J-Town

Jerusalem has a really crazy energy about it. Really, how is it possible for it not to? As one of the holiest cities in the world, it is rather full of tourists and for me that wasn't so holy. At times it might as well have been America for all I knew. You could literally walk down the street and hear nothing but their accents for ages. That being said, so many different people from Christian, Muslim and Jewish faith from countries all over the world make pilgrimage there. There are some amazing architectural structures, and in the cobbled streets of the Old City there is still an old Souk which has shopkeepers trying to convince people to come in and buy something.

Once we had arrived there, we dumped our things at a friends work and made our way down to the Old City. Doing the traditional Jewish thing, we ate bagels and then, doing the traditional 'jess eats lots of food thing' we followed that with a burger, without cheese...did I mention there was no cheese? Who eats burgers without cheese? Moving on...

We spent a while looking around and finally we get to an open outdoor area and a few hundred metres away from us is the Western Wall. It is sometimes referred to as the Wailing Wall or the Kotel and in Judaism, the Western Wall is venerated as the sole remnant of the Holy Temple. It has become a place of pilgrimage for Jews, as it is the closest permitted accessible site to the holiest