Tripod

I’m writing this morning with a dry and scratchy throat and a pressurized sinus cavity. A couple from the Lutheran Church here is on home leave for a month, and I’m watching their sweet apartment and their manic-depressive three-legged cat while they’re out of town. So I put up with some allergies and in exchange get to live in downtown East Jerusalem with a double bed and a DVD player to play with.

M&M, my charge for these few weeks, has mastered the amputee thing quite well. He needs to get a good burst of momentum at the start of a movement in order to keep himself going without the help of a fourth leg. So you open a door, and this fur bomb comes shooting towards you. The marble floors plus his fur makes it difficult for him to stop, though, so he just crashes into door jambs or his water bowl or my legs. He’s also a biter and a scratcher. In short, the sympathy wears off quickly, especially when you’re mopping up his food and water that he’s sent flying for the third time in a day. He gets lots of points for coping skills, but not many for likeability.

M&M in repose.


M&M in action. (Notice the stump.)

This past weekend was the Taybeh Octoberfest Beer Festival, something you don’t pass up on if you’re in the area. “It’s a fun thing to do,” said my boss a few weeks ago. “And fun things don’t happen much over here.” Yes, it’s not common to find a Palestinian village where everyone is happy and most are slightly drunk, but once a year Taybeh, the only 100% Christian village in the West Bank, steps up to the task.

On Saturday we packed a car full of people (with room for the many cases of Taybeh that we brought home) and drove into the beautiful West Bank countryside and the intense late-summer heat to a town known for its Christians and its beer. The community center was swarming with most every international in the Jerusalem area, along with tapped kegs of Taybeh and various Palestinian vendors from area, selling Palestinian needlepoint, peace dove oil lamps and home-grown honey. (You can’t actually eat the comb, I learned…) A few school groups of debka dancers performed on the outside stage, preceded by a less-choreographed performance by one of the drunker locals grooving to the Arabic pop karaoke taking place next to one of the beer stands.

Shake what your momma gave you.




Taybeh Beer Factory



“Load ‘er up!”



There was a recent picnic for the hospital staff. They’re serious about meat-eating here.

Roman Holiday

Woah there.

That’s not the Middle East.

No, I left behind the desert and went to Italy for a week. Besides a lot of pasta, a lot of gelato and a lot of walking, there aren’t loads of details, just pictures. Here are some from Rome:

Romulus and Remus and their she-wolf Momma


This Bernini bust of Medusa is considered not his best work. But they’re fixing her up anyways.


I always thought this was in Greece. Turns out it’s not.


The Marcus Aurelius statue in the Capitoline Museum. That’s my travel pal, Phil, gawking.


Typical Rome.


Typical gelateria.


The Colloseum.


Trevi Fountain.


“What is that smell?”


The Appian Way was the road leading out of ancient Rome, along which wealthy Romans built their mausoleums.


Here’s me trying to recreate one of those 17th century paintings where aristocrats would dress up as peasants and pose in pastoral settings, reading, playing cards, or being awoken by rosy-cheeked shepherd boys. You know, how peasants lived.

Some from Vatican City, which sort of counts as its own country, seeing as they have their own postal service:


Cherubambino.


Nothing wrong with a little holy wine. Me, with the wine-in-a-box you can buy at the Vatican cafeteria, and Bacchus, in the Vatican Museum.


The popes have been hoarding art for centuries now, and just pack the halls full.


Catholic kitsch? You’re in the right place.


Vatican City by night, over the Tiber River.

A Moroccan man was running the hostel where we stayed in Florence. When I heard him counting out my change in Arabic I started talking to him a bit. (I'm relieved to find I can communicate with dialects other than Jerusalem's.) “I knew you were Arab!” he said triumphantly. “I could tell from your eyes!” Here are a couple from Florence:



Here's a security guard locking up Lorenzo Ghiberti's doors to the Florence Baptistry.




The Arno River, which flows through E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View. A recommended read.

And finally:

Weird, right? The uncanny resemblance between this Velasquez portrait in the Vatican Museum and former Backstreet Boy Kevin Richardson.