One Hot Day in Super Land: A Glimpse of Peace in a Cheesy Amusement Park

People keep asking me questions about politics, violence, and ISIS (or as it's called in Arabic: "da'esh." The apostrophe here meaning that all immediately surrounding vowels should be pronounced like a growling cat mid-strangulation).

Which I guess is understandable, because I'm in Jerusalem which is in the Middle East and both of those proper nouns carry a lot of baggage and crop up in the news on a regular basis. But instead of any of that I'm going to talk about fun and silly things like amusement parks because that's what I'm actually doing.


So I'm living with a wonderful intern/associate pastor/vicar type character named Fursan, and he runs the local church's youth groups -- which means I get to tag along to all sorts of things! And for some of our break from work/school this last week (Because of the Islamic holiday Eid al-Adha), Fursan and the middle school/high school/young adultish youth group decided to go to a magical magical place called Super Land.

So I got up reasonably early on Monday morning, had my standard breakfast of cultured milk fat, jelly, and coffee, and prepared to ship out for Super Land. I of course had very little idea of what on earth Super Land was, but I was soon to find out. After waiting an unnaturally long time for everyone to gather and the bus driver to show up, we got going.

 

Outside the park: Clean, manicured, and potentially a *few* native trees.

Also: Lines. Already lots of lines. Deep sense of foreboding kicks in right about now.

Not too long of a drive, probably less than an hour. Super Land is west of Jerusalem, near Tel Aviv, in a town called Rishon Lezion -- if that means anything to you. And what did I find there in Super Land, you might ask? Well, amusement park stuff, duh. Exactly like an American amusement park except it was all in Hebrew and the demographics were a wee bit different. Here's some more photos!

It doesn't look very crowded in this shot, but yes. It was crowded. This just looks relatively empty cause people aren't allowed to form lines in the middle of the walking areas. Anywhere they were allowed to form a line, it got pretty dense with humanity.

Hebrew! Various warnings and instructions variously bolded and highlighted and underlined and ovaled and "!!!"ed. 

The language situation was a little weird. Coming out of East Jerusalem, where most signage includes Hebrew, Arabic and English, and where most people speak Arabic, if not also English, it was a little weird coming into Hebrew-Heavy Super Land. Although Arabic is one of Israel's two official languages, it was a bit of a struggle. There were a few employees who spoke Arabic, but most of the time we all had to rely on the Israeli clerk's stumbling English, and sometimes I had to rely on the twice-removed mediation of my Arab companions with their haltering bits of Hebrew skills. (That felt weird.)

Not that I would've been able to understand if everything had been in Arabic? Whatever. I spent most of my day just trying to soak up language ability. I was the ajnabe (foreigner), the ward of the group, suddenly removed from the context I'd just begun to learn how to navigate and thrown into a different one (that looked oddly familiar in a kitschy, American sort of way).

And even though Fursan and the motley assortment of middle school, high school, and college kids were in a vaguely foreign environment themselves, they took care of me. Some of the younger ones used the only English they had to verify that I had fun after every ride, and all of them seemed to feel responsible for making sure I ate and didn't get lost on my way to the bathroom.

(We could note here also that these kids don't know me super well, and I'm not especially communicative, what with the semi-permeable language barrier membrane that I'm slowly but steadily creating pores in for me to peer through or whisper-mumble something half-articulate and only partially incorrect through. Pretty humbling.)

Some of my young Palestinian Christian companions getting off of that-one-ride-where-the-boat-spin-swings-you-around-in-a-circle. Like most things at Super Land, it brought me back to state fairs in North Carolina, and bringing with it, of course, all that attendant anxiety about the safety of those shoddy fair rides. Some things never change.

Here's the Super Land mascot-type-character. Kinda scary. And I don't get it.

They have bumper cars here too! In listening to Arabic conversations going on around me, I'm often limited to just understanding the occasional word here and there, like "peace," "shoes," or any of an extensive range of prepositions, but I now have reason to pride myself on being able to deduce what ride we're going to before we get to it. Cars (Sayyaraat) is bumper cars, chairs (karasi) is that one thing with the chairs, and trains of death (Qataar al-mot) is roller-coasters! I have not been able to corroborate that roller-coaster translation anywhere online since my trip to Super Land, but I stand by it.

