I woke this morning at 5:30 am to the tinny, high pitched ‘call to prayer’, blaring out over the city’s loudspeakers. And it’s called me back to here (in a very secular move), to processing this last, incredibly busy week and the almost unbelievable fact that I am here in Jerusalem, with a view like this from the top floor of my university building:
Now that I look at this picture my thoughts have morphed to a (likely cringing) metaphor, about how symbolic this landscape is of my current state. The clustered grey buildings occupying the immediate space are immovable, squatting and glaring like the bureaucratic operations I’ve had to negotiate with throughout this week. You can picture me running around, lost and masked in the wrong University buildings, stuck outside the campus’ gates because apparently I need my ID card in order to enter to collect my ID card…walking into my Hebrew language class late and not hearing a word of English the entire lesson, and being consistently met with closed doors of offices who it seems close literally whenever they want. Probably the most chaotic point involved reaching into my bag mid lecture to find a chopping knife which I’d managed to leave in there by mistake and realising that it had (thankfully) escaped the notice of the security guards who search you upon entry to the university…It genuinely and momentarily got me missing the slower pace of quarantine, where I couldn’t get lost in my living space or worry about sweating through my mask or all of the above.
Yet, returning to the picturesque view of the city, all it takes is a second to lift your eyeline out of the bureaucratic nightmare to the great expanse beyond. And that’s where I am now, on the other side of the gritty reality of this week, my bedroom transformed from:
to:
With a view I can always look out onto:
The romanticised dream of munching pitta and hummus while wandering through the Old City seems like much more of a possibility now that I’m settled and have these sort of options in the supermarket:
And the final transformation was my birthday, where I went from not expecting anyone to know it was happening, to being surprised by housemates who had got up early to make the Cselko birthday special: vegan pancakes!
I treated them and 20 others to what I hope was an edible stir fry. And what I now know to be excellent friends :)