Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

This morning at 0520, the town’s main siren – the same one that they blare every noon to tell you that yes, it is the middle of the day – sounded six klaxons. This was answered, before the din had even died down, by the sound of sirens on the streets: lots of them. (We’re near a fire station, so that may have been the source of that; from the number of sirens I’m guessing that every single vehicle in the station was dispatched at once)

There was neither high wind nor rain. No fire was on the horizon. We smelled no unusual smells, no smoke or bitter almonds, felt no unusual tastes in our mouths, no sudden concussion nor the whine of aircraft overhead.

In short, I have no fscking idea what that was all about, but I’ll note: There is something very creepy about finding yourself in a foreign city when all the alarms go off, and realizing that you have no way whatsoever of finding out what’s going on or what you should be doing in response.

So open questions to all: What would you guess the sirens were for? Natural disaster, accident, invasion from Mordor? And what would you do in a foreign city if sirens were to go off in the middle of the night?

For some reason, every weekday at noon in this town they blow a loud alarm that sounds disturbingly like an air raid siren.

(This was written while on the plane from Tokyo to Fukuoka)

Some things I’ve discovered today:

Well, I got back the pictures from Israel, and disappointingly few of them turned out well. Time to get a digital camera.

I stuck up some of the best here. Most of these are probably not of general interest, but some of you may like the last two.

The inscription is from the dig site I was visiting. This photo was taken on top of one of the (still-being-excavated) walls of the city from the Jebussite stratum (ca. 2000-1300BC). The inscription is a bit faint in the picture (it’s the scratched lines in the stone) but it reads “Nahum” (a man’s name) in the Hebrew script of that period. From its language one can infer that it was written after the Jewish conquest of the city, so it’s probably ca. 1300.

The other picture was taken from a hillside in Jerusalem. (For purposes of orientation: This is on a hillside adjacent to the Old City. Relative to the center of this picture, the Wall is at 4 o’clock, and the al-Aqsa mosque is at 5 o’clock. The hill itself is part of Jerusalem. The hill on the left of this picture is actually a Palestinian village; the hill on the right is part of Jerusalem; and the valley between the two is Gehennom, the valley of Hinnom, which several thousand years ago was used as the city dump, and was a place to throw the bodies of people you really didn’t like. Thus going to Gehennom when you died was considered a generally bad thing.

For further orientation: The Jebusite wall (v.s.) is at 9 o’clock to me in this picture, and about fifty meters straight down. Did I mention that all archaeology in this city is urban archaeology, and goes right through buildings? Almost all of the city is about as dense as the hill on the left in this picture.

…and the Mediterranean Sea is, as always, fscking beautiful.

Well, looks like my travel plans to Israel are finally set. Leaving the 23rd of September and returning the 5th of October, which means I make it to my cousin Maia’s wedding and miss about the first week of the school year. Ah, it’s expendable. And it’ll be very good to see family again.

*sigh* There’s some very odd things about this trip. First, that I haven’t been back in so many years that I’m a very different person from who I was the last time there; it’s like meeting my family again. And second, that there’s a strong feeling that every encounter there may be the last — either because I may never return, or because several of the people there may no longer be there when I do. So many people from the older generation are beginning to show their years… and the situation there is always unstable. The stress of the past two years’ war has not been good for anyone.

Oh well. I plan to eat some damned good food while I’m there, and maybe spend some time wandering through the marketplace, haggling over rugs or antique copperworks or whatever, and sit on the beach, watching the sun set over the Mediterranean. If you squint hard enough, you can still see Phoenecian ships go by on the horizon.