Jerusalem

Hey everyone! Sorry for the complete lack of updates, but I’m lazy and the king of putting things off. I’ve been here a couple of weeks now, but I haven’t really done much touristy stuff. My time has been spent going to Ulpan (Hebrew language classes every morning), studying physics (I have an exam in Konstanz at the end of September), going to the beach and just getting settled in to the dorms. I have met tons of new interesting people, as well as tons of annoying Americans. Not all of the Americans here are annoying, the annoying-ness is concentrated to the group of 18-23 year olds. Who would have imagined?

Anyway, the touristy stuff started for me yesterday. The Over Seas Program, which is the office in Tel Aviv University that takes care of the overseas students as well as organizing the Ulpan and other social activities, organized a trip to Jerusalem.

I don’t know if any of you know much about Jerusalem (I didn’t when we set out yesterday and still don’t) but it is the Holiest City in the world. The three largest religions have many holy sites there. What was and still is strange for me is that Israel is so small, which means that we had a 45 minute bus ride to get to Jerusalem.

The morning started at 7:30 when we had to meet in front of the dorm gates. (There are two dorms, Einstein and Brodesky. I live in Einstein as well as the older American students and students from around the world. Brodesky is mostly the younger Americans.) At Einstein we were split up into two groups, each group with a bus, and that was our tour group for the day. Each group was led by one of the student organizers from the Over Seas Program (there are four of them) and each group had a security guard from a private company. The security guard was of course armed.

We set off at 8am and the first stop was for breakfast at Canada Park just outside of Jerusalem. There was nothing special there except a unit from the Israeli Army. I think they were basically there for our protection. By that I mean they were sitting around smoking and took as many pictures of us as we of them. Someone even brought a guitar so the whole group of us students along with the soldiers sang some Israeli song.

After that we went to Jerusalem. Our first stop there was on a hill on the outskirts of the city where we met up with our tour guide. From there we had a nice panorama of the old city and surrounding area and got a bit of a history lesson. From there we went to the City of David, which is the original Jewish city on that spot.

Our activity in the City of David was to talk through an ancient water tunnel. The tunnel was made naturally and after its discovery was widened to allow humans to slosh through. The tunnel was obviously underground, pitch black, narrow, in some places with a low ceiling, and filled with cold water about up to my knees. I was in the back of our group with another guy, Steve, and our Israeli student leader person, Karim (they were actually behind me). When it came time to go into the tunnel, the rest of the group in front of us had lights and stuff and took of at a pretty good pace, leaving us behind. So I stood there and looked into this small dark hole with water gushing into it thinking “They want me to do what?” None of us were excited about jumping into dark, cold water, but then Karim had a stroke of genius and gave me her cell phone to use as lighting so I could lead the way. After getting over the initial gitters of walking through ice-cold, knee-high water in a should width tunnel with 5ft high ceilings it actually become a very fun adventure. We started singing Beatles songs, which helped, and sang pretty much the whole 45 minutes it took to trudge through.

Our main group actually got split up into smaller groups in the tunnel, so there were other groups of 5 to 6 people in the tunnel that had no light at all. Typical of the organization here, no one had warned us before the trip what exactly we would be doing. They just said we’d be doing something in water. So many people did not come prepared. None of us expected that we’d be trudging through knee-deep water for 45 minutes, my roommate, Peter, was one of the people who was completely unprepared. He wore jeans, so before we went into the tunnel he just took his pants off, and did the whole trek in his underwear. He later told me that in the tunnel he kept rubbing against the walls, so to protect his nice shirt he took it of and stuffed that in the bag as well. I can just picture him walking through the dark cave wearing only his underwear, flip-flops (that were taped with scotch tape to his feet) and his hat carrying a plastic shopping bag with his clothes in it. Hilarious!

After the cave we went into the Jewish quarter of the old city. At this point it was already 2:30 in the afternoon, we were already an hour and a half behind schedule. We had a quick break for lunch and then walked along the old main street of Jerusalem, build by King Herod (one of the Roman kings of Jerusalem) to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This church is supposedly where Jesus is buried, however, depending on the type of Christianity Jesus is buried in different locations. Anyway, the church was pretty impressive. We then walked back through the Jewish Quarter to the Western Wall, or the Wailing Wall, where we ended out tour of Jerusalem.

I’m sorry that I don’t describe in detail more of what we did, but the part of the day where we were actually in the old city was pretty rushed as we were running behind schedule. Jerusalem is just one of those cities that you can’t do in just one day, so I will definitely be going back to spend more time looking at the sites there. As it was, the highlight of the day for most of us was the tunnel. The rest was interesting, but I need to do more reading on the history and then go back and really look around.

We finished the day with dinner in a Moroccan restaurant, which was excellent food.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the pictures, and if you have any questions, comments, please feel free to leave some in the comments section below.

Chris

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the photos on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=33763&l=d85bf&id=585544736