Everything anew...

Not only does this week mark the end of my tenure with my current employer that I've worked for the past three years, it also marks the beginning of my last semester, the universe willing, of course work for the MFA. No matter how I try and wrap my brain around this one I can't help but think "wow!" so much is going on and I'm trying to shed my corporate persona and be a free thinker and academcian. I'm 30 minutes from the start of my class and for the next three hours I have to remind myself that DSNs, ESPs, DSPs, RFCs, bounce codes, headers, smtp and the rest of it has little to no bearing on what we'll be discussing. I don't know if I've been lazy with my schooling over the last year or what the exact deal is, but I've done this dance between the academic and the corporate for 10 years in one capacity or another, and it's becoming steadily harder to flip the switch and remove myself from one venue and into another... I need to write a poem tonight, if I don't get too smashed as I'm due back in the "fray" once class lets out. Once more unto the breach... once more.

It's begun....

I've known for a long time now, well longer than I can consciously recall that this city is kind of the home of the Irish coffee, and if you were to pinpoint the spot where the irish coffee was born, you would say "The Buena Vista" in Fisherman's Wharf/Cannery. Well I was there tonight, and before I went there we drank a half bottle of Jewel of Russia Ultra, and when we got there we had drank the obligatory Irish Coffee, but after that its a blur, there were shots of Jaeger, Surfers on Acid, Baby Guinnesses, lemon drops, and did I mention the surfers on acid, there was the three wise men that came to visit and more shots of Jaeger, and yes, Arvil was there, so in essence we're all fucked. There was someone, names withheld to protect the innocent, that had to be put in a cab home, but he's ok, or will be, or maybe, when tomorrow rolls around, but yes, it's begun and we're all fucked... need i say more?

It's the dream that bothers me...

One might say that everything is back to normal. I'm listening to Jeno on 90hz.org spin his unique and magical flavor of free-form-funk, dishing up rhythms that remind me of wild nights a decade ago in the city that I'm now living in. The commute, if you can call it that, was always to a favorite tape that ran the gamut from 120 to 160 bpm (that's beats per minute). Homeward bound was more like Bob Marley speed, but that's understandable after you spent an entire night dancing on borrowed energy.

I'm not sure what's keeping me up now, I should be getting quite tired and although I know I could probably mosey into my bedroom and find a kind of solace in a little death, sleep rather, I've been putting off this final post, the summation, the report from dream land, not nearly as bold as Greco, simpler than that really, let's just say I'm keeping my word to Erez when he asked me, a few days before I left: "so are you going to write your thoughts?" I meant to write this the week after I returned; I thought it might be a good kind of therapy locked in the smoky chamber of my Portland hotel room. The summary, or the bottom line if you will, is impossible to do, and when my body and brain couldn't agree on either a time zone or desire for one, writing was unfathomable. I'm home now, and I've given up pretending that I'm in the oriental east, near the central Asian land of my home, or as near as I've ever been. Yeah, I gave that one up a while back, I'm here, with small mementos of my trip: a kitchen cabinet that smells strongly of tea I brought back from the shouk in Jerusalem, a couple kippas, one for my brother Ilya who I haven't seen yet since my return, books from the Israeli National Art Museum in Tel Aviv from the Femme Fatal and Reuven Ruben exhibits, a shofar on my dresser that Zach asked me to bring him back, the ticket stub from Mayumana and the double CD collection of Meir Ariel that still on my desk. I've played Metropolin more than a few times since I ripped it into my itunes and transferred it to my ipod, or as Oren calls it "the new American passport." Last night Rachel and her cousin Shai who is here from Israel came to see me, it was nice to hear a "familiar" accent; last week she roped me into giving Shai some pointers on digital photography for a job opportunity he has to become a photographer in night clubs for a new website. I don't know if I was terribly helpful, other than providing him an idea of the kind of gear he'll need in order to pull this off. I wish him luck, I mean come on, besides an assassin for hire I think my other dream job would be national geographic photographer. It really is the same thing when you think about it, one requires you point and press a trigger to "steal souls", the other includes triggers too, one's just messier than the other, you know?

