If you have a nice building thats beyond repair, tear it down apart from the front and build a new one, and use the outter old front as a facade.
As spotted in a Jerusalem supermarket. Have spotted whole sheep’s heads (complete with eyes) in Arab market before.
Well most cars I see have dents and scrapes in, but didn’t think they do stock car racing in Israel, but seen this Mitsubishi quite a bit in my neighbourhood and it looks like it has been put through a race….
I am in the process of migrating over information from my somewhat broken and awkward to manage Microsoft Office Live web site to this blog. Here is some of the background why I am in Jerusalem.
I have grown to love Israel from my two visits as a tourist in 2004 and 2006. To be honest its never been somewhere I have wanted to visit when I was younger, I didn’t understand why it was on the news all the time nor if there was any relevance to the place of the same name in the bible.
As a child I learnt French at school, it bored me as the text books were old and dull, when much later I visited France in person the sights and experiences showed me it was far more interesting than some dog eared 1980s books with black and white photos. At the same time, the land of the bible becomes real when you get to see it in the flesh.
This web site is not intended to give a history of Israel or the middle east conflicts. Its just a brief overview on my plans to live and work out there and why its still relevant in the bible today.
The media often paints a unfair picture, and both the news and documentaries rarely show the good qualities of the state of Israel, the vast beauty of the land, the scene of biblical events in history and those yet to come, a country having the only democracy in the middle east, a wide array of people gathered from different corners of the world, but most of all it being the land where Jesus was born, grew up, did his ministry and died.
Me
My name is Jonathan Hayward, I was born and have lived in Portsmouth UK. I am a computer technician, I didn’t got to university, I did plenty of jobs that weren’t ideal and struggled to get a direction with my career and plan with God. In the last 5 years I have worked in various IT roles.
I have been to Kings Church in Southsea, Portsmouth, UK for the last ten years. In my church you sometimes might find me manning the front welcoming people and giving out the programmes. For those going to church for the first time or if you have not been in a long time, (including myself) lets face it – church can be terrifying! I never had a big plan or aimed to be pushy, just to give a sense of welcome to those visiting the church once or regular. In several of the places I have worked I have had the chance to meet and pray with other believers there.
I work as a computer technician, I support users on the telephone, by email and face to face. I like finding solutions to problems, I also like to help people overcome technical challenges.
I didn’t go to university, I messed up my education so I learned and taught myself a lot of things. Repairing discarded equipment that business ditched as they didn’t have the time to fix themselves. Getting to something that resembled a career meant I made a few wrong choices along the way
I got in the right direction working for Novatech, one of the country’s top mail order PC retailers, well known as they offer after sales technical support without any premium rate numbers. I was able to maintain their reputation by answering calls and providing fixes or arranging return of defective equipment.
After then I moved into the corporate environment and supported users with in big companies and got familiar with the popular range of applications from Microsoft which are the tools in most businesses today, like Windows XP, Office and Active Directory.
I enjoy speaking to my users on the phone, email and in person. I get to deliver and install new or repair equipment directly to people. I get to speak and know everyone in the whole organisation. I have served and assisted computer problems for Senior Directors, HR managers, Software Developers, Accountants, Car bodywork repair assessors, Salesmen, Nurses, Therapists, Medical Secretaries, Consultants and Doctors. This being on the phone, by email or in person, including people from different countries, some blind, deaf and disabled people and users with little to no computer experience or with very limited English.
I spent a year working a NICE Systems who are one of the market leaders in voice recording solutions for telecoms, they are based in Ra’nana in Israel.
In many of the places I have worked I have found other Christians and we have met up and chatted and prayed in our lunch breaks, as its good to build up and encourage each other when things may get difficult or stressful.
Outside of work Jonathan likes to assist with setting up church and being part of a welcome team. I have always tried to strive to make church friendly and make sure everyone who comes through the door, its easy to forget that church can be a scary or daunting prospect for a new person. Jonathan also likes the countryside (especially the New Forest where I spent part of the time working in hospitals there) travelling, cooking, photography and spending time with my friends.
Recently, I tried to put 50 Shekels (9GBPish, this PC doesnt have pound symbol 🙂 worth of credit on my mobile phone. This is hard in itself, Cellcom’s web site is of course in Hebrew and has options to view this site in Arabic or Russian but not English.
Every now and then Cellcom send me a text with some offers, but it appears in funny squares as my handset doesn’t have Hebrew support, although I have seen my Motorola V8 phone sold here on Orange IL.
Google translater is an absolute boon. Not only does it do Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and all European languages with Latin type alphabets, a recent update means it does Welsh, Afrikaans and Icelandic, total of 51 tongues.
