Experiencing the City of Jerusalem Vicariously Through Me

Today I walked into the new city of Jerusalem (that which has been built in the last 150 years) to buy for myself a new Biblia Hebraica Stuttengartensia... Dede, you know what I'm taking about... and I decided that I had to attempt to describe what it's like. The traffic in Jerusalem, and all of Israel for that matter, is like a large United States city (aka New York, Chicago, Boston, etc...) except with twice as much honking. The excessive use of the car horn in this city is unnatural. Everyone honks and it drives me bonkers. I'll stand at an intersection and hear someone lay on their horn for a good 5-6 seconds without cease... and lo and behold, all that noise just came from a little old lady. Jew and Gentile, young and old, beautiful and hideous, everyone abuses the horn and the situation has escalated to an unhealthy level. Ha... alright, just had to get all that off my chest. Perhaps I just wasn't cut out for the big city. Alongside the honking and traffic, people drive crazy here... and no, pedestrians DO NOT have the right of way. As a general rule, the larger your vehicle the more you have the right-of-way. The city buses are the craziest. They have these accordian style double buses which FLY through the city. It is not the drivers responsibility to watch for pedestrians, rather the pedestrians responsibility to watch for the crazy city buses, driven by insane city bus drivers. The hairpin turns those guys make are incredible. So now I've described the traffic, honking and crazy city buses. Now add to this picture Ultra-Orthodox Jews walking and always reading their Torah to themselves alongside secular Jews in skimpy western clothing alongside huge tour buses pouring in and out of the city full of Middle Eastern groups, European groups, North American Groups, Asian Groups, South American Groups, Russian Orthodox Groups... you get the picture. Now imagine crazy 16 year old kids running around with beers in their hand (they hardly have any kind of drinking age in this country). Especially late at night, the city of Jerusalem is a madhouse... and of course, every group of people is speaking in their respective tongue so that Jerusalem is not only a madhouse... but a madhouse at Pentecost. Lastly, Jerusalem is a pungent city. You never know what you're going to get, sometimes I smell sweet fragrances and spices and other times I smell excrement and urine... It can all be very overwhelming. So there you have it, the city of Jerusalem in a nutshell.