Is it nice being home? I don't know, I think it is. I've been happily united with my turn tables and find myself mixing little flips of three and four records at a time. Maybe they'll congeal into a nice 13-15 record set that I may even record, rather than leave in the air like a Zen rock garden to be plowed over when I open the window. The cat is out of the bag at the office; my boss sent out an email that I'm leaving the company. The response has been rather interesting. Thinking back on the last 11 years of my corporate life I've only left 1 other job willingly, read: not being laid off, and that departure was rather sudden due to circumstances having to do with my need in the new position "yesterday". This change feels like a slight shift in career path, I mean I'm staying in the industry, but I'm changing sides, like defecting from the KGB to the CIA. You have to excuse all these metaphors and allusions to intelligence, I just came back from the movies, I went to see "The Good Shepherd", and well, I thought it was excellent, slow, and not to everyone's taste. I suppose you have to have an inherent love for all that cold war intrigue and espionage that nearly ended the world. Then again, seems like having the "red scare" was far more, in hindsight, tolerable than the unknown enemies of today. At least we knew then from which direction the missiles would be coming. Has our world become more complicated? Or are we simply falling into a kind of solipsistic belief that our world is more complicated and everything is so much more important? Isn't this just a digital replay of the analog world to some degree? Eh, who knows...? I'm really not writing what I should be writing about.

How shall we begin? The basics? Israeli's are travelers. Living in a country the size of, oh um, I don't know, Rhode Island requires one to travel to keep a kind of claustrophobia at bay. However, within this tiny spit of holy land you have numerous climates, forests and deserts, hills, mountains, large bodies of water and the potential that any rock you kick might turn out to be a piece of the ark of the covenant or missing pieces of gospel or mosaic law. That's one of the things that I adore about that country, the possibilities. My mother is fond of saying "look what they built in just 60 years", yes, 58 years to be precise, that's how old the country is, but the land and the native populations are much older. Yet the similarity to the United States, the mixtures, are astounding. We like to think of ourselves as a melting pot, but I ask you, where in this country do you meet a waitress that is half Moroccan, half German and speaks 7 or 8 languages? I heard her screaming in the kitchen, or more like whining at a Russian cook in Russian. She spoke Hebrew to Erez and dropped a few words of German when I decided to exercise what little rust there is in my brain of my childhood language studies. Yeah, similar but different.

There are so many small "warmths" to remember from my trip, from the flowers that Michal brought me on my last night in Tel Aviv to the phone call from Rela on my first night in Jerusalem, consequently, if you're reading this Rela, do say hello, it's ok, the blog doesn't bite back, I promise. Although the weather didn't reflect the hospitality, it was ok, sometimes you need a contrast in order to fully appreciate where you are and what you have on hand. Like I said, other than prevent me from doing something insane like buying gear at Diezengoff mall and heading into the Negev backpacking, it didn't deter us too much. Speaking of which, when I say that Israelis love to travel, point and case: at the mall there are a pair of outdoor shops, smaller versions of our REI or Any Mountain, there was a class being held on traveling through south America. All the attendees were late teens to early 20s, I imagine fresh out of the Army or soon to be released, and ready for a little adventure, the broadening of their horizons and perhaps the necessary soul searching to decide what to do at the University upon their return. Frankly, I like this system much more, other than the bit about having to serve in the military, and even this I understand to a degree, the idea that at 18 one has to decide what they are to become seems a little strange. Here I am in my early 30s and still trying to decide what I'm to become by living between the two fires of my corporate existence and moonlighting in the academic world. Sometimes I wish one would widow me so I could fully embrace the other.

These are the memories I think I want to keep in my pocket, or maybe like a candy cane or a package of mints: kube soup in Jerusalem, the way that Shosh says "Aliya", Michal's laugh, listening to Irina call Erez a goat in Russian for waking her up and making her go to see Mayumana with me, the feeling of breathing air for the first time when you finally exit Yad Vashem, the color of the Mediterranean around Caesarea, the sunrise over the Dead Sea, Yoram's stories about San Francisco in the late 70's, Misha and Nella's panic room, Erez's fluidity and planning, the country western bar in the middle of nowhere but really near Ashdod, the B'hai temple at night, the fact that it snowed in Jerusalem the day I landed, Kippa man, the Yemmenite witch doctor, a Mitzrahi dance club, Israel's whiskey a-go-go, grilled haloumi sandwiches from Aroma, Nili's charming sarcasm and how she allowed me to smoke in her place whenever I was jonesing, the candles of the children's memorial, Guy's sense of humor and cinema knowledge, Shai's love for food and his attempts to describe Rachmo, Eilad's generosity for the aforementioned tickets, Itimar's stories of his first apartment with Erez complete with rats busses and psychotic lunatics, Yafo by night, the old city at night, cab drives with their free opinions and occasional historic tirades, the sun behind the olive columns at Rammat Rachel, floating floating and floating in salt, 2 hours of nearly clear skies without rain at Masada, labone with olive oil and zatar and even the shop keeper in the old city that said "all san franciscans are cheap" when I didn't want to see his shop and goods. Yeah, even he's an integral part of my memories.

