Jerusalem - I love this city

I love this city, I really do.

Two dirty leather-bound and tatooed guys brandishing huge magen David necklaces while wearing kippot and crazy futuristic sunglasses hop on a scooter and scuttle off. As they ride, they pass a Yemenite religious old man teaching a young student about some commentary from the sages. The man doesn't have a penny to his name but he prays every moment of the day. The two walk and talk simultaneously on their way to the bus. On the way to the bus stop, they pass a store where a Russian woman wearing a cross is yelling at the top of her lungs at the store-clerk because the price of tomatoes went up. She's flailing her hands in the air like she's about to hit the man and he's yelling right back in her face. A student eating shuarma in the kiosk next door asks them to quiet down and they both yell at him to mind his own business. The bus drives by, the same to which the religious men were walking. There, one soldier is going to the central bus station to get to his base, another is coming back from a funeral, both are wearing super-futuristic sun-glasses. The air is dry, the climate is so hot and everything is dusty after 11:00, only 2 hours after the street cleaners came by. It seems like a scene from mad-max, but actually it's my neighbors. There's no way to put Jerusalemites in a box - everyone's so different here, and everyone's here for a different reason:

Some people want to get out and are stuck here; some believe that they should never leave; some are journalists that are here to expose some right wing plot; some are journalists here to expose a left-wing plot; there are students, politicians, tourists, Asians, Americans, French, Russians, Ethiopians - just about every nation in the world is well established somewhere in the city. Some people are just plain weird, like the lady that sprayed me with a water gun the other day while walking with a friend.

All in all, it seems that this place is just shy of a controlled anarchy. It's it's own civilized world - and it is that - a whole 'nother world somewhere between the third, the first and the next. It's a world of ancient history hiding behind futuristic sunglasses.

My friend from Beer Sheva say it's a weird place. So do my friends from Tel Aviv. Weird it may be, but still,

I love this city.