I'm currently in the process on catching up on recording the rest of our Istanbul adventures, but have already written about the next step of our journey. Here 'tis!
Sarah and I are currently in our Jerusalem hostel, listening to (of course) the score from the Fiddler on the Roof and singing/dancing along. Aren’t we mature?
We will be on a bus back to the Jordan border tomorrow morning, on our way to Petra for two days. After crossing the Israeli border without any problems on Tuesday, we admired our now beautifully filled passports and our wallets, jointly filled with small change in a total of 9 different currencies (USD, Euros, British pounds, Lebanese pounds, Egyptian pounds, Turkish lira, Jordanian dinar, Israeli shekels, 1 Danish kroner (courtesy of Lydia Bello)). We’re pretty pleased with ourselves, and thrilled to have another few days left in Jordan; our Lonely Planet guide, which is alternately snarky and hilarious, incredibly helpful, and (on more than one occasion) dead wrong, describes Petra as being like one big Indiana Jones film.
Really everyone makes a huge deal out of Jerusalem being the city of the Three Faiths… so I had always imagined it as a city with religious sites belonging to the three faiths but had never thought about the real lives of the people who live here. Jerusalem has been pretty darn cool, and we did a lot of wandering and museum-going; but what struck me most about walking down the streets is that you can hear church bells and the call to prayer from the minarets in the same 15 minute period, walk down a single street and see Christian Orthodox priests, Orthodox Jews, Muslim women in hijabs and more observant Jewish and Orthodox Christian women also wearing head-coverings, Christian Coptic Ethiopians, Catholic monks, Jewish men in yarmulkes, and the faithful and more secular of every kind. The separate “quarters” of the Old City are not cordoned off and the lives of all these people seem to intersect generally without much problem (not to say that greater problems don’t creep about unseen).
There are also more soldiers in the streets than I have ever seen. Sitting in the bus station waiting for our ride from Eilat to Tel Aviv on Tuesday I was shocked by their vast numbers, especially by the numbers of women, and even more by the fact that all of them looked straight out of high school and acted like it, too – young soldiers sprawling out in groups on the bus station benches, with cell phones and iPods, talking and chatting and laughing and flirting. Military service is required of all Israelis, both male and female; the majority of them aren’t a day older than I am and many appear to be younger. Some of them nonchalantly carry huge guns around in the streets – and on the bus as passengers – as though it were just another part of their uniform, which I guess it is. The thought that one of them might bump against one of the soldiers’ legs just in the right way that it accidentally discharges frightens me more than the idea of there actually being an incident in which they had to use the gun and I tend to edgily try to avoid being around them. The young soldiers are absolutely everywhere. This is a picture of a relatively large group of them at the Western Wall:
On our way to Israel, we spent a good deal of time in transit. We flew out of Istanbul on Monday morning, had a layover in Cairo (ironic, because we had ultimately decided NOT to stop in Egypt because it was going to be too expensive of a flight from Istanbul), and then flew to Amman, where we slept a few hours in a hostel and got up stupid-early the next morning to catch a long bus to Aqaba. From Aqaba we crossed the border to Eliat – we thought, and were right, that in the south it would be an easier crossing for Sarah (who recently went to Lebanon, which technically you’re not supposed to do if you want to go to Israel – we crossed without any problem at all, and the smiley young woman who examined our passports only pointed at Sarah’s Lebanon stamp and showed it to her supervisor, who shrugged). From there we caught another 5-hour bus to Tel Aviv across the beautiful and expansive Negev desert, spent the evening in Tel Aviv wandering on the beach and eating the best shwarma I’ve ever tasted and slept another few hours in a hostel before getting up once again to catch a 1-hour morning bus to Jerusalem so that we would have a whole day ahead of us. In short, a little more travelling than I’d prefer, but it was worth it in the end.
Our first day in Jerusalem we started out with a lunch of some deliciously cheap prune yogurt, bread and hummus, which we ate sitting on the edge of some planters in the plaza outside the Old City’s Jaffa Gate – we seem to have set a precedent of eating street food meals on planters in plazas; we did this almost every single day outside the Yeni Camii in Istanbul. I am particularly fond of old walls, so Sarah humored me and we then took a walk around the southern ramparts of the Old City walls (built by Süleyman the Great of the Ottomans – the second to last foreign rulers of Jerusalem, after the Crusaders and before the British – in the 16th century), which had some great views of the city:
(view of the Mount of Olives and the Jewish cemetery from the walls)
It would have been awesome to walk around the whole city on the ramparts, but unfortunately you can’t do that in Jerusalem, and so the southern ramparts ended near the Western Wall, which we observed from a distance but did not go all the way up to:
Apparently, you can also view a 24-hour per day online live video of the Western Wall at www.aish.com/wallcam. For some reason, I find this a little over-the-top.
We also observed the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount from a distance, figuring well, we can’t go in anyway, and it’s probably better to stay safe in a city where three religions have basically fought for centuries over that one spot. It was a pretty dome!
We then spent a couple of hours wandering the Muslim quarter and markets of the Old City and admired displays such as this:
It’s a mountain of beautifully-arranged spices – sesame seeds nestled in holes in a base of some green spice, and that’s a model of the Dome of the Rock on top if you can’t quite see it.
In the Muslim quarter is the Church of St. Anne (commemorating the memory of the Virgin Mary’s mother Anne, who supposedly gave birth to the Virgin in the caves below)…
…right next to the excavated ruins of the Bethesda Bath where Jesus supposedly healed the sick man:
We left the church starving and exhausted, so went to go find some food just outside the Old City gates – some delicious chicken kebabs from a street vendor in the Muslim part of town. We were so exhausted that we crashed in our (not-so-nice, dirty, cold, awkwardly-arranged, internet-less, don’t-provide-breakfast) hostel at the early hour of 6 pm and slept the whole night through, huddled on our mattresses underneath the drafty window without enough blankets.
Day 2 (today) in Jerusalem was our museum day. We spent the morning in the Tower of David museum, with a 2-hour-long guided tour by a former New Yorker who explained the long history of Jerusalem to us, starting from the Canaanites and ending conveniently with the British (thus avoiding the more recent, more polemical stuff), trying her very best to be come off with a neutral point-of-view and not always succeeding. To conclude our intense museum-going, we took a city bus to the opposite side of Jerusalem, to the Holocaust Museum, secluded in a wooded park, which despite being a 4-hour-long emotional ordeal was worth it. It is a well-done museum (much better than I remember the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., being), as you would expect from a memorial in Jerusalem commemorating the deaths of over 6 million Jews and the suffering of countless other survivors. We once again returned to our hostel completely exhausted after having a nice sit-down dinner in a restaurant.
I’m excited for the next step of our journey tomorrow, and will try to finish up the Istanbul details meanwhile!
Cheers!
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