Muslim woman entering a conservative country. A moment ago, heading in the opposite direction, she was in an elegant pants suit. Yet in this moment on this plane we all co-exist simply, bound by that same purpose as of an hour ago --- confined to the cabin.

A sneak peak from Wadi Rum

We had the chance to film and photograph in Wadi Rum, the protected reserve in Jordan yesterday.

Here's a quick peak at some of what we did....

Time to go

Its about 1:30 in Jordan. In 30 minutes we board a bus for the airport and a 4:30 flight out to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The notion of leaving this part of the world is strange now. I've just come from watching from the back of the balcony a performance of Dancing in One Language, our ubiquitous outreach program performed today for the entire student body here at King's. I am reminded always that there is so much more that unites us than divides us. The young people here take in the program in so much the same way as they do in Anacostia, in Rockville, in Philadelphia. They find the same charm in Roger & Lucie (the tale of a boy and the mop with which he falls in love after she comes to life in classic Disney fashion), they find the same odd vocabulary and confusion leading to fascination with "Harmonica Breakdown," Jane Dudley's 1938 masterwork about change and challenge in New York.

And what is not so different, though you would think it is, is that few have seen what we do here as few have seen what we do in the States. Dance is new in this part of the world -- modern dance, western dance -- and yet we encounter this at home in almost the same way. Each program is an introduction. Each program is a guide, a window, into what could be, given a chance, a truly universal language. What stop it from being so is the striking lack of exposure, not the lack of commonality. We do speak these languages of movement together. Today is just further proof of a truth that needs more time, and more advocates, to flower.

Time to pack up, say farewell, for now, to Jordan and to an extraordinary country, people and time in life.

But we'll be back.

Looking for Lawrence (part 1)

From the town of Madaba, in which King's Academy sits, the road to the south is covered in the contradictions of modern life smashing into tradition. King's is the first coeducational private institution in the Middle East. Walk its campus, with grassy hills, freshly planted trees notched into the landscape, granite walkways and a clock tower situated at the mid point and you could breathe the air of New England on a May day. The students are in western clothes. They banter as kids do -- loudly.

The dining hall is a cacaphony of glasses crashing together, of laughter and voices bouncing off the high A frame ceiling past the lecturne and the wall jacks for microphones and overhead systems. The food is pasta and chicken and the pita is off to the side but present. Yet the language is Arabic far more than English. The school is in its infancy, and despite the trappings of a high income, high society Andover or Choate, the bulk of its students are scholarship and they come from around the country in search of the best and brightest to lead the Kingdom into the second half of the 21st Century. It is the King's Academy quite literally, and the concern for who will guide the country is clearly present and proactively considered.

But a few feet beyond the guarded gate other worlds emerge. Southbound down the main highway the three + hour drive to the ancient city and landscape of Petra are the seemingly endless intersections of ways of life challenged, cherished and churned up. Down the black tarmac of the highway, looking straight ahead, the highway and transportation system in unremarkable save for the utter disregard for the dividing lines for traffic and lanes. Cars wander between and astride them in ways you can't do in the States without incurring the road rage for which we are too well known. Here is it unremarkable and odds are that if you observed the lane system too closely you'd just end up causing the chaos you were trying to avoid.

But at the tarmac's end everything changes. Just past that blacktop life intersects, and does so in ways that can lead you to impressions devoid of understanding or simply missed. Countless herds of goats, tended in the tradition by a lone man and an aged stick, edge the road, slipping onto it at the margin and herded back with a combination of care and casualness that reminds that this has been going on since antiquity. What is odd is the realization, not that there are goats, but that there is something about the road's edge that makes for a more fertile landscape, laced with more vegetation. The ridges of the road attract moisture in some way, and that facilitates green growth and that, in turn, invites the goats. They coexists and the ancient becomes oddly dependent upon the infrastructure. Herds of goats abound. You see them in small grassy areas surrounded by the detritus of car repair warrens with people bent over hoods as the grease monkeys of the States are. They intersect. But they are not, as seems to be too easily missed, a sign of backwardness or poverty. They are tradition, and tradition is at play with the times here. It cannot be seen through Western misunderstanding.