I can't do it, I can't really say what I think about that place, I'm not done with it, that's for certain. I've always held this theory, and here you have to forgive me for being a romantic, I assure that I'm completely dead inside, my room mate in Russia for the last two years, the illustrious James Boobar, professor of heavy metal novel writing and Dostoyevsky, will attest to this fact. However, I've had this long standing belief that falling in love means that you are forever sacrificing an integral part of your heart, or soul, some small corner of you is no longer yours. Now you're not completely bereft of this morsel of being, no, it's just stained with another person. There is that smell, the smell of other people, hell at times, thank you Sartre, but this hell can be the most exhilarating sensation that starts in your nose, travels down to your mouth in tiny traces causing you to salivate. It then courses in vapors through your stomach where it twists with hunger even though you've just eaten. The particles now in your blood stream venture out at bullet train speeds into your appendages until you find your toes curling in your shoes, trying to grip the ground in case Newton was wrong. That stain that is the result of "other" may very well be possible in regard to "place". I know a part of me is forever wearing the dirty cobble stone streaks of three summers in St. Petersburg. Although my liver and my lungs cringe at the thought of spending another four weeks undergoing cruel and unusual punishment, the stain needs to remember where its odor comes from. Well I have a new stain, one that will probably need a "refresher". There are still so many parts of the country that I haven't seen and am dying to see: the Golan’s, the Galilee, the Negev, the Red Sea, Éclat, maybe I'll venture out into the Sinai if things simmer down a bit, or finally make it up to the temple mount and take that close-up of The Dome of The Rock. Whatever the case may be, I'll be back.

Ben asked me if I had done any writing while I was over there. Blogging as we all know is a way to avoid writing, or the kind of writing that we at times need to do. In my case the writing I refer to is editing, and specifically editing Not Us Not Them. It's sitting here on my desk, I dug it up, for the specific purpose of editing it. No Ben, I didn't write much, or not at least the kind of writing that translates into poetry or new material, but I think I helped myself find the need to go back in time and finish something I started.

Parting thoughts...

Last post before taxi arrives... next post will be from the good ol' u s of a... about The Dead Sea and what not... but for now... this...

It's time
off track
the business
of
security
trade-
ers
in the bone
white
sleight
of hand
what
peace
purchased
for
mind
if scorned
the price
traffiked
stood
guard
careful
vigil
in
disinterest
after all
what
noblesse
obliges
the mighty
to wall
keep
us all
outsid-
ers
to harm.