I decided to be a bit ambitious and register on Cellcom’s site to buy credit online by opening up Firefox with several tabs for Cellcom’s site and google translator. Well it nearly worked, I can convert whole URLs or paragraphs and it kind of makes sense, and I have to enter my first name in English and in Hebrew, Jonathan > Yonatan > יונתן
On the next page I have to enter something called an “A” number. My understanding is this is something like a National insurance or social security number, and leaving it blank or entering something dumb like 123456 didn’t work. So when I get credit from my phone I have to buy a paper voucher and rely on a friend to key it in with Hebrew spoken automated system. Oh well.
Pomegranates are funny. They look completely unlike any other type of fruit, looking like a Christmas tree bauble with the odd tapered bit that sticks out to opposite end of where they are joined to the tree.
They are not that popular at home as they are a bit quirky. Buying cartons of the concentrated juice here is a bit to syrupy for my liking, however juice squeezed from shop with a juicer in Jerusalem is really nice.
You can chop one open and scoop out those pretty little seeds that look like rounded red gem stones, stick them on breakfast cereal, with yogurt or with other fruit.
I have a tree in my garden but I am a bit annoyed that someone stole all our good (not yet ripe) fruit and the only ones that remain are the rotten ones, for some reason they can go bad by the skin splitting open. I did get to grab a couple whilst at a friends flat which had a tree which is above the balcony.
The scriptures talk about these funny little fruits quite a lot, as part of the produce specifically described that Hebrews would grow here, as an exotic desert, and as a bronze ornaments on the wall of a majestic looking house.
pomegranates
I took a walk along a main road that leads up to one of the government buildings, I was thinking of going scrumping (old British slang name for mischievous children who steal fruit from neighbours gardens, strangely this wasnt on Wikipedia when I looked) but far from being an act of theft, the bible talks about fruit overhanging the wall is ok to take. Actually I can’t find this passage but some other laws on fruit can be found Leviticus 19:10 Deuteronomy 23:24 But seriously, the fruits high above the pavement are too high for me to grab. Picking fruit is fun though, as like getting blackberries in September back at home in the UK, I am guessing the very dry climate isn’t suitable for them here.
But these fruits to me are yet one of the many tangible things from the bible I get to see everywhere in Jerusalem.
This weekend during Rosh Hashana it rained. This maybe a fairly unpleasant dampener or our British soil is decidedly non trivial here in Israel with its desert climate. Some of the other volunteers say it has not rained since March. I would bet that many Christians and Jews in the land have prayed and God has answered on this turn of the new year, we are now in 5770 in the Jewish calender. I think it rained four times in total, once when I was taking a walk through the park which was actually quite refreshing and the gentle wind meant I was mostly dry but the time when I was home.
Got to eat apples and honey with pomegranate seeds, as this purpose made tray shows this a regular custom on this holiday.
apples and honey
I wanted to get to a Synagogue but didn’t really plan what I was doing that much as being tired and have difficulty sleeping lately, but did have bible study at a friends house and got to have a blow at a Shofar. Sunday went to my normal church and just met up with some people and had quite a honest debate about some of the more difficult challenges that us Christian volunteers from various different continents face here.
Airmiles and frequent flier points
Lately I have become a little obsessive with Airmiles. I now have 1500 of them earned since December which is enough to get a free flight to most central European cities, or two (750 each) free flights to Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and various parts of Scotland (interestingly enough including Lerwick in the Shetland Islands)
I would need about 5000 to fly to Tel Aviv or New York from London, or 10,000 to get to Auckland or Alaska, so at the moment its not that useful for my current travels plans currently, but for any people doing charity work overseas or for people with needing gratis bonus holiday it can be a nice treat.
Catches. The ticket is free including all taxes and charges, and you are flying with a “grown up” airline (usually British Airways who own Airmiles) so meals and drinks are included, although maybe not if you flight its brief one (ie: Heathrow to Amsterdam you don’t get food as its only 1 hour 10 minutes if I remember correctly) But the catch is you have to buy at least one nights stay in one of their recommended hotels. I haven’t checked to see what this or if this comes at a premium, but as Airmiles the company has been around since 1986, if this was really a devious trick the company wouldn’t be around now. Also as far as I know they don’t get fussy about what time you can or cant fly as long as long as all the seats on the plane aren’t all booked out. Points cant be sold or given to anyone else. One last thing, the points don’t have a expiry date but if you don’t accrue any points at all in a 12 month time period they will charge you £30 when you eventually get to book.
