Haifa is full of paths and shortcuts for walkers. We live in a neighborhood called Neve Shaanan, which is handy for catching a bus, but not for walking paths. At least not yet. I am in the process of seeking out hidden shortcuts to make it more feasible to walk home from schul and possibly even take stairs down the mountain into Hadar.
Hadar is the central neighborhood in Haifa, is quite crowded and busy, and would be considered a high-crime neighborhood. High-crime in that you need to lock your doors when you leave your house: not high-crime in terms of drugs, murder, and gangs. It is generally considered safe to walk alone at night even if you are female. Going to Hadar is kind of like going to Tijuana, Mexico or Chinatown in San Francisco: there's a lot of shops hawking the same type of goods from store to store. But Hadar is kind of a neat area and has some interesting coffee shops and cheap street food.
So I'm looking for stairs down the mountain hoping to reach Hadar and found some steep narrow stairs that wind down the mountain. I followed them down around a 100 feet or so, only to have them dead-end and I huffed and puffed my way back up telling myself stair-climbing is very good exercise. Once back on the street, instead of going back home, I continued my shortcut search and shortly came upon some more steps and down I went. A few cats stared at me like I was crazy, apparently humans don't use these steps and low and behold another dead end.
Did I learn my lesson? Nope, I found yet another stairway and went down those coming to another dead end mid-way down the mountain. Someone had thrown out a old couch on the side of the hill, and I saw several animals huddled together. All but two scattered when they saw me.
They were about the size of cats, but their ears were too little and their faces more rat-like. In fact, I wondered if I had stumbled upon huge Israeli rats. From what I could tell, they didn't have much of a tail, and their fur seemed soft. I stared and they stared, then one ran away and the other just hung around.
Back up the stairs, I had to stop and rest and admire a tree in bloom with bright red flowers that looked like little feathers clumped together. Once home I described to David the animal I saw. We researched it on-line and at first thought it was a hedgehog. But hedgehogs have spines rather than soft fur and I could have sworn the animals I saw were furry rather than spiny. What's more the animals scattered and hedgehogs, rather than run, tend to curl up in tight balls. Then I found a description and photograph of the animals I saw, and they are called hyraxes. You can check them out for yourself at http://www.awf.org/content/wildlife/detail/hyrax.
Almost every night as I try to go to sleep, I hear a really loud whistle, like somebody is whistling for their dog or something. In my imagination it is bad guys whistling an all-clear for whatever clandestine activity they might be up to. But then it happens three or four times. Well, apparently hyraxes make whistle noises and that's what I've been hearing. How cool is that?
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