Yet there are oddities everywhere. Over long stretches of the road south you see the narrow black tubing of slow-drip agriculture. Those tubes are linked to well-spaced green cylinders set on steel a few feet above ground. Each of these has a single tube tracing out from the center at bottom and running through the cement footings into the ground. Its ground-water and these tanks, surrounded on all sides by fencing are irrigating. But it is what they are irrigating that is the surprise. Just as we do in the States, beautifying the great ugliness of highways, these cylinders are feeding water to trees and shrubs planted, single-file, along the highway. Behind them is sand and rock and semi-desert. Before them is highway. One day it seems that you will drive the southbound route and tallk pines and shrubs will convey to you the greenness of a lush landscape. Why? Is there a master plan to it, or is it just that someone somewhere sought a way to make the road lovely?

From the corner of your eye you catch a rush of orange. At road's edge a single man is standing atop a crate placing the last set of rich orange carrots atop a great cone of them. Thousands of carrots piling up against the brown landscape. In the distance a tent, set in the traditional rectangle. Even at distance you can see the hues of orange and yellow and gold of fresh fruit. The front of the tent is peeled back on each side, and, for an instant, an aged man sits, cross-legged and still, his Kaffiya on his head, his long dish dash draped, and a cup of tea at his feet, appears. The next day, driving back, he will be again in that spot, seemingly unmoved, awaiting a traveller to purchase fruit.

Heading south, towards Petra, the landscape is more churned and battered. Part of it is nature's will. Part of it man's. There are signs of mining (phosphorous?) and the dust of diggging. Its compliments by the dust devils of nature's handiwork. They together raise dust into the air. The landscape goes green and radically brown and another green tank sits in the distance irrigating against the rush of desert.

Towns go by, all seemingly unfinished. Its as though a massive construction and urbanization program was undertaken, and then, mid-construction, someone said "just kidding," leaving the first floor unfinished and the second as no more than the first layer of cement pilings, the rebar jutting from it in forlorne ascent. Its everywhere. Yet inside some people sit and take tea.

The King is also everywhere. His portait abounds. But it is changing. In Amman it is he and his exquisitely beautiful wife and their children. Here he is in full military garb. Farther south that portrait changes to traditional garb. He is many people to many regions, yet remains remarkably one King. Its an incredible, and vital, balancing act, and everywhere there is a sense that he genuinely does it well.

Off in the distance a single man carries a vast bundle of twigs and sticks gathered from all around. Firewood. Yet in his left hand, balanced to an ear, is a cellphone. The shepherd to the left out the window swats at a stray goat while in mid sentence on his Nokia. There are no women to be seen anywhere.

In the distance a single rail line snakes along with the highway. It travels the entire length of the journey, heading, it seems, towards Aqaba.

Aqaba. From the land.

Lawrence was here.

5 minutes

There is a falafel shop in the Old City of Jerusalem where the shopkeeper makes what seems universally to be regarded as the best falafel in the Old City. He is apparently now a rich man, with many stores, but Suzan took us to the source. It was indeed great food. Sitting at this small restaurant, which is at the intersection of the third station of the cross, I became curious about the incredible range of people walking past. So I gave myself five minutes to photograph everyone who walked by.

The first image is of my colleague Shannon, the videographer of all trip and the person who has made the video blogs and mini-documentaries while I've done the text and photo entries. All the rest of the folks who will pass by here in the next few moments were portraits of a city in a moment in time.

Back across

Friday the 9th is really Friday the 13th, meaning its our 13th day since we left the States.

We're back in Jordan after another adventure crossing out of Israel/The West Bank. While this one didn't come with the capriciousness of an Israeli Customs agent lying to us about a new law demanding that our passports be stamped, it did take hours. But really it was uneventful but for the delay. 

