Everyone is working so I take my nostalgia tour of Jerusalem alone. I walk down to the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, past the money changers and the stores that sell soft drinks and food you buy in a hurry, past the place that sells motorbikes and is full of Ethiopians, past the place that organises free trips for people in the army. The Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv has moved from where it used to be when I was last there, is three floors bigger and full of shops and escalators. I get lost there now and my eye is assaulted by shops full of food and tables of different styles of cakes and breads, so I miss the place where you buy the tickets and when I finally get my ticket, the bus for Jerusalem has left and I have to wait for the next one. Fortunately it’s a bus to Jerusalem, they come often.

The Central Bus Station in Jerusalem hasn’t moved but the city has grown around it. When I lived here you drove upwards, round curves of yellow-faced rock with a roof or two peeping out the top. The curves and the cliffs are still there at the approach to the Jerusalem I knew, but the city now starts several kilometres earlier and houses peep out everywhere. The bus station itself has grown three floors too, full of cafes and shops and a central kiosk or two. One sells jewellery and I want to buy something. I eye off a couple of pieces but look for the entrance instead. It turns out to be on the middle floor.

Outside is the tunnel under the road where I once found a row of Turkish toilets and freaked out before I saw the European ones on the other side. I really needed to go. They’ve demolished the toilets and the roof and it’s mostly cement except for a security guard at the entrance to a building. I come up the other side and when I do, I see a tram. Sleek like a bullet and light blue, one tram track goes to the tram junction at Mt Herzl and the other side goes down Yafo Street into town. This tram is going to town, I think.

The tram definitely wasn’t there before. I remember a wide road. The road is narrower. Across the tram tracks is a park which may or may not have been there and beyond it I can see the Hilton Hotel, now Crown, and Binyanei Ha’Oomah, the big theatre where they once held the Eurovision. I used to cross the area when I worked at the Hilton but I can’t remember it being a park, though that was 40 years ago. Maybe the trees have grown bigger.

This time I walk on past and the road divides. I can’t remember it doing so. I take the right fork because somewhere in my murky memory it seems to lead into town. I walked this street a lot once, it was a good way to get exercise and I lived somewhere at the end of it, but there isn’t much familiar. The tram chooses the right fork too, so I follow the tracks. There’s a low stone fence to my right (the tram is on my left) and there seems to be a garden behind the fence, then a wasteland and between the two a government building. I remember a beggar right there at the corner where the wall stopped and buildings began. I don’t see any beggars now. I remember Jerusalem was the first place I saw beggars, shaking glass jars and sporting various deformities. I heard somewhere that they make a lot of money. There was a beggar who died and his mattress was stuffed with cash, though it may have been an urban myth. Further off, behind the wasteland they are building more buildings and cranes stand out at right angles and swivel their metal arms about.

The buildings come closer as I walk on, they become glass-fronted stores built of stone. In an Australian town there would be a bank of them made of smoothly levelled sandstone and selling handicrafts and exquisitely crafted dolls and dollhouses made by local grandmothers. Here the stone is rough and undressed and the stores contain all sorts of things. One is a hairdresser, one contains pots and pans and another contains dinner settings. Not to be outdone, there is another shop with pots and large boxes with modern kitchen appliances. A shop contains hair ornaments. Then a laneway opens up and I am at Mahaneh Yehuda, the marketplace full of stalls selling fruit and vegetables.

On the other side is a square, surrounded on all four sides by roadway which cars hurtle round but can’t park. That can’t have been there before I think, though it looks like it has been there several years at least. Then I remember being forced to stop there by sirens ringing for Holocaust Day. The sirens blasted out for what seemed like a long time and everyone stopped without exception. They were blowing people up at the time, the sirens were not long after a bomb was left in at Zion Square. It blew up before I got there but I was only fifteen minutes away. I really hated standing still anywhere in the city. Nowadays I might be in the tram trundling past on its rails.