Art Museum
Tel Aviv
12.27.06

This is the olive column sculpture/statue/project at the kibutz, Rammat Rachel, or Rachel's Kibutz. It sits ontop of a hill on the edge of Jerusalem and an Arab village. From this place you can see a good chunk of that Judean desert. The trip to the columns happened thanks to a suggestion by Oren. He thought that I might dig the spot, I can't agree more, I mean I was in love up there. It was the first and only time I felt truly alone anywhere in Jerusalem. The city is shit! Yeah, I said it, the city is a pile of shitty stones that 2000 years of civilization have shat upon and created the mess that it is today. A bedouin cab driver might've said it the best: "the orthodox make the war, Arab and Jew." I think he might have a point, really, now don't get me wrong, I love Jerusalem, I really do, I mean I really enjoyed my time there and hanging out with Oren, but after today's drive through Maah Shaarim, the ultra orthodox neighborhood, I've decided fully, I hate them, I really do. Maah Shaarim is about as much a part of Jerusalem as Xanadu is a real place in the Coleridge's poem. It is an ugly ugly corner of the city where Ashkenaz Haceedes have settled and recreated a 200 year old Polish ghetto. There are signs over the arch ways that lead to the courtyards of these insular communities that forbid unmodestly dressed women from entering. The people within these walls do not serve in the army but demand the greatest protection. It seems like a bum rap for the average Israeli, if you ask me, who pays their stipends from the government for being holy and spending their days by the wall praying, not serving in the army, and having demonstrations, somewhat as potentially violent as across the line in that other Palestine, about the Meshiach, who according to prophecy will never arrive until there's a new temple. Well to build the temple on would have to obliterate Al Aqsa Mosque and the absolutely beautiful Dome of the Rock. Sounds like a plan no? Only the dome is the 2nd holiest site, behind Mecca, in all of Islam. Funny how it landed right here, in the middle of this mad mad city. It's a lovely city really, I mean dirty like any other major city, confused streets and what not, but lovely, except not. Let's think about this really... the rabinic movement, from what I've read in history, sprang up as a response to the destruction of the 2nd temple in 53 c.e. At this point the priesthood of ancient Jerusalem was effectively whiped out, thus new leaders were necessary and a group of "teachers" or rabbis took the reigns. This changed the fundamental face of Judaism. Another change came in the codification and preservation of commentary on the Torah in the form of the Mishna and Gemorah. This happened about 100 years after the destruction of the 2nd temple during an insurrection that left many of the Judeans dead in the wake of Roman reprisals. I've deviated from my original point, but if the Priesthood died and gave way to this new form of Judaism and heirarchy within, why the desire for the meshiach, he can't come unless there's a temple and a priesthood to welcome him as prophecy goes. This would end the rule of the Rabbis, wouldn't it? Or, do the Rabbi's become the new millenium's priests? Hm... I don't know, but I know that there'd be someone who would would stand to benefit from an all out war over the temple mount. That's for certain, cause that's the only way you get to build a new temple, is to get rid of what's there. Besides, what is the meshiach coming to deliver the jews from?

Ok, enough pontificating and back to my tales... so on my second visit to the wall, this was the next day after Oren took me of a night time tour of Jerusalem... I stopped and bought a kippa from Kippa Man, a shop, realy, I'm not lying, just down from Zion Square. He had a lovely selection, and I didn't care for the paper Kippa that kept falling off my head. So I figured I might as well add it to my walking kit of supplies that I'm going to refer to as my Jerusalem Survival Pack:

-Kippa or Yarmulke
-Pop out map of old city (know your quarters)
-Cigarettes & lighter (non child proof... yeah!)
-Coinage in the pocket
-Sense of direction
-Lonely Planet guide
-Camera and tripod
-Something to chew
-A sense of humor about these things
-Steinbeck, he reads well abroad.
-Warm Jacket, hat and scarf... just 'cause for the last one...

So as I approached the wall a bearded man sprang forth and said "Anglit? English?"

"yes, I speak english, do you speak russian?"

"No, hebrew and some anglish" smilling

he stuck out his hand and took hold of my slightly unwilling hand, the last time I gave my hand, a fat bearded man tied a red string to it and demanded money.

"blah blah blah (<---insert Hebrew prayer if at all here) Are you married?"

"No"

"well you should get married as soon as possible and have as many children as possible"

"Thanks, but I like where I am."

"Would you like to donate some money to the poor of Jerusalem?"

"No thanks, I'm a student, I'm poor." while wrenching my hand free of his grip and the eyes of his two pesa wearing children clustered around him. I glanced down at his shoes and noticed that they were some sort of dark Italian, and expensive something or other. He himself didn't have pesa, and the rest of his garb was, almost humble and even a little unkept, as if it was all sort of intentional. Yeah, it was at this point that my fascination with these quakers that will stone you for driving through their hood during shabat completely faded and became an active disdain.

Still, I truly didn't want this to deter me from enjoying what is otherwise an amazing city. The three most popular tourist attractions in Israel are Yad Va-Shem (holocaust memorial), the Wailing Wall and Masada (which I saw this morning.)



Now Yad Va-Shem is a truly amazing piece of memorium... I found it far more gripping and fascinating, and less disneylandish than the holocaust memorial in DC, I hate that one, avoid it at all costs. If you want to see something done well with both an impact and a sense of subteltey about it then go see the glass towers in Boston, those are lovely and poignant. However, Yad Va-shem... well even I felt a little weary in the heart by the end. The building is a giant triangle with rooms radiating off. You start at what is the beginning, a series of burned documents found on some victims, photos, remnants of their earthly life. From there you go back in time exploring historic examples and laws that formed the 20th century basis for anti-semitism, there are artifacts dating back to the medieval ages, and earlier, examples of laws that prevented Jews from holding office, barring them from living in certain places etc. etc.

