Week 5: Jerusalem

Saturday Dec. 20, 2008

I woke up early today because my aunt and cousins Batia, Itzik and Pnina were taking me to Jerusalem. They picked me up at 9:30am and we drove to one of the oldest cities in the world. On our way we stopped for breakfast at an all chumus place. This is a middle-eastern phenomenon... there are these places that only serve chumus. Now we're not talking no Summer Fresh Hummus in a box. No, no, my friends, these places serve the best home made chumus you can dream of. And they take their chumus quite seriously. Chumus is no side dish or dip, oh no! Chumus is your main course served warm in a bowl. The falafel, salad, poached eggs, pita, and onion... those are your side dishes. You eat the chumus with a spoon, you don't even need the pita. Now what about the onion you ask? well, believe it or not, you use a layer of fresh onion to dip into the chumus... as my friend Rafi would put it, onion is the new pita!
After chumus, we went to another little shop that my cousin Itzik knows well and picked out some fresh home made treats for later - apple and date filled pastries and some other turkish sweets.
We finally got to Jerusalem and the moment we arrived, I instantly felt that I was in a really special place. You can't not feel this way here, it surrounds you as you walk on 2000 year old pavements, listening to church bells, the muezzin call for prayer, watching the religious kids rushing to synagogue, and seeing other people just going about their business. For those of you who have never been to Jerusalem, I strongly recommend that if there is one city you must visit in your lifetime, this is it!
The government passed a law in 1971, that all structures built in Jerusalem shall be build from Jerusalem stone, so the entire city has a very unique character.
It's Saturday today so all the Jewish shops are closed and only the Arabic shops are open. We walked around the old city and Itzik gave me the coles notes version of some of the events that took place here. We walked by buildings from the Turkish era, through the Armenian quarter, and a street remaining from the Roman empire. It was fascinating.

We walked through the shuk and shopped in some really cool shops. This shuk is quite different from the one in Tel Aviv. It's much bigger, much older and there's a lot more stuff! Itzik spoke in Arabic to the shop owners and got us really good deals on random stuff.



























Above is a beautiful cafe in the shuk.

Once we got through the shuk, we reached the Kotel (western/wailing wall). This is considered one of the holiest places for Judaism because the first 7 layers of the wall are the remains of the 2nd Temple built by Herod the Great in 19BCE, the next 4 layers were added in the 7th century, the next 14 layers are from the Ottoman period in 1866 and the top 3 layers were added before 1967.


There were tons of people there praying. I stood in front of the Kotel, put my hand on the 3000 year old wall and had a moment to myself. I did what most people do when they go to the Kotel and wrote my prayer on a small piece of paper and put it inside a crack in the wall.
















On our way out of Jerusalem, we stopped at a camp site to have a coffee with the lovely treats we bought early that morning and enjoyed the incredible view of Jerusalem. This was an awesome day. I got to spend really nice quality time with my family and I felt really satisfied.