From The Cemetery To The Old City

With my girlfriend and her mum, I visited East Jerusalem for the first time which felt to me like a home from home, the busy urban streets really not so different from the place where I live in North London, full of shopkeepers, street vendors, men and women shopping, people going about their business, and schoolchildren carrying bags full of schoolbooks. We are in Ramadan but I saw that the cafes were all busy - this section of society seems much like our secular own, concerned more with the day to day aspects of life than piety, though the culture is more modest, around 50% of women having covered heads. I met a man running a patisserie who used to be my girlfriend's physics teacher. It seems many here have had to change profession several times to get by.

We visited the cemetery first to pay respects to dead relatives, then changed some money, bought a snack, and entered the Old City via Herod's Gate.

I still had a dreadful cold when I recorded this, so please forgive the regular sniffs.