Where There’s Smoke

Friday, the 11^th of Feb.

Yesterday during my wonderings I found an internet café tucked in the back of a corner store nearby and resolved to go back.  Well when I woke up today my internet was briefly working.  Unfortunately the first emails I saw informed me that my grandfather had a stroke Thursday evening (US time) and is in the hospital.  So that made my trip to the café even more of a priority because of course the internet only worked long enough for me to see those emails.

The café is really close, the guy speaks great English and is really nice so overall that’s a big win and a huge answer to prayer.

Anyways, as I was leaving the internet café I thought I smelled smoke.  I have a notoriously terrible sense of smell so if I can smell it then you know it’s bad.  I started looking around and sure enough ahead of me a building was being evacuated as smoke seeped from the second story.  (I’d love to use the word billowed, just because I love that word, but that’d be a tremendous exaggeration.)

So the store employees are pushing out the customers, literally pushing them out and yelling.  (What they were yelling I have no clue.)  The first emergency personnel to arrive were police officers on roller blades.  Yep, roller blades.  I didn’t even see them roll up but suddenly they were right beside me.  Next came three fire engines, an ambulance and several police cars.  I got bored and left before finding out what was wrong.  I could tell by the way the firemen were moving that nothing exciting was going to happen and my attention span failed.

The Israeli public is absolutely unflappable.  I think that comes with years, decades even, of dealing with terrorism and war first hand.  We all know someone who died on 9/11 or was deeply impacted by it, but these people live with that on a regular basis.  The loud sirens here do not signify tornados but incoming missiles launched by terrorist organizations sworn to eradicate the Israeli people.  Security guards check your bags at the door because people blow themselves up in the buildings here. (FN1)   All that to say that despite the fact that the building was on fire the customers still wanted to shop and so the shop employees had to force them out.  Later I watched people continuing to try to enter the shop despite the fact that the police were blocking it off and the fire department was crowding the sales floor.  It was a fascinating and impressive display of cultural adaption to danger.

FN1.  Danger.  All that is thankfully a few years behind them.  The security remains but I don’t sense any danger at all.  I honestly feel a lot safer here than I do walking the streets at night in Tuscaloosa or I did leaving the office in Birmingham.