Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Bulldozer Deja Vu

Backstory:
Three weeks ago (when we first arrived) there was an Israeli Arab construction worker who ran his bulldozer into a bunch of cars and buses on Jaffo street. Killed some people, hurt some people, scared everyone. It was also a big deal because he was an Israeli citizen, and there was a huge controversy about whether or not to demolish his house. And it was the second time an Israeli citizen perpetrated an attack in Jerusalem. (The first was the attack on the yeshiva in May.) So enough backstory.

Today (an hour and a half ago) there was a copycat attack. It was really close to HUC - on the same street, about a block away, in front of the King David Hotel, where Obama is going to be staying tonight. Anyway, so Josh and I get these texts asking us to confirm that we're ok, and we start hearing sirens. Of course, that's because we can actually see the King David Hotel from our kitchen window. Like so:

So that's a little scary, but seriously cool. We've been hearing sirens ever since, and now there are helicopters circling our neighborhood looking for the two suspects. Observe the helicopter directly overhead, as seen from our kitchen window:
So you might say life is interesting here. Of course, everyone adapts differently to living in a stressful environment. Not that it's that stressful; it's just high energy. But anyway, my adaptation mechanism is to think of living in Jerusalem as an adventure and get all excited about it. So I do things like run to the window to get photos of the helicopter. I think that's pretty functional, don't you?

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