Jerusalem smells of pee

I recently moved house, from one apartment on a little alley in Nachlaot to another apartment on a slightly bigger alley about 2 minutes' walk from my last place.  I love it.  My new apartment is just the right size for one person, with a walk-in cupboard and an amazing balcony with a view south over the whole city.  My new alley has more trees and is closer to Beersheva, one of the most beautiful alleys in the neighbourhood filled with wisteria plants and bougainvillea and rose bushes and lots of other beautiful green things.  My new, slightly longer morning walk to work (clocking in at 12 minutes, 15 if I get distracted buying fruit from my new friend Chaim in the shuk) leads past two jasmine bushes which at the moment are in full flower, so for a few brief seconds each morning I catch the heavenly scent of those beautiful white flowers.  This is wonderful for many reasons, but the main one has got to be the fact that for a brief moment it drowns out the heavy scent of piss that pervades Jerusalem’s streets.

I’ve never lived anywhere where the smell of urine (and other stuff) is quite so prevalent.  To be fair, I’ve not lived in India where I gather people defecate openly on a daily basis and I’m fairly relieved as I just don’t know how I’d handle that.  I read a report in the New York Times this summer which said that children in India are often more malnourished and have higher levels of stunted growth, despite being better fed than children in countries with similar ratings on the Human Development Index.  Current research indicates that this is connected to the very high number of people who defecate outside, since the lack of decent sanitation and constant exposure to faeces affects children’s general health and development.  Gross, yes, but fascinating reading (here if you want to read the whole article: www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/world/asia/poor-sanitation-in-india-may-afflict-well-fed-children-with-malnutrition.html?_r=0 ) and interesting food for thought.  My friend Chaz spent 6 months in Chennai and tells me he could never quite get used to the site of men squatting in the street shitting outside his front door.  Not surprising really.

Anyway, whilst I don’t live in a country where sanitation is that poor I do live in a place where men feel it perfectly appropriate to pee wherever and whenever they feel like it.  The number of times I have been walking through the alleys of Nachlaot and walked past men of all ages and backgrounds up against a wall, with a small, suspiciously yellow stream of fluid running in rivulets down the centre of the alley.  (The most startling are, it has to be said, the Haredi men – there’s something massively incongruous about someone dressed so soberly being prepared to urinate in front of all and sundry.)  Nachlaot is at least relatively private; foot traffic through the bigger alleys can be heavy but most of the little alleys are generally quiet, which I guess is their main appeal for a man looking for a serene corner for a piss.  Jaffa Road, on the other hand, is not in any way private, nor is Agrippas, or Hillel Street, or the road full of bars up from the Coffee Bean – all places where I have seen men of all shapes and sizes relieving themselves.

This in itself is bad enough, but of course Jerusalem is absolutely rammed with feral cats, all of whom use the streets as their own personal litter trays.  My new alleyway is particularly overflowing with cats, though this is perhaps due to the people who insist on feeding them daily and who have therefore made my street some sort of cat Mecca.  The old lady across the street who I met on moving day brings out a sack of dry cat food and chucks it around the street with cheerful abandon, as does the young guy two doors up from her.  I have friends living on the ground floor of my building who once had the nerve to ask her to stop and she actually shouted at them, saying she would feed whatever cats she wanted on her front doorstep.  The net result is that the current cat population of my little alley is, at a conservative estimate, around 157 assorted cats and their offspring.  Whilst her care for the cats is undeniably admirable, my new neighbour doesn’t seem to appreciate that our street smells, all the time, like the men’s toilets at a large football stadium on game day when the pipes have backed up.  More than that, the effing cats have decided that the little alley-off-the-main-alley which I have to walk down to get to my front door is their personal toilet.  Thus almost every morning when I leave the house, showered and squeaky clean and smelling of roses, I am greeted by at least one, usually two, sometimes three piles of steaming fresh cat turds.  The heroic girls in the ground floor flat keep a brush outside their front door and clearly sweep up on a regular basis, for which good deed I intend to say thank you with a massive bunch of flowers at some suitable point in the near future.

It’s not just there.  The bus stop opposite the Abraham Hostel that I walk past every day going to work is some sort of meeting-point and toilet for the local dog-walkers; the skips that are used for rubbish disposal on the main streets have a faint, sharp, wee-like smell underlying the other smells of rotting vegetables and overflowing ashtrays.  Every Friday when the shuk has closed down, some poor sucker has the job of washing down its alleys and streets the week’s general mucky usage; the river that runs down Shiloh at about 10 p.m. on a Friday may just contain enough nitrogen to fertilise one of those massive fish-tanks that celebrities from Cribs have on display in their sitting rooms.  It's worse in East Jerusalem; there they burn the rubbish (perhaps because the wretched Municipality won't collect it regularly enough) and whatever isn't burnt is just chucked on the street willy-nilly.  Empty plots of land look like out-takes from some zombie movie where the undead have just marched through a town, leaving destruction and vast piles of plastic bags strewn in their wake.

Jerusalem smells like an open sewer, a lot of the time.  And as you can tell, from this rather long rant, this week it has finally got to me.  To be fair, we’re at the end of a long, hot summer and a few months of rain may wash away the smell of stale pee and usher in the glorious fresh smells of springtime.  But in the interim before the winter rains come, I need to find some way of surviving those first 50 yards when I leave my house every morning and I don’t think one of those scented balls that people used to carry during the Great Plague is going to have much cop.

Coming soon to A Brunskill Abroad: Allie got married!  In a glorious, month-long celebration (or so it felt after the ziyani, hen party and wedding all over four days) during which I ate a lot of food, drank a lot of arak and I tried to dance dabke but just ended up looking like the awkward Caucasian I am.