Utilities

• The grey two-thirds-cylinders, about the height of the average man, at the curb print out slips allowing you to park for a period of time where the curb is striped blue. The slip goes on the dashboard where it can be seen through the windshield. Parking is free in the evenings and from 1 pm Friday until 8 am Sunday.
• Each shorter, rectangular cabinet, most grey but some green or painted like nursery walls, is either an electric junction box, a telephone junction box, or a repository where mail waits for the letter carrier.
• Letter carriers wear regular clothes. Their profession is discernible only when they are putting mail in mailboxes or picking it up from the repository. They may ride from place to place on a post-office red motor scooter.
• Mailboxes for posing letters are painted red. They are the flat rectangular shape of British "illar boxes," and indeed, a few are sturdy relics of the British Mandate.
• At post offices you can change money, send a fax, send or redeem a Western Union money order, buy a phone card, and pay utility bills.
• The things outside of grocery stores, shaped rather like American mailboxes but painted orange or other colors, are charity receptacles. You can deposit nonperishable food and other things you buy at a grocery store. some also have a slot for cash contributions.
• http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/frogs.html explains the green containers along the streets.

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox