Culture shock: Jerusalem's wild cats

Now it's the kitten's turn

Winky waits while her pal hogs the tuna 

Culture shock: Cats

I miss my cats. I used to hate cats and then I found a stray by the road in 1986 and took him home, then he charmed another into the house in 1987 and now they are attached to me, hip and thigh. I don't think of myself as a cat person; I am a dog person first and always. As my kids would say, "Yeah, Mom."

Here in Jerusalem cats are everywhere and they're all strays. Wild cats, feral and mean. They live in hedges and garbage cans and back alleys. When we moved into this building, I saw lots hanging around the garden - at least eight cats and three or four kittens. One day I discovered the dirty secret of my neighbour across the hall, Judy. I caught her Feeding the Cats. She was shaking a big bag of dry cat food into small bowls lining the side of the building where no one goes - it's where they store the gas canisters for the stoves and dryers in the flats. Judy even has bottles of water hidden under there and pours out bowls for the cats.

"Everyone hates me doing this," she admits. "But a friend helps me. We took all the cats to get spayed and the black cat had a terrible infection in her eye so the vet had to remove it. Now we call her Winky." Feeding time every day is 10 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. Judy doesn't like to feed just any old cat - only the ones she had fixed and has cared for. There are five in all. She shoos away interlopers and kittens but all they do is wait in the weeds and amble back when the Big Five are done to finish off the bowls. Judy is generous so there is plenty for all.

The cats have figured out I am another soft touch. I have discovered they like weiners, cheese, chicken livers, milk. Anything I toss down from the window is a thrill and they hunt madly for stuff that lands in the shrubs. Someone should tell my cats at home who won't touch anything except rare steak and Trout Feast.

I bought $40 worth of cat treats at the pet store (grocery stores, see below, don't sell animal food) so they emerge from under the bushes and trees to see what I have every time I come downstairs. Like Judy I try not to let the neighbours catch me when I bring down some food.

The kittens are now the most aggressive. This morning when I dumped a bag of trash in the building's garbage bin I nearly brained three of them but they scrambled out with no hard feelings., knowing I had some salmon treats in my pocket. A few days ago when we went to some friends for afternoon tea I told them about the cats. "Everyone feeds cats," they said. "But they never admit it."

Next door to our apartment is the world's smallest grocery store with all the necessities and many luxuries including the Herald Tribune; Danny is the nice grocer. 

Culture shock: groceries

Pretty mundane task, buying groceries, but here in Jerusalem it takes some getting used to. I think that's a polite euphemism for believing that Israel is a kind of like home except for the Hebrew, the weather, the buildings, the plants, the Ultra Orthodox, the views and the drivers.

The truth is that buying groceries in Jerusalem is an experience. I haven't decided yet if it is good or bad, but when I get home I always have a nap afterwards.

Here's what I find:

Israelis love tuna salads and tuna sandwiches so you'd think buying tuna would be easy. Yes, they have it on the shelves in the stores, but oh my god it's Starkist. Starkist Tuna, the first of the tumbling scandals that finally destroyed the Conservative Party in Canada in 1993. That skunky tainted tuna from Canada that wasn't good enough to eat at home so it all got shipped off to other countries especially Israel if what I see on the shelves is anything to go by. The tuna scandal that got Fisheries Minister John Fraser fired. I decide to try one can. Inside is what I feared - brown, fumey tuna in chunks. Ugh. I scrape into a foil pan and take it downstairs to the garden, home of five wild cats led by one-eyed Winkie who all fight over it.

The meat and fish in most of the grocery stores we've been to - including the big fancy supermarkets - is almost all frozen and it's all kosher. It lies there in grim, unappealing slabs. To our relief, our Israeli friends tell us not to buy it. They've told us where to buy non-kosher meat so we trudge over to the German Colony where a chunky old guy in a tiny shop called Diplomat has some meat in his big stainless fridges. He demands to know what we want but doesn't let us see what's in there - he opens the door a crack, edges sideways and reaches in to pull out some steaks or a bit of chicken. He says he has ham, salami and bacon too. It takes him thirty minutes to find, wrap and sell 250 grams of salami, 250 grams of ham and two chicken breasts.

There are a few supermarkets around and hardware stores, but I can't find the one thing I crave - a Swiffer. Our apartment has pale stone floors, beautiful crud magnets. David goes home and brings back a new Swiffer and two boxes each of wet and dry cloths. I have a happy morning Swiffering every room. He brings back the biggest jar of Skippy I've ever seen; we can buy it here but it's like gold dust. To make a pot of tea for one, I have to use six Israeli bags so David also brings Canadian tea bags, three times the size of the ones here.

Cereal comes in boxes so small that four bowls uses it all up.

