Gold souk and Bruce begins work!

This is the gold souk we visited on Thursday. It turns out Thursday is the very worst time to go visit this area because there is so much traffic on the streets it's awkward for taxis to get to. The first taxi driver just pretended he didn't know what we were talking about - except we rang an Arab speaker and it's also in the most popular part of town so we now realise he just didn't want to be bothered getting through the traffic jams. Ha!
I didn't buy anything although there were a few nice pieces. I tried on a couple of rings $NZ200-$NZ400 and that was just with zirconias.
Bruce was really blessed with a free load of timber from the construction site across the road. He's making shelves and doing some building renovations at 'Holy Land Designs'.

Amman City

Across the road from the apartment we are temporarily staying is this huge building still under construction. There has been a few holdups - the crane fell over, a floor collapsed - killing a/some workers. Whew.. hope we're safe!

This was part of the old city siq / little shops we walked around this week. No shortage of fresh fruit and veges and a little cheaper than in NZ. We had lunch in a restaurant - at the table next to ours the people were munching away on half a goat's head each. I WASN'T tempted.

We walked around City Mall for 6-7 hours one day. At one end of a floor about 1/3 of it was a children's playground with bumper cars, merry go rounds, video games, roller coaster, whizzy things etc. We couldn't believe how amazing this place was! The Mall was 6 floors high but the prices were 6 times the prices I would pay!!!!

Jerusalem and Ramallah

This week we met an author, John Hulley who has been living in Jerusalem 27 years. Bruce bought an unpublished book off him. He took us to a Jewish Orthodox area. Many women wear wigs to cover their own hair - some time ago there was a pogram and the women shaved off their hair to make themselves look ugly but wore wigs in public. It was an interesting section of town we would never have seen. John was a very interesting person also.

These photos show the main streets in Ramallah. It is one hours bus ride from Bethlehem.

The men are always busy - solving the problems of the world!! Yeah right.