Airmiles isn’t a frequent flier scheme, its purely an loyalty scheme to earn a little bit each time to your holiday, the great thing is I can earn incentives from buying things that I would of otherwise have bought anyway. I have converted most of my Tesco points to them, some from fuel (Shell points) for my longish drive to work, also from Scottish and Southern Electric, and buying things through popular online retailers such as ebay, CD wow and Play.com. All of these businesses I am already a customer before I signed up for Airmiles. Although I have got a Lloyds TSB credit card which earns me 1 mile/£10 spend so combined these can rack up the points a bit sooner, I also got an invite to fill in some simple questionnaires online by a partnership organisation which the points accrued there can be traded for Airmiles.
A good tip to get the extra Tesco points is to take your aluminium drinks cans to the bigger stores where they get crushed and recycled and the points added by the computer operated machine in the car park, ask your work place if you can take home spent inkjet cartridges (you can get 100 Tesco points each for most HP ones, and their T&Cs say you can send in up to 30 a year, so once they are converted to Airmiles, 30x cartridges is nearly enough for a free return flight to France) and to also take your carrier bags to avoid taking new ones.
Don’t forget to earn the miles from each of the respective partner companies, you must log into your Airmiles account on their site then click on the link to take you to the respective retailer (ie CD Wow) to get the points. I didn’t do this when I originally got my Lloyds TSB credit card and when I phoned up to ask if they could add the miles, they said they wouldn’t do it.
BMI miles
On advice of a web site I applied for a BMI American express card to get the 20,000 (will get you as far as Istanbul or Moscow) miles on this. This only needed a £250 spend (couple of months of fuel and grocery shopping easily took care of this) I cancelled the card afterwards as lots of stores don’t take Amex so its not that useful.
This was not as good as it seems you still have to pay taxes and charges but not under any obligation to buy any other services. In reality the ‘free’ flight is actually a third off the usual price of the ticket as the taxes and charges make up the other two thirds. Still this is useful to have this when I plan to fly at somepoint.
I earned a little (500 miles) when I paid the £293 for my ticket from Heathrow to Tel Aviv. I don’t think I get really anything for these though.
I may try the Easyjet or Flybe credit cards, as I am going to Ireland and Spain for a birthday and a wedding in 2010….
Some weeks ago I was walking back from a friends birthday party today, just said goodbye to our friend Daniel who lives a few blocks away from me and his friend who staying over for the weekend, and I was walking down these stairs in an alleyway and spotted this wee creature :o)
It was very tame I thought it might have been injured, but seemed a little scared and appeared ok, having shiny black eyes and wet pointed nose, its prickles were quite soft so I guess its quite a young hedgehog.
I don’t think I have ever seen one live (sadly they are usually seen dead on the roads at home) before this close up as they are nocturnal animals. It was strange to see one not in a hurry to escape from me.
I passed further down the steps and saw a student on the way up, I told him not to step on him, he thought it was quite cute seeing this prickly mammal resting half way down the path too.
This was taken from the balcony of a friend flat. Gets an amazing panoramic view of the city. I am quite jealous of this appartment. 🙂
I have started using Flickr as the supposedly better alternatives I have just dont integrate well.
Few days ago I played frisbee with about 10 of us in the park. Has to be said I don’t really do sport. If I engage in anything that might involve tackling or taking control physically of some item like a ball from someone else I tend to ending hurting someone. Instead I took a leap to grab the spinning plastic disc about 6 feet away from me and try to do a goalkeeper type leap and later that afternoon I found that my back was sore.
This kind of worried me, but after some praying and sitting in hard upright chairs for a couple of days, the pain has gone. Similar things healing has been happening with some other people I work with. The Lord is good.
Today I hit 33, Jesus died at this age at the peak of his ministry somewhere probably no more than a mile than a live at the moment. Thats quite a sobering thought.
Lately I get to go round someone’s house, either with one of the Bridges for Peace volunteers, or to some friends who work for one of several other Christian organisations in the city, and have food on friday night (Shabbat) which I did yesterday, its always great fun and everyone tends to much in making something.
Today I have some people coming round my house tonight so I am trying to make a bunch of things, have assembled together a Lasagne in a long aluminium tray, I have never cooked anything this big nor for and organise for 10-12ish people who are coming tonight, I need to make some chilli as well as Lasagne with its meat and diary combination isnt kosher, hopefull this should be ok, no one has told me if they are vegatarian or has any special requirements, I am just a little nervous this is all going to work out ok tonight.
Later tonight a few of us are heading to a comedy club in town, as have been recommended this is a must do experience when doing Jerusalem, not been to one of these before, so should be interesting.
Brit In Jerusalem 