Friends! Waiting in line!

Apparently the Middle East has bumper cars too. Who knew?

And these are the chairs I was talking about earlier. The ones that pick you up and swing you around like a sepia-tinted Kansas twister. I remember *loving* this ride as a kid. Not quite sure why. I think it just felt very high and intense, but I was firmly in a chair so it felt safe. High point (haha!) of many a yearly family trip to the state fair. That and fudge. Family pictures were eh.

Kablam! America but in a desert ecosystem! Which makes you really start to question the logic of all the water rides.

A Jewish orthodox family trying to read the map. It was a pretty small park, but I gained very little in terms of confident navigating ability during my day there. It was like a miniature Holy Land equivalent of a local state fair trying to be Six Flags.

Muslim woman wearing hijab, apparently texting and trying to find her friends. They're probably stuck in a line somewhere.

Muslim man carrying an overexcited child as they watch people do that crazy fly up in the air and back down thing.

Anyways, it was a good time. And just like fairs and amusement parks and cheap country buffet restaurants in America, Super Land gives you a glimpse of a society at its most united. No matter the race, the socio-economic background, the religion, ethnicity, or political disposition, everyone comes together. Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Arab-Israelis, Jewish Israelis, Palestinian-Arab-Israelis, Palestinian-Arab-Christians-who-live-in-Israel, etc. etc. and probably many other religious minorities like Druze and Baha'i that I can't confidently identify or spot in a crowd. (And many other fancy and complicated and unexpected ways of putting together the many descriptors I just listed above). 

They were all there. And they weren't there to voice their grievances, legitimate or quasi-illegitimate, they weren't there to cause tension or to politicize or to protest or to rationally express the myriad ways they've been wronged or to irrationally announce their radical response to whatever it is. 

They were there to have fun. To live their lives. To give their children an exciting day of rides and games. To stand in line with their family for the bumper cars. To wait in a queue with their friends for the fancy chair ride. To patiently pass the time in semi-organized linear segments of people to spend less than 5 minutes on a "train of death" with the people they love most in the world (plus that weird ajnabe they're being nice to).

And all that is not to say it's perfect unity, total peace. Of course not. And if it were it'd be a farce, a bold-faced lie of an anecdote-turned-metaphor. The tensions are still there. It transcends the conflict but it does not hide it. 

From the language discrepancies to the (drunk?) Arab man who tries to start a fight in line for the log-flume, to the Israeli staff woman screaming at every other person in line about how seating works on the log-flume (often in what is *at least* their second language), to the Palestinian youth who cut in every line until an older man who can command respect tells them to stop -- to the countless people who simply aren't there because a dividing wall, a fee, and endless webs of arbitrary, convoluted, explicitly racist bureaucratic processes are keeping them away.

 (And that's for West Bank Palestinians -- Families in Gaza just have a military blockade in the way.)

The shaded middle-left area is Israel, the blue line is Jerusalem, and the solid orangish line is the dividing wall. I'm in the ambiguous part of Jerusalem that's "Israel?" but not Israel. The wall is sometimes a huge concrete wall and sometimes just a fence, but to cross it you have to go through a checkpoint. For West Bank Palestinians to cross for short visits they have to apply and pay and wait for it to be processed, and then it's still subject to the whim of whoever processes it. And there ends the educational bit for today. This map came from http://t-j.org.il/JerusalemAtlas.aspx , go visit for other cool informative cartography.

And anyway we don't need something like amusement parks to hide the conflict and tension for us. Where is God in that? What it does is something far more significant: It allows those peoples to come share a space, flaws and all, and explore and exhibit their common humanity despite and through and in the midst of those tensions.That's where God is. In redeeming that space and those lives and giving us a chance to be a part of that.

 Because kitschy overpriced "fun" and waiting in lines is something the whole world can enjoy!

Given the territorial access and economic means, of course.

Which is a pretty huge caveat.

But yeah.

It's still something.