The path of history weaves in and out of he main hall of the triangular building, the ceiling of which is a long piece of sectioned glass. As you weave left and right across the triangle, always advancing, you move rom the early 30s to 1938 and Kristallnacht, then the invasion of Poland, France and finally the all out war after Hitler decides he canfight the Russians in the East and the British and American's on the western front. You weave in and out of Warsaw and learn the history of the liquidation of the ghetto and the uprising which caught the Nazis off guard as Jewish rebels refused to go peacefully into that good night and fought in the ghetto until it was set on fire to root them out. From there it becomes ever more grizzly and you learn names that you never knew before, stories, video monitors present testimony, pictures drawn on 60 year old wax paper of ghostly figures standing in long lines of prison fatigues, already the walking dead, act as silent witness.

There's a model toward the end of the path, before the circular room of testimony, that Claude Lanzman used in his epic documentary, Shoah. I remember how well it was used in the film to demonstrate a kind of tragedy that can't be truly understood, or as Giorgia Agamben said, in Remnants of Auschwitz, to truly bear witness is to have perished in that place, so the witness isn't a true witness per say but a kind of leftover memory that hasn't come to the point of witness as it hasn't died. Death is the witness all others are survivors. Witness the act of survival, I suppose, that's a way you can look at it. Anyway, i don't want to talk about Agamben, he's problematic, but he came to mind when I began to think about Lanzman. There are snippets of Jan Karski's testimony in Shoah, he snuck into the Warsaw ghetto before its liquidation. He was working for the Polish government in exile as a courier and tried to warn people then of what was happening. He took a piece of that prison out with him hoping to rally sympathy that would turn into action, but that came too little too late for many...



You step outside and take flight. The image above is of the flight that you take, your spirit soars, perhaps in nothing more than sympathy, for the experience, and is liberated and perhaps rejoined with a lost relative/ancestor. The concrete walls of the complex become a kind of ramp from which you can fly and gaze out on the world outside. It's a really beautiful moment you can have there at the end, well planned I think.



The hall of names is a series of photographs over a hole in the ground, the circular room is surrounded by pages and pages of testimony from the survivors and their families. There are empty shelves, the book isn't closed per say, and there are stories to be collected about those that perished, stories about a civilization nearly destroyed and wiped out completely.

However, the one that really got me, was the children's memorial:



This one really cuts to the quick. You down a path and into a hallway that gets really dark really quick. Then into a room which is filled with candles and mirrors where you walk in a circle, as a voice reads the names of children killed in the holocaust in English and Hebrew. This one just sends chills up your spine, while the pseudo night of that room brings peace at the same time. It is a really moving and beautiful piece of work. Nothing can ever be enough for those that perished, and these things are really for the living, I'm not sure that they have a point at all, maybe Aeschylus said it best in his play, The Persians: "Death is long and without music."

New Year in Jerusalem was a mellow event. Oren and I met in the early evenning and travelled to Tanya's, class mates of his from the architecture program. We had some beer, some honey pepper vodka, a few cigarettes some laughs and then left to meet Sharon at the flat in Nachlot. From there it was off to this couple who live up the street for a quick l'cheim and a spot of Chocolate fondue and then off to Pacotek, a moving party, which was happening in some theatre. Well, we stood in line for about a half hour waiting to get in, to no avail. The party was effectively full and the door was shut. We rang in the new year in line, I called my folks, and we continued to wait. All of a sudden, something caused the entire crowd to turn around to the street behind us... a car came speeding by and someone from the window screamed "Allah Aqbar!!!!!" at full volume... this gave me an instant chill, but nothing came of it, just that moment, eh... I figure I have no room to complain or even express fear. I don't live here, and the tension that is in the air in Jerusalem is lived with by others on a day to day basis, so I don't feel quite right in saying it was a nervous moment, it was a moment that's not part of the quotidian as I know it. we left the line and took a cab back to down town and found a bar where we toasted the New Year, Oren got drunk off 1 beer and 1 chaser, yeah, shots are chasers, i know, it's completely backward, but Nili says this of the country all the time, so I'm ok with repeating it... so chasers are shots, and you chase your beer with the shot... wooooo....

