Someone told me recently that there are lots of Africans coming to visit Israel, apparently its because countries like Nigeria, the government gave Moslem people free trips to Mecca, as most Moslem people try to make a pilgrimage there at least once during their life.   The Christian people thought thats not fair, can’t we have a free trip to Jerusalem to see the home of our faith?  So this was agreed and now large numbers of Nigerian Christians have been coming since.

I spotted a brightly dressed group here:

Above if you look carefully on the right there is some wedding pictures taken place, its a good job you can still get nice photos against the backdrop of the old walls despite the mess around the streets with the electric light rail system being built.

Was at the Kotel (Western Wall) last weekend, I noticed and some other people were a bit alarmed to see smoke in the distance by the Mount of Olives.  Checked the news later, didnt see any thing about any possible terrorist activity or anything else bad.

Have noticed lately that quite a few mostly Arab people use these brightly coloured blue and green hand carts to carry their wares up and down the stairs around the old city, the steps have sloped stones in the middle.   The back of the carts have a tyre draping down from a piece of rope, think this is to stop the cart from running away if the person operates it lets go by accident.

Went to meet up with a friend in an Ethiopian bar.  In between a shoe shop and a 1 shekel store on Jaffa Street is a fairly unassuming alley way…Didn’t manage to get a pic of the front of the bar sadly.   The Ethiopian community make up a small percentage of various many different Jewish groups that are here in Jerusalem.  Sadly many of them don’t have good knowledge of Hebrew so may have difficulty getting work.

The bar itself feels basic but people are friendly, beer is cheap (Goldstar is 10 shekels) There is Ethiopian Reggae music always playing here, food is available.  Below is a kind of thick pancake with some beef and mushrooms and a small amount of very hot chilli.

Also below is a poster of some music event here.  Notice on the left is writing in Amharic (not to be confused with Aramaic which was used along with Hebrew during the time of Jesus)   this is a Semitic language used by the Ethiopian and Eritrean people.   It looks like a little like something you see by Aztecs, although its a left-to-right language like Western or European tongues, as opposed to right-to-left fashion Hebrew, Arabic and Persian uses.    Incidentally I found Windows XP doesn’t support Amharic in a normal fashion but Vista and 7 does.