We reached the Israeli/Jordanian border just before 8am. The gates to the crossing were not yet open, and so our taxi and the mini-bus that hauled us from Convent to crossing pulled over for a bit to await the start of the transit day. Getting out at the last slip of land in Israel (which was Jordanian by mandate in '48 and fell to the Israeli's in the '67 war) and walking a few feet away from the car set in motion the inevitable exploration. Just off the road itself endless cigarette packs lined the thick sand of the Jordan valley floor. History will reveal that Marlboros are the choice of drivers by a wide margin. The discarded packs popped up like spring flowers, and the butts of all those cigarettes, thousands of them, were the seeds. It made you understand just how many hours have been spent by taxi drivers waiting at that spot. There are bits of gum, an occasional water bottle or soda can. But mostly its just cigarettes and cement and rebar, the detritus from more tense times of barricades and shells. 

At the center dividing line between traffic bound for Jordan and traffic bound for Israel are the ubiquitous cement barriers. But unlike the Jersey walls in the States, these are cubes. They're painted as dice. Always a crapshoot crossing the border. Someone has a sense of humor or a sense of irony. 

You have to pay to leave Israel, and its not lost on one that someone somewhere has been sent back for lack of a few sheckels. 

The ride on the Jordanian side requires us to pile into four taxis. Shannon and I get the last one, and its just us, our cameras and our drivers. Who, as it turns out, is completely crazy. There's a video of our trip with him coming in the morning. We called it "moments with a madman." He was hilarious. Talking and singing and muttering and passing cars at insane speeds, honking at everyone, waving, yelling "HELLO" to any convertible he could encounter, and poking me in the shoulder regularly. At the end he gave Shannon the biggest, wettest kiss on the cheek I think I've seen in years. And it was all gums. Not too many teeth left in what had to be a 75 year old mouth. Hilarious. 

Saturday and Sunday we are off to Petra and Wadi Rum, and so will be off line for a day or so. But there will be stories to share for sure when we get back....

The Rosary Sisters

The Rosary Sisters

It’s about 7:45 in the morning on Wednesday, May 6, 2009. Here in Jerusalem the weather is perfect and cool. The sunlight is lacing the olive trees outside and making those remarkable patterns the thick leaves and needles do in a light breeze. The air here is very dusty. Filled, really. They say it’s only in spring that the winds rise up in such a way as to hurl the desert into the city.

The Rosary Sisters Convent is a guesthouse now as well as a convent. Dina found it through a family connection, and its just literally next door to the American Consulate. Its an enormous structure with room after room after room, as you would expect. Down a long corridor one finds, in the morning, the Sisters at breakfast. There are only a few of them to our eyes. If there are more they are quiet and sequestered somewhere out of sight. In the guest dining room there is a wall-to-wall map of the world. It has little pictograms of soldiers with various populations of them by country. In the world today there are either 195 or 196 countries (depends on whether you count things like the Vatican).  On the map in the Sisters’ Dining Room there are 63. The map, like the city in which it has been looking down upon the endless stream of visitors to the Convent, is frozen in Political time. The map of the Middle East shows Jordan as the power in the West Bank.

 

The highway to Nazareth.

A divided land.

In a taxi heading north to the city of Jesus’s childhood. We’re in Israel proper at the moment, on the road at 130kpm. In the back seat of our Mercedes Benz taxi Tish, Julie and Shannon are sleeping. The scenery slips by and the topography changes. Ahead and to the left is Tel Aviv. We left Jerusalem about 60 minutes ago. From the steep hills of the West Bank we drove into a long plain. The trees a few meters above were pine covered. It could have been New Hampshire.

The highway out of Jerusalem was walled on either side, fortified in that most horrible of ways to which we have become accustomed. “On this side, Palestine; on that side, Palestine. Only the road is Israel,” says that driver. A strip of land appropriated to make a highway and locked inside those horrible high walls festooned with barbed wire.

Once into Israel proper everything relaxes. The roads are smooth and fresh paved. The traffic moves better than on I-95. Wide expanses of scrub brush and amber, dotted with olive groves and farms that run from the simple to the complex. And then a wall pops up on the right, just as those separating the Palestinians meters behind us from the Israelis. A sign on the road says, in Arabic, Hebrew and English, “settlement.” And you realize that even inside the country there is division, and that walls you hoped you had left behind pop up and cut off one from another. And then it is all ordinary again. The highway authority has been busily planting trees, beautifying the landscape. The scene again feels as if it could be in New England or Western Maryland. You realize that Israel has made a great country, a great infrastructure, rise. It feels so familiar, so well planned and made. It reminds you of what brilliant things they have accomplished in just a short tie.