Last day in Jerusalem was a blast and also the universe telling me it was time to go. The night before we tried to go eat Rachmo, it was closed, then we went to another place for the Kube soup, they had just served their last bowl... it was getting depressing this just out just closed thing... oh yeah, the Jerusalem mix place, up the street in Nachlot, relative died, family went to Greece, denied again... I might've mentioned this below, I can't remember now. So The museum, the National Museum in Jeruslame, with the dead sea scrolls, yeah, that was closed for the morning when I arrived. So I packed it up, after calling Oren and telling him G-d wants me out of Jerusalem, and headed to the gate at the Western Wall, I walked down the road into east Jerusalem and down to the garden of Gesthemene with the thousand plus year old olive trees, gorgeous I tell you, gorgeous... they'll be up shortly, so check back for infra red pics.

The church in Gesthemene was having mass so I stood around for a bit and watched it... Too many people were coming in and out to setup the tripod and take a picture, its not an old church, rather new actually, there's a Russian orthodox one above it up the slope of the mount of olives with golden domes, quite lovely and just on the other side of the road from the garden and the ancient olive trees, supposedly bearing witness to Jesus, (consequently, did you know that Olive trees can live forever? they only way to kill them is to uproot them and burn their roots, otherwise they're kind of like turtles... well, sorta, or redwoods, there, more like redwoods... giant ones) there's a grotto and sepulchre which is where Mary is supposed to have died, now we all know that she's burried in paris at the Louvre, the Da Vinci code told us as much... right? It too is a lovely place to walk down and pics are coming as soon as I have time to work on them....

Oh but realy quickly, on my last day, this was after the shlep to the olive trees etc... I went to the Shook, market, with Oren and Sharon, we made the Rachmo place, fantastic... and then they too me to see this Yemenite, the local witch doctor. People come with all kinds of problems, he gives them village remedies. He makes a kind of juice of herbs and roots, it's interesting stuff, can't say its great, but its not bad. He asked to see my hands when I came up to him, then he started putting stuff on them... he must've sensed I hate lotion... cause he made me put it on... and the smell of his home made lotion lasted with me all day long, not terrible, but not my favorite scent in the world... still, he was an amazing guy, you could just tell, there was something about him... realy.

I think I'm going to end this here, and tell the rest of the tale, which includes a soak in the Dead Sea and a trip up to Masada, another day, fingers are tired and I want to relax a bit before we head out to see a show tonight: the Israeli version of stomp... May Umana...

Back in the 'viv

I came back to Tel Aviv this afternoon and set around to upload more pictures to Flickr. Jerusalem is a not to distant memory at the moment. I have to start this by saying a very big toda, spacebo, swadi kap, danke, mili grazi, mahalo, gracias and THANK YOU to Oren and Sharon for putting me up for the last three nights at their extraordinarily charming Nachlot loft. It was intimate and cozy, but it offered me a centrally located base camp from which to explore Jerusalem. I think though, yeah, I'm quite positive, that Jerusalem didn't want me there for some reason. Here are several examples of why I think this: the jerusalem mix restaurant, aunt died and they closed to go to greece for the funeral, National Museum of Israel was closed, just this morning, it rained for the first two days I was there, we tried to eat Kube soup yesterday, restaurant ran out as we arrived, we trid to get into Pacotek for NYE, we waited for a half hour and they stopped letting people in, when we finally made it to "rachmo" they ran out of the white kube soup, basically, the way I can express this is that it was a series of unfortunate events and near misses, but you know, all in all, it was still an amazing time. Saying that I scratched the surface of Jerusalem would be a lie, I think I would need a week in that city to do that, however, I do feel as though, from the standpoint of culinary ecstacy, I didn't do all that bad. I'll get to that a bit later. There are a number of stories that must be related, but I'm genuinely tired... actually a little exhausted. I plan to set aside time tomorrow morning to write at the cafe, and or from here before gong to breakfast. I'll spill some beans, some thoughts and those darling little observations that are still sticking in my brain, in the mean time you should go and see the photos from Netanya of my family, Haifa of erez's family and Caesarea, an ancient Roman port built during the time of Herod.

There'll be more pictures and posts come the morrow... leila tov.