Let’s take a vacation - Israel and Jordan

Sitting here writing this while I am home from work sick, with a fever, I really would like to take a vacation.  Alas I’m not sure what we have in vacation plans this year and we are certainly unable to take one right now so I will reminisce about the most recent vacation we went on - Israel and Jordan.  This was perhaps the most interesting vacation we ever took.  No vacation ever had as many highs and lows as this one.  While in general I am very glad we did it, there were definitely lowlights (such as Nelya breaking her toe in the Dead Sea) and extreme highlights (being the guests of honor at a hip night club in Tel Aviv).  I won’t cover all the trip in one posting, but similar to what I did with the Manu Rain Forest I will go through the trip in the order we took it.

So let’s get started with the first destination in the trip - the holy city of Jerusalem.

Before I get into depth about the trip, I would like to dispense with one preconception about the Middle East in general and Israel in particular - it is not a dangerous place.  Not once during our trip did we hear a bomb, bullets, or anything the least bit threatening.  The most scary part of the entire trip was the horrible Israeli customer service.  So don’t be dispelled with what you hear in the news - Israel and a good portion of the Middle East is perfectly safe to travel too.  In fact I feel safer in most parts of the Middle East than I do walking in the US at night.  We have so far been to Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Oman and felt very safe in all of them. 

So getting on with the trip, we typically arrange to arrive at our destination at night - which allows us the chance to sleep and then get up in the morning - usually finding ourselves already adjusted to the time zone.  We did this with Jerusalem as well and one of my wife’s cousins picked us up at the airport and drove us to our hotel.  Our first big scare was when his car got stuck on the freeway and we couldn’t figure out how to start it.  Luckily I found the instruction manual for the car but it was in Hebrew which didn’t help me much and he had difficulty following all the steps listed.  Finally one of his friends drove by and we rode with him to the hotel.  A policeman finally stopped to start our cousin’s car - so he was OK.

We checked into the American Colony Hotel which was easily the best hotel we stayed in the entire trip.  It is a very historical hotel and despite its name receives very few Americans these days.  There is a reason for this - the hotel is located in the Arab part of Jerusalem.  We didn’t mind this and felt perfectly safe, though two buildings away was a headquarters building for the PLO.  (I didn’t bother asking to go in)  Despite this, the area is very peaceful and one of my wife’s cousins who served in the Israeli army near there mentioned that it is not dangerous.  Still, my wife’s relatives were all hesitant to go there due to Arab/Israeli relations.  The hotel is lavishly decorated but for some reason I didn’t take any photos.  Ironically it used to belong to a Nazi collaborator and anti-semite.  As I understand it is Swiss owned, though all of the employees are Palestinians.

Enough about the hotel, let’s take a short walk into the old city.

This is the gate (Herod’s gate I think?) that enters into the Arab part of the old city.  Jerusalem is a fascinating city and is very ancient.  However the most interesting thing I found about Jerusalem is it’s still in use.  If you travel around Europe, most medieval towns now house shops and tourist related activities.  This is not the case with Jerusalem - where most of the city is still being used the way it was a thousand years ago.  In fact, I was rather surprised that Jerusalem in general had poor tourist facilities.  In particular finding things in the old city was a challenge.  This is a the definition of a “street” in the old city.

There are very few signs and we often had to ask where to find things.  Even very important things - such as the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, were rather difficult to find.  On the first day, we decided to follow Via Dolorosa.

This street (or network of streets - it is not a simple path) lived up to its name.  It is very much like the street above, but darker because most of it is covered.

Along the way there are different stops where different important things occurred.

Add to this the fact that we had too strollers and two lazy kids (three and four years old) meant that we often had to carry all of them (kids in strollers) up and down all of these stairs.  By the time we were done my arms were bleeding from getting constantly scraped by the strollers and we were completely out of breath.  I am not Christian, but during the whole ordeal I often though - “poor, poor, Jesus”.  Just when my wife was ready to insist that we give up and head back, we ran into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the most important churches in the world, supposedly contains the tomb of Jesus and is a very strange church.  Partly due to history, partly due to the fact that multiple churches own it (Orthodox, Coptic, Catholic), the church is more of a maze than a cathedral.  Each way you look there is some staircase that goes somewhere interesting.

After hanging around a bit at the Church and catching our breath, we wandered around some of the Arab spice markets, where Nelya picked up some spices to take home.  A number of spices she remembers from Tajikistan were available there that are not obtainable here in the US (or are of a better quality there).

All in all it was an interesting first day, and we were quite exhausted at the end of the day, though there was one extremely important thing we still saw that day.  However that deserves the beginning of a new post, so I will discuss it tomorrow and in the meantime leave you with the thoughts of covered crammed markets and exotic spices in the old city markets of Jerusalem.

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Tags: church of the holy sepulcher, israel, jerusalem, middle east, old city, photography, Travel, via dolorosa