Rules

There are many rules here.
I went to the beautiful, third largest Israeli city of Haifa with a friend I made in the Youth Hostel. (Now Ben has gone and I am a single girl on her own I am attracting "friends" by the dozen). We wanted to visit the Ba hai shrine. The Ba hai religion belives that Moses, Jesus, Buddha and Mohammad are fundamentally bearers of the same message. All I wanted to do was walk in the perfectly manicured gardens but... I had a vest top on so my shoulders were visible. We trapsed the city looking for a cheap top or shawl. Eventually I found something but I was annoyed that they had not let me off.
There is an obsession with women and clothes and by this I mean the "go go strip club" in Tel Aviv must be the exception rather than the rule. I was on the Jewish bus from the central bus station and it passed through the stetl of Me'a She'arim. A huge board on the way in shouted that all girls and women must dress modestly when passing through the area. There seemed to be no women in the area only orthodox male Jews clustered in small groups wearing black suits, white shirts, tassles, black shoes and hats. There were black and white posters in Hebrew everywhere and even a shoe shop selling nothing but black shoes for men!
The wall annoyed me today. I went to Bethlehem in the West Bank and wanted to visit Rachel's tomb (my namesake and wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph in the old testament). The wall was built such that it split Bethlehem from the outer reaches of the town where the tomb was. So, there were no Arab buses I could catch. I would have to go back to the checkpoint and then walk to the tomb. Having already been wandering all day I decided to give it a miss.
The wall annoyed me again today. I was on the bus back into Jerusalem and so we had to leave the West bank. The Israelis do not care who goes in but they care who comes out so when we arrived at the checkpoint we piled out our sherut, pulled out passports, had them checked by attractive, uniformed youngsters and then piled back on... only not everyone. There was a problem with one woman's identification and we had to wait for ages. After the wait of about 20 minutes I felt quite a comaradery with my fellow passengers!