A Day in Jerusalem

Whew! What a day!

We started at 7AM at the bus outside of campus.  Getting up that early was just delightful.  After waiting for people for forty-five minutes, we finally left. Our first stop was the Knesset, after driving through the Rose Garden.  They fed us breakfast on the bus, but it was Israeli style, meaning vegetable sandwiches... Most of us just kept it to eat later. Avocado, eggplant, tuna or cheese sandwiches, most with peppers, cucumbers, pickles or olives, are not really appreciated as breakfast foods to most Americans.

Outside the Knesset

The Knesset was a very pretty building, and it had an amazing mural by Mark Chegal on the main foyer.  However, it's pretty much the same as the Capital building in DC or the EU building in Brussels or the UN building in New York City. Basically what you see on C-Span.

Chegal's Tapestries

Next, we went to an overlook on the governor's palisade, which is leftover from the British rule.  From there, you could see almost all of Jerusalem.

More pictures can be found on my Facebook.  Below is one of my favorite shots, though:

From there we went over to the food shuk, where we had lunch (Michele and I got fish and chips), before walking over to the old city and seeing the Western Wall.

I would have taken many, many more pictures, and bought some things, but we were rushed to get to various places and prevented from stopping. We would get where we were going and then have to wait a considerable amount of time, which was very frustrating. I'm planning to go back and see more of Jerusalem.

We wandered around the Western Wall, saw some of the old Jewish Quarter and some of the more historical places that I haven't been before. It was pretty cool. My favorite thing was this map/mural:

Our tour guide said this: "We're on a street that's 3000 years old, sitting on stones that were put here 2500 years ago, following a map that's 1800 years old, that was found 1000 years ago, that was rebuilt 700 years ago, that we're now using today."

I think that's pretty cool.

We also went to a cool museum about the generations of Israel with all of these glass columns that were engraved with the names of the Israeli forefathers. It was really interesting, but I felt we could have spent some of the time better than sitting in the museum.

I prayed at the Western Wall and then we moved on to take gorgeous views of the city from above the wall... Our guide led us up all these steps and we ended up on the rooftops. It was really amazing.

We then went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which was interesting. I appreciated that we went to a non-Jewish site, but there were some complaints among some of the people.  They did not seem to realize that, even though they're in Israel, not everyone is Jewish, and that includes describing our OSP group.  My patience with a lot of the Americans in the OSP is running very, very low, and I can't wait to be in classes with Israelis.

Dinner was buffet at an Italian restaurant with EXCELLENT dessert, and then we all piled back onto the bus for the drive back to Tel Aviv. We finally got home around 9, and I'm pretty sure everyone is headed to bed. Nearly everyone was asleep on the bus.  Michele and I figure that we walked at least five miles around Jerusalem.

Lilah tov!