Today I had lunch with another colleague from my LA trips and we talked not about politics at all but mainly about her family trip to the US. She also had stories to tell about her son whose English was improving — she is originally from the USA but moved to Jerusalem, and in their home they speak a mixture of Hebrew and English. Her son didn’t like to speak English at all until one day when a friend visited and he wanted to speak to her. A whole dormant vocabulary was discovered in her son, and his English has been improving ever since. This reminded me of some of the bilingual families I met in Norway, including one where a little girl spoke English to her mother and Norwegian to her father. Never having been any good at foreign languages myself, I’m always amazed by bilingual children.
I the evening I met up a my friend from India who I bumped into at work yesterday. We took a taxi to the Israel Museum. On Tuesdays it opens late, and there seemed to be all kinds of things going on. There were lots of children flying kites, live music, a bread fair, and various food being served from stalls.
We were mainly there to see 1:50 scale model of the city in the time of the second temple. At that time Jerusalem was walled, but bigger than the old city is today. The model was great fun, and the audio guide explained about what life was like there. The site of the museum itself is impressive — there seem to be several buildings laid out in gardens with sunken areas leading down into other exhibits. The Dead Sea scrolls exhibit is actually underneath partly of a large fountain.
We also had a look in the main museum building that contained artefacts from various ancient cultures, and some pretentious modern art by the Zik Group or someone. The Little Israel exhibit was more modern art but a bit more fun. There was a scene made out of toy people and cars, showing police holding back the crowds while toy bulldozers knocked down toy houses. Presumably this was a comment on the Gush Katif evictions. I took a picture of it but was told off for taking pictures, so I’d better not publish it here.
We grabbed some food from the food fair, which was more complicated than it sounds. There were large queues — and I learnt that Israeli queues are not orderly and polite like Britsh queues — and you had to queue to buy a coupon and then queue again to buy food. What didn’t help was that all the menus were in Hebrew, so I didn’t know how much what I wanted cost. I solved this problem by buying the most expensive coupon, which was only 20 Shekels anyway. Then the girl serving the food didn’t speak English (most poeple in Israel do, but she was quite young) so I pointed at what I wanted, and had to resort to sign language to explian that I didn’t care that my coupon was worth more than what I’d ordered.
In any event, the cous cous, veg stew and meatballs was quite tasty despite not being very hot.
We walked back to our respective hotels, and I went for a nice cold Goldstar.
More Jerusalem Travel: previous day; next day; exploring the city; first day.