I’m wearing short sleeves and I’ve heard Jerusalem is full of religious people now. All the people who aren’t fussed with religion have moved to Tel Aviv. I wonder if I will be attacked for being immodest. It happened to me once in Geula, when a pregnant woman, wheeling a stroller and with several children clustered around her, grabbed me from behind and called me a dairy maid. I turned with my hands up to hit her and she screamed: “That’s right, hit a pregnant woman,” before turning her back and running away as fast as her children could follow. I was stunned, I remember, and felt awful, though I shouldn’t have, she was intruding on me.

I keep walking till I can turn right at King George St. This is the centre of town, the triangle of King George St, Ben Yehuda ending at Zion Square and Yafo Street. I found an old goldsmith on Ben Yehuda once who sold me earrings and made a necklace for my sister. According to the newspapers in Australia, it’s all dangerous now, full of Palestinians whose homes have been taken, waiting to stab Jews. Maybe American tourists. Maybe one little blonde Australian. How were they to know I really don’t like what the Israeli government was doing. I’m a tourist in Jerusalem, aren’t I? Besides which, it doesn’t seem scary. Truth to tell, it had never seemed scary.

The centre of Jerusalem hasn’t changed much, said an old friend, but I found it had changed a lot. The Mashbir, the department store at the corner of Ben Yehuda and King George, with the big, white-tiled square where you arranged to meet people, isn’t there anymore. I sit down in one of the open-air cafes that had sprouted on King George and ring my friend to complain. “Yes, it’s not there anymore,” he says. I remember a boyfriend from Argentina once who complained about the lack of open-air cafes in Jerusalem. I wondered where he was and if he was still complaining. The coffee smells good, and the cakes, so I have one of each.

I ring Eti. She still lives in Jerusalem and she isn’t working so she agrees to meet me in King George and we decide to take buses. We spend the rest of the day riding buses and talking, except when we wait at bus stops in clean suburban neighbourhoods and talk some more. Everything looks different. The Jerusalem I lived in had lots of empty land but they’ve filled it up, mostly with apartment blocks. The first bus we took was to Talpiot which I had thought was in the south and full of track housing for immigrants. It could have been anywhere but it is industrial, hot and dusty.

The next bus we take is to Mt Scopus, opposite the old city and next to the Mount of Olives, where all the Jews who could afford it were buried so they wouldn’t have to crawl very far on the Day of Judgement. I remembered walking through the cemetery once with a friend but I didn’t see it today, though I did see one I remembered on Mt Scopus next to the entrance to Hadassah hospital, which Eti reminded me my mother had visited once to see her sister. I had forgotten. The tall buildings with never-ending stairways I had lived in as a student were gone, but the short ones were still there, where I roomed with a girl from Argentina who had sex with her boyfriend in the bed on the opposite side of the room, while I was trying to sleep. I made friends with the girl next door and slept there. They were very friendly, it was just disturbing. Eventually they moved out.

The bus drives up into a tunnel which has replaced the dirt road I used to walk every day, head bowed and grumbling, till I reached my lectures and tutorials at the archaeology building, or the little computer room I worked in, where the maths students ran their computer programs. It seems to have turned into an airconditioned multicomplex of libraries, lecture halls and cafes, full of young, wide-eyed students trying to look cool. I wish I could be back there again, only with cooler air.

Down at the tram junction on the main north-south street I see police headquarters behind its barbed wire fences. It used to be on the main road but they’d built a flyover and it is back a bit and less prominent. I went there once, on recommendation from the university employment agency which meant I had to go, but the police had no intention of employing me. I’d lost my Zionism somewhere, and the man at the desk looked at me with hatred. The building looks smaller now. We take a tram, blue and bullet-like and like any tram anywhere. We are still talking but now we’re winding down and saying goodbye. Eti gets off the tram in town to buy underwear. I stay on till the bus station and, after walking around and trying not to buy things, I venture out of the air conditioning and lo and behold, there’s the bus to Tel Aviv.