Alright, back to the Holy City.
When last I left you, Alli and I were sleeping in a very noisy cave weirdo hostel and Spenser was on his own elsewhere in the Old City.
We left our temporary home in search of breakfast and managed to stumble across not only the first real bagel place I’ve encountered in Israel, but also two other members of our group who had spent the night in Jerusalem as well. No sign of Spenser, but as we hadn’t received any frantic phonecalls from him, we assumed he was fine somewhere (turns out the guy running his hostel was feeding him a full, homemade breakfast, which we did not receive at our hostel).
Met up with the rest of our program at the entrance to the Temple Mount, a holy site for both the Jews and the Muslims, on which the Dome of the Rock resides. It’s considered the holiest site in Judaism (two Jewish temples once stood here), though today it is dominated by the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
al-Aqsa Mosque
Dome of the Rock
Though the Temple Mount is contested as a holy site (as with all things in Jerusalem), it’s managed by a Muslim council and only Muslims are allowed to enter the buildings. You can try to fake your way in, as I contemplated, but I’m told there is a rigorous screening process before entree (no joke) so you may be better off looking from afar as I did. Because the outside is a pretty spectacular sight in itself.
(that’s my cue to bombard you with tons of pictures)
I almost got left behind because I got so caught up taking pictures. No joke.
Okay, so it’s been way too long since I started this post and I want to move on to bigger and better things (*cough*EGYPT), so I’m going to speed things up here and breeze through the rest of Jerusalem. I’ll visit again soon, I’m sure, so we can talk about it more then.
After the Temple Mount we headed for Mt. Zion and saw the church where Mary is said to have died – except that they don’t claim that she actually died there, they say she “fell asleep” here.
After that we ducked for a bit into the oldest Holocaust museum, I believe, in the world, built in 1948 (I’m recalling this from memory, so I might be wrong on that – I’m terrible with dates, much as I love history – but at some point I’ll discuss all this in more detail and will make sure my facts are straight). Very simple and pretty and intense, the whole place is line with these large tiles, each one for each of the communities in Europe destroyed by the Nazis. A few other things on display, like clothing and books and lots of pictures and we were meant to spend only a few minutes inside, as it’s fairly small, but we ended up taking quite a bit of time looking at everything.
Had lunch in the Muslim Quarter in the Old City, which was great, got a fab picture of Arabi Diet Coke
And we continued to the Kotel Tunnels – basically the insides of the Western Wall.
Really cool, really beautiful stuff here, including people praying at the wall from the inside, which I didn’t ever really know existed.
The lighting was lovely so I got lots of really nice pictures inside the tunnels. Basically, to sum up the tunnels, there was a temple built here once upon a time, then other people moved in and took over and built overtop of the temple, so all of these hallways and arches became tunnels. Basically.
Okay, I’m going to stop here because I’m about to run out to get some awesome hummus and I want to just post this already, so I’ll be back at some point to talk more about the tunnels and the Holocaust museum and such, but up next: EGYPT.
Yup.