A sign for Tiberium passes. This was the seat of Roman government, and exceptional and elegant city in antiquity that is being rediscovered through archaeology. It was in Tiberium that they found the name of Pontius Pilate.

To the left more Pine forests; to the right, as the land begins to slope again and slide, rich groves. The minarets of mosques peak above the woods, and small cities and villages come into view and vanish. There’s a sulfur odor suddenly and the realization of some industry over the hill comes into your mind. Israel has many mosques. We’re in an Israeli arab area. There are Israeli flags on the roads and endless mosques in the distance.

Ten kilometers down the road and we’re in a valley. The first sign for Nazareth comes and goes, along with a second sign to Tiberium (or Tiberias). The gals are awake and the conversation has turned inevitably to Christianity and the question of the Gnostic gospels and the endlessly debated issue of “the true gospels.”

Yesterday Katherine and several other members of the Company took a walk through the Old City and went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In wanting to learn a bit more about where they were Alice asked a man standing by the slab where Jesus was laid who seemed to know and be interested in sharing. He promptly informed them that he was a prophet, had died in the 1970s and knew the future. And that was just the beginning. In relating this story last night on the bus back from the closing night performance Dina, listening to them related that he was indeed a prophet, said "yeah, and I'm the snake in Jungle Books." Which, of course, she is. So who knows what his real deal may be.

The road to Jerusalem

The history of Jerusalem is so intimately tied to the history of the world that it is often impossible to distinguish one from the other. The definitions of world view, of faith, of values, of societies and politics stem from this place as the headwaters of the Ganges sustain an entire civilization. It's almost impossible to take in.

At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where standard Christian historiography says that Jesus died, was taken and laid down from the cross, and then entombed, the various Christian sects are so divided that the have been know to beat each other with broomsticks, palm leaves and other implements over who cleans what, when and how. There is ladder on the second floor, outside the entrance to the Church. It is a simple wooden ladder, with nothing unusual or ornate. It's been there, in that spot, for over two hundred years because the monk or cleaning person who put it there TO CLEAN THE WINDOWS, didn't follow protocol in the agreement between the different sects within the Christian hierarchy and go called out. No one can agree to move it, so its there, atop perhaps the most sacred site in Christianity, in plain sight.

Inside the incredible Old City of Jerusalem, which is without question one of the most extraordinary sites I have ever taken in, a long market walkway, with floor stones thousands of years old, leads to a stair. As you walk up the stair you encounter stall after stall of all manner of goods, from frankincense to plastic baby toys. Walk to its lead step and the air goes quiet. There is commerce ALL around you. Five steps from the top an Israeli soldier steps from the shadows and stops you. He waves to put your camera down for a moment. He tells you "not now," but then relents and allows you to the top of the stair. To your left is a man who operates/owns the kiosk closest to the aged door. As you rise to the landing you realize that, through the door, is the Al Aksa Mosque, the third most holy site in all of Islam, the place where Muhammed ascended to heaven. IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES.

My colleague Shannon asks me details and I tell her about the raising of the Temple of Solomon by the Romans in 79AD (the destruction of which paid for the building of the Roman Colesseum), the creation of the Mosque, the sparking of the first Intifada by Ariel Sharon walking that revered landing. A man comes through the door and stops just long enough to look at me and say "it's history my friend. What can you do?" and then disappear down the steps.

The shopkeeper to my left says, "do you know what? My family has owned this place, this kiosk, for 1,600 years?" And you know instinctively he is not kidding.

Descending the stairs, you come down to an intersection, and at that intersection is the man who said "it's history." He invites you to his store and you enter to find it completely filled with every spice history tells you the Middle East is defined by. His colleague takes 20 minutes to share each and everyone one with you, to smell them, explore them and invite you to understand them in the context of an ancient land.

He hands you bread better than you have ever tasted and when that smile reaches your lips he says "its the water. Only Jerusalem has this water." And you believe him.

Day one in Jerusalem. And its not even noon.