Sunday, November 18, 2007

Remembered scenes

I've been in London for the last few days, having great adventures my first time in this world-famous city. I've been doing lots of museums and markets and gigs and the theatre and all that good stuff - so much so that each day I finish quite tired and without the physical or creative energy to write a blog entry about it...so for now I will offer you my photo album on Facebook and save the London stories for another time.

Meanwhile, I've been meaning to write about some of the images from everyday life in Israel that I don't have pictures of. Since I can't create an iMovie montage of these little scenes and vignettes, instead I'll have to describe them and if you like, you can make the montage in your head...

1) Dirty skinny street cats, hundreds and hundreds of them, everywhere, on every street and next to every dumpster in Israel. Their piteous state did not, of course, deter me from attempting to make friends with them, usually with little success.

2)People in cars winding down their windows at traffic lights to ask directions either from the driver in the car next to them, or a passing pedestrian. I'm sure this happens in other places, but certainly not in New Zealand - at least not with the absolute commonplace frequency that I'd see in Israel. I think in New Zealand, if we're lost, we make a solid effort to figure out where we are for ourselves, and then, only when this proves impossible, do we pull into a gas station to ask for help. In Israel, people obviously drive around with no idea how to get where they want to go, but have no qualms about this because they can just ask someone while they are driving. It's so obvious! Who needs GPS?

3) Old people and their Thai or Filipina caregivers. Since the first and second Palestinian intifadas, Israel has brought in thousands of foreign workers to do all the low-paid jobs and manual labour that no-one else wants to do. This includes the job of being caregivers for very elderly and disabled people. Many times I would be sitting on a bench in a park or a Tel Aviv boulevard and see one such elderly person sitting limply in a wheelchair, perhaps having suffered from a stroke or degenerative illness, with a young Asian carer by their side. Sometimes there would be a whole group of them, because the caregivers would organise to get together with one another perhaps to break up the loneliness of being a stranger in a strange land. It made me a little sad to think about these two different groups of people, the immobile elderly and the foreign caregivers, each a little isolated from the people around them because of the barriers of language and the ability of the average passerby to, well, pass them by without any interest or interaction. One could write a much longer social commentary on this....

4) Ugly wedding dresses. If you find yourself in one of the more beautiful spots of Israel - like Neve Tzedek, the Bahai Gardens in Haifa, the ports of Akko or Yafo for example - in the late afternoon when the light is golden, chances are you'll stumble across at least half a dozen brides and grooms with their wedding photographer. And chances are that at least 60 percent of those brides will be wearing something that takes your breath away...with its utter hideousness. We're talking layer upon later of ruffly frills (like the kind you see on those decorative toilet-roll dolls), wench-like corset bodices, sometimes made from an attractive see through mesh (because everyone wants to see the bride's midriff on her wedding day, do they not?). My personal favourite was a blood-red dress, complete with the ruffles and bodice, not to mention black lace trimming and a bride-of-frankenstein hairdo to go with it. Now before you accuse me of being overly judgemental and insensitive towards tastes different from my own, please note that I deliberately did not take pictures out of respect for the fact that these people, on the happiest day of their lives, of course thought themselves to look beautiful. And I'm willing to accept that one woman's sense of what is hideous can be another's sense of what is beautiful.

There are lots of other scenes and images of course, but those are a few I really wanted to remember.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for these evocative word pictures, I can remember seeing similar scenes with the cats and the wedding photos. And i appreciate your writing these vignettes all the more because of the utterly infuriating frustration of not being able to download more than 5 seconds of your imovie without crashing my whole computer. You think you have wifi rage, try dialup rage!!!@#$%

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  2. Actually I have pictures of your FATHER also trying to make friends with those cats.Must be genetic.

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