We can use a VISA card here for anything. At the supermarkets we hand over a VISA and they ask if we want the payments spread over three months. We spent a couple of hundred dollars at an Office Depot last week and again, did we want to spread the payments? Apparently before big holidays, they'll spread payments over ten months. That way lies perdition.

What's good makes up for what's bad. Israeli jam, whatever kind it is we're buying, is extraordinary; sometimes we go through two jars a week. Same goes for fruit juice. Fruit and vegetables are the pride of every grocery - always fresh, gorgeous, plentiful. Because they're growing the bananas just a few miles away, they aren't banged up and bruised. The grapes, melons, oranges, passion fruit, baby pineapples and pears are all delicious; only the strawberries, fat and perfect like those from California, are disappointing but that's because we live in Ontario which has the best strawberries in the world.

Dairy products are just fine. We buy great Turkish coffee from Danny next door, a grocer who runs one of these little hole-in-the-walls stores you see all over the city - you could walk by and miss it but inside his little cave there are fresh sesame crusted rolls every morning, good yogurt, that fabulous jam, dishwasher detergent and the International Herald Tribune. Danny doesn't do fruit; the guy at the other end of our street does fruit.

Everyone also does pistachios, salted pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds. Taxis drivers seem to do nothing but chew and spit seeds all day as they drive; when they stop for a snack it's more seeds. Coffee wherever is wonderful - rich, fresh, dark and with hot milk and foam everywhere including gas stations - but in their homes, people here seem to have an appalling fondness for instant. Arab pastries are weird to our taste but quite fun to buy because of the excitement of buying them off hot grill pans and eating them with a thimble of Turkish coffee.

Here's what everyone seems to eat when they go out for lunch: salad. A salad in Israel will feed a family of eight. Most of the ones we've ordered come with stuff we're not used to which doesn't mean it's bad. Such as sauteed sweet potato, shredded, sliced, chunked. A wide variety of seeds. Raisins. Cheese, nuts, who knows? Or salad can mean a salad buffet so you choose a spoonful of shredded this or fried that. Then there is the endless discussion about the best hummus and where to buy it.

What we love to do is go to the Arab quarter of the Old City or the Jewish Market, Mahane Yehuda (rebuilt and rather fancy since the bombing a few years ago), and buy from vendors. We hunt for places where they're grilling lamb on a spit or twirling shwarma; they'll add diced tomatoes and cucumbers, some mild pickles, shredded lettuce, mayo and hummus, stuff it all in a pita and send us on our way, happy.

It's still not summer here; the evenings are cool and breezy and our apartment radiators bang and whistle every night trying to keep us warm. But people tell us we're only a week away from hot weather and that means vendors with freshly squeezed orange juice every fifty feet.

The Negev: a birder's paradise

A swirl of storks

A Bedouin camp in the desert; migrating storks on their way to Africa; watch out for wandering camels; sheep and goats in a Bedouin valley 

Fruit trees in blossom, acres of pink and blue flowers and wild tulips on the way south 

Flowers, birds, sheep and camels on the way to the Negev Desert

It was overcast and cool yesterday, perfect weather for a quick toot to the Negev and the Dead Sea before heat and tourists make it less than perfect. Besides, we wanted to see the spring flowers that we've heard so much about. We drove south through hilly forest and farm land, enjoying the fields of bloom, marvelling in the long green views of deep valleys.

What we didn't expect at all were the birds along the way. I wonder if there is a Roger Tory Peterson for Israel because I recognize none of them. Most exciting was a swirl of fifty or so large birds high above us when we reached Mitzpe Masua, an area of open farmland just past the Keren Kayemet forests south-west of Jerusalem. I immediately thought of vultures and figured they were gathering the clan for a feast of dead cow or sheep. But they didn't look quite like vultures...

When we got home I found several excellent websites for birders in Israel, compared my fast digital snaps out of the car window - and concluded that what we'd seen were migrating storks on their way from Africa to Europe. (Black storks or white storks, we couldn't tell - they were too high.) We learned that Israel sees more bird migrations than any other country because it is in the centre of bird migration from Africa and Asia to Europe and back. March is one of the best times to see these birds in flight and what we caught were storks riding the thermals on their way to Europe for the summer. Eilat, at the southernmost tip of the country, is one of the most famous birdwatching centres in the world and birders come here just for that, ignoring the historic sites entirely.

The Negev itself surprised us; greener by far than we remembered from previous trips. It looked like Manitoba or Saskatchewan for a long while ... and then, finally, the miracle of massive drip irrigation ended and the real desert began, where the only inhabitants were flocks of sheep and goats along with occasional camels, kept by impoverished Bedouin tribesmen living in shanties and plastic tents or leans-tos of corrugated metal scraps.

Sights of the Old City

Tourists are starting to come back - as the crowds at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre attest; Armenian pottery on display; Ultra Orthodox Jews going home after visit to the Western Wall