My Quest for Cheese in a Sleeping City

JERUSALEM, Israel—Like all girls hoping to de-kosher a BBQ, we were on a mission for cheese.

We walked, step-in-step on the tracks of the light-rail on Yaffo. We passed kids playing tag and religious men on bikes, but in all of our journeying we did not see a single neon “open sign.”

We should have known that our quest would not be easy; it was it was noon on a Saturday—Shabbat in Jerusalem.

Loosely translated into English using the one word I know in Hebrew and lots of context clues, Shabbat means something along the lines of  “nothing is open,” or “the day of rest for your credit card.”

If you want to spend money, commute, or rip toilet paper from Friday night at sundown on to saturday, you can't. Everything shuts down and all the toilet paper is pre-ripped. It is like Christmas Day in the States, except here even the Chinese restaurants are closed. The streets are empty, and the 24/7 markets are actually just 24/6, so you have to trek miles to find your pack of Kraft American Cheese.

Which we did.

30 minutes into our walk we were getting desperate, we were hungry, and in need of some calcium. I’m not going to be dramatic, but we were probably on the verge of osteoporosis or scurvy. I was at the point were I would milk my own goat for cheese, which is pretty desperate considering the fact that my goat has been dead since 2003.

Now I am not a particularly religious person, but I was praying to god that we would find a supermarket, and if I did still have a goat I would consider sacrificing it.

But then, in the distance, the calming sight of flashing neon red and green materialized. We found our open sign. Our oasis. Our cheese. And boy was it overpriced.

We bought it anyways and went home and to celebrate a job well done by day drinking Kiddush wine and napping. Because quite honestly, there is nothing else to do in this sleeping city on Shabbat.