Despair and Joy: 24 Hours Around Jerusalem

Three years ago, I scoffed from Tel Aviv at Jerusalem. Tel Aviv, Israel's global party city on the sea, seemed to be the younger sister who just got more and more luscious as her older sister turned into an old maid. But Jerusalem is actually turning out to be a cougar. This is a city of endless faces, where you can live in different centuries depending on your neighborhood, and where you can experience bottomless despair followed by euphoric ecstasy within 24 hours.

Take the last two days. Monday night was the beginning of Tisha Be'Av, the fast day commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple and the exile of the Jewish people from ancient Israel. Two thousand years later the wounds are still fresh. So I went down to the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City to find the crying people.

Tisha Be'av may be a Jewish holiday but the Old City is sacred for the three monotheistic religions, and I saw part of an 81-boy delegation of Muslims from Britain taking a tour of the holy places.

Down at the Kotel, I found an open air slumber party. At the outskirts were girls smoking cigarettes and talking on their cell phones. Some men washed their hands.

But most people were getting ready to bed down for the night on sleeping bags.

In the mixed gender plaza, elderly couples unrolled blankets together. Children fell asleep everywhere.

Here are the women praying down by the wall.

The closer I got to the giant ancient bricks, the more wailing I heard. Unfortunately, my camera battery also observed the fast day and ran out. On my right was a woman in a dark headscarf, rocking back and forth and weeping into a prayerbook. Up ahead were dozens of heads of thick brown hair (Jerusalem has few blondes). As I looked between them I saw hands on the wall out of sync with the mass misery: hot pink fingernails studded with rhinestones on one hand, glittering white nails a few feet down.

I walked away from the wall and sat with a [male] friend in the plaza that normally is mixed gendered but on this night was declared segregated. We saw at least two dozen women flouting the new rule, but most were wearing skirts. I think my jeans attracted the attention of one man who looked about 50 or 60 with long grey sidelocks.

"You have to leave," he told me.

My friend was quick on his feet. "Why us? Look at all the other women."

"But you have to leave."

"Are you the police? Show us your papers."

He took a few crumpled sheets of white paper out of his pocket. There were scattered words in Hebrew printed on them, nothing remotely close to a police badge. We lay back, ignoring his protests, and watched the fluttering Israeli flag of the Kotel against the deep black star-studded sky. A gentle breeze blew my hair around my face. The murmur of thousands of praying, mourning, chatting Jewish worshipers ebbed and flowed into my ears.

Eighteen hours later, I grabbed a plastic bag full of tinsel boas and jumped into a friend's car en route to Ramallah. The occasion: the 1970s disco sensation Boney M was performing at the Ramallah Cultural Palace. At 40 shekels, tickets were a steal. I went with a group of mostly journalists, but our red furry cowboy hat, orange Pipi Longstocking wig and miles of tinsel drew the attention of reporters on duty and as we waited for Boney M to start, TV cameras kept panning our rows of plastic chairs.

Then Boney M got on stage - a four-singer act led by Mazie Williams, a woman at least in her fifties, and we rushed to the front.

We danced next to girls in hijabs and at least five or six sneaky Israelis. In the open air, you could dance with a hundred people pressing against you, and then take a few steps to catch your breath in the wind. One singer, in a tight black dress and gold chain belt, kept slapping her bottom.

The only man singing wore a black shimmering shirt unbuttoned to his navel. Mazie, the only original band member, wore a leopard-print tank top unbuttoned from her navel.

The crowd loved it. The only awkward moment was that at the encore, Boney M played "Daddy Cool" for a second time, which was a clear marker that something was missing. That something was one of their major hits, "Rivers of Babylon," and apparently their lyrics prompted the festival organizers to ask them to skip it: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down / Ye-eah we wept, when we remembered Zion."

Now, I know Ramallah is technically not Jerusalem, but it's only 20 minutes away, and this sign in the Beit Anissa bar shows that Ramallah, like Tel Aviv, is ready to supplant the stodgier capital:

And worth mentioning is that a respectable portion of the crowd I knew at Boney M were Jerusalemites. This city has a critical mass of people who know how to have a good time. There are more events than I can keep up with; the newly launched Jerusalem Digest offers a daily program of those events in Hebrew, Arabic and English. But to really get an idea for whether the city is improving, just come here. Walk the streets, eat hummus at Abu Steve, take in a latin music concert in the vegetable market or shop for imported silk from Damascus in the Old City. You won't regret it.