Maybe it’s just me, but Jerusalem has always had a mythical quality. Maybe it’s the history of it, or maybe it’s just how beloved it is for people all over the world. That’s why it sometimes catches me off guard when I remember that Jerusalem is also just a city, like any city in the world: bustling, crowded and filled with all kinds of sights and sounds. The pulse of people coming and going, calling out from storefronts selling their wares, yelling into cellphones or at each other from their cars. The screech of bus brakes and the hiss of their doors opening and closing. And the smells. For some reason, everywhere I go in the city, I find one of two smells to be a constant companion: freshly baked bread or freshly smoked pot. Mingling with these are the tempting scents from the foodstands selling shwarma (roasted meat), toasted nuts, sticky baked goods (which, when displayed on the street attract a disconcerting amount of flies). There’s the occasional whiff of garbage, typical of any place where a multitude of people share a small amount of space. Sitting at dinner in the middle of Ben Yehuda Street, I looked at Shuie and realized, “We live in a city!”. Quite a culture shock from the quiet of Cape Cod. Thank Gd, Yonah is back to his happy self. He was able to go back to Rivka’s yesterday, where his baby friends were very happy to see him. Yesterday, I had an hour-long meeting with Lynn Finson, the education director of Midreshet Rachel. Although I’ve been attending the school for almost two weeks now, we hadn’t gotten the chance to sit down and talk about my schedule and, as it turned out, my story. Listening to myself tell her how I ended up in Israel–I’d been wanting to come, then I met Shuie and got married, had Yonah, then I lost my mother–it made me realize how much I’ve been through in a relatively short amount of time. “You’re a pusher,” Lynn said to me, meaning I was the type to be strong and move forward. “I am a pusher,” I conceded. I’m my mother’s daughter.