Last Tuesday I went to Haifa. I caught the bus 331 in the morning and arrived successfully at the central bus station.
I should note here that I really love exploring places by myself. I like being able to stop and take pictures, people-watch, change my plans minute to minute, and talk to strangers. So far this has been more or less impossible in Nazareth, where it is strange to see women acting very independently, and there aren't many women on the street. I feel very conspicuous.
So Haifa--an Israeli college town--seemed a good choice for exploring last Tuesday. I set out with a map from an outdated tourist information book and an abstract plan that would hopefully lead to a jog on the beach at some point.
The first sight of the day was the Dagon Grain Elevators, which are pretty fancy for storing grain if you ask me. Maybe they felt the need to pretty them up because of the other close-by attraction, the Baha'i Shrine and Gardens. These perfectly manicured gardens are breathtaking, and take up an entire hillside. Or perhaps I should say mountainside, considering this is Mt. Carmel. To add to the centuries of conflicting religious claims on this region, the Baha'u'llah (who founded the Baha'i religion) pitched a tent at the base of Mt. Carmel in 1891 and claimed it as a holy site for the Baha'i faith.
I stopped by the tourist information office, and the woman at the counter took a break from her lunch to say "Today is Purim. There's a childrens festival in Carmel." She headed back to the break room, satisfied that my needs were met, and I had to call her back out to find out what bus to take.
I had a few misunderstandings with the bus system, but at the first incorrect bus stop, I met an American Jewish couple staying with relatives during a conference in Haifa. They helpfully gave me directions to the festival. As we waited for the bus together, the couple remarked what a new and exciting feeling it was for them to be in a place where the majority of people are celebrating the same holidays and traditions they are.
I can identify with that feeling to some extent, and I understand how great it feels. Growing up as a Mennonite I felt a bit like a minority in the surrounding culture, until I went to Bethel College, that precious little microcosm of Mennonite life... Suddenly everything in my life revolved around a Mennonite-friendly vocabularly and set of traditions. Not only did I not have to explain that, no, I don't drive a buggy, but I was surrounded by other people raised on peace, justice, and zwieback... It's certainly exciting and pleasant to have a place where you feel so at home and so understood.
But any community with a strong majority cultural identity faces the challenge of how to celebrate the culture without excluding or marginalizing the minorities cultures. I think back to the number of conversations I had with people frustrated that, as much as Bethel touts "community," that community didn't usually seem to include them.
I will assume that your thoughts are going in the same direction as mine, thinking about this within the context of Israel, and I don't want to belabor this point, but I will just say: as much as I can understand the good feeling that comes from that feeling of belonging, the majority culture always needs to be sensitive to the exclusion, separation, and frustration for the "outsiders" that can happen as a result.
Oops, tangent. Back to Haifa.
Eventually I figured out it was time to get off the bus when I started seeing parents carrying tired little kids in costume. Just a block off the main street, on the promenade overlooking the port of Haifa, was what appeared to be a giant Halloween party, but we're not in the US, we're in Israel, and this is Purim.
Purim is the Jewish holiday celebrating the story of Esther. Esther hid her Jewish identity from the evil Haman, and so today this is a festival when kids dress up in costume. There was face-painting, a circle of little kids banging on giant drums, a stage where a woman dressed up as a fairy encouraged kids to share their singing and breakdancing skills, carnival food, an inflatable castle with a ball pit, and lots of awesome costumes. I was jealous that I could only be an observer, not a participant.
I eventually made my way over to the churches on Mt. Carmel, where a 70 year old man named Odi adopted me and insisted on giving me a tour of the entire church, including a maze of different chapels with statues of Mary, Jesus, or St. Elias. Sometimes all three. He insisted that I take pictures of all of the statues, and I obliged, but I won't share them all with you here. Our only language in common was my little bit of Arabic, and it took me an hour to gracefully extricate myself from his attentiveness. It was only later that I realized that, with my limited understanding, I nodded and smiled to a question he repeated over and over, and I had accidentally agreed to visit Odi again...
I took a cable car down from Mt. Carmel. I still wanted to take a run on the beach in Haifa, but the sun was down and it was time to head home (so yes, the picture at the top of this post is a lie, that was from a different trip to Haifa)... I wandered around looking for the train station marked on my map, and finally asked a local where the train station was. "This I can tell you with certainty," she answered, which seemed like a hopeful sign.
Unfortunately, her directions didn't work out so well for me. I ended up joining forces with a group of Chinese tourists also lost and looking for the train station, and then taking the train the wrong direction, pleading with the railroad management to let me go the two stops in the opposite direction with my one-trip ticket, waiting at a dark bus stop for an hour, and finally boarding a bus back home. I was the only one on the bus since it was the very first stop on the route, and I used my five words of Arabic to break the ice with the bus driver. He was very friendly and helpful, and after finishing our conversation, I promptly fell asleep for the drive home.
...Tomorrow is Tuesday again. What adventures await?!
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