Well for us the border crossing was easy and no real big deal except for the aggressive old Greek Orthodox ladies trying to jump the immigration queues as they were returning from their bus tours to Sinai! Its a very picturesque crossing as you walk along the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba. Once across the border, we shared a quick taxi ride to the Eilat bus station and then catching a bus for a 4 hr ride to Jerusalem passing the shores of the Dead Sea along the way.
Right away we could feel the stress starting to ebb away from our bones once in Israel, finally being in a place where one could walk down the streets without being solicited for one thing or the other, where things can be bought without extensive negotiations on the price, etc. Also, the fact that everything is clean and maintained and that you are surrounded by beautiful things, gardens and buildings etc...it really has a psychological impact on the well being that you feel and after months and months away from such environments you can really notice the difference. Now there's an argument in favour of careful urban design and taking the effort to make nice architecture. We can say now that we've directly experienced the difference that can make.
Once in Jerusalem, the first observation to be made was how cold it was in the evening. The city is spread over several hills at about 900m elevation and that made it about 10-12 degrees at night...quite a difference from what we had been living in for the past several months. We managed to find a room in the Petra Hostel, just inside the Jaffa gate of the old walled city....a corner room with arched ceilings and windows, a small balcony out front with a view over the tower and square of the Jaffa gate...primo! OK so maybe the bathroom left a lot to be desired...you can't have it all! Here's a view through the bedroom window with old Jerusalem in the background.
The first evening was spent taking a stroll down into the Jewish Quarter and by the Western (Wailing) wall. This is where the Orthodox Jews gather to pray as it actually is the retaining wall of the hill where the Jewish temple (built by King Solomon) used to be, which since 670 AD has instead been the site of Muslim mosques/tombs such as the famous Dome of the Rock shown below....a very nice building considering it is 1300 and some years old!
Back to the wailing wall...this particular night it was packed with people as it was a night where the next wave of recruits for the Israeli army were taking their vows. We arrived just as it was finishing and so it was full of young teenage men/women in uniform carrying machine guns and having their photos taken with their families/girlfriends etc.
We discovered that we could attend a Shabbot on Friday evening....so we did as we could not think of a better way to partake in an authentic Jewish Sabbath dinner. Let's just say there was much food, singing, speaking and praying over the course of 3 hours. Thankfully, the rabbi who hosts this meal every Sabbath in his own home, does his best to explain what they are doing and why otherwise we would have been lost.
Well there is just too much to say about the next couple of days, touring the various sights of the city...churches, mosques, archaelological excavations of water pools written about in the Bible, of the main roman street and market of the time, etc, etc. For us it felt great to see these sights that we had read about in the stories of the Bible and reflect on them.
Faith in God is a very tangible and comforting element here while the many differences among the religions is also evident. We were grateful to attend a service at Christ Church Sunday morning. It had been so long since we last had the opportunity to worship in an English-speaking church. It was wonderful.
One thing can be said - it is remarkable how historically valid the Bible is at mentioning in great detail particular places of which some have only been recently discovered. An example is an excavation of a long tunnel constructed to bring water from a spring that was outside the old city wall into a pool closer to the city where it could then be incorporated into the city. The old testament describes in detail how King Hezekiah built this tunnel to bring the spring water inside the city wall in anticipation of a seige from the king of Assyria. So here it is, in the last 10 years they have found this tunnel and you can walk through the 500m length today in 70 cm deep water flowing from the spring. Here's a view looking down into the tunnel and another of the excavated exit into a pool.
Other things well worth mentioning are the visit to the Mount of Olives, the site where Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemine and was apprehended on his last night - there still exists a grove of olive trees which have been dated to 2000 yrs old.
We then walked back to the Lion's gate (previously known as the Lamb's gate) and followed the Via Dolorosa - the route that Jesus walked to His crucifixion. It ends at the Holy Sepulchre which houses what is believed to be the site where Jesus was crucified and buried. It is important to note that Jerusalem was conquered, destroyed and rebuilt many times and that even today the current Old City is built above the original city therefore the exact locations are not known for certain events but the close proximity is widely accepted.
One whole section of the old city is called the muslim quarter and it is completely different from the Christian and Jewish quarters.
It's packed to the brim with little shops, mostly 'underground' and congested with people. All in all, we couldn't detect any obviously strong tensions in the city as it was easy to move around between the different 'quarters'. You just have to get used to the sight of 18 to 20 something men/women armed with machine guns strolling around everywhere and passing through x-ray machines whenever moving in/out of the Jewish quarter.So that's an overview of the old and the new in Jerusalem through our eyes - a city with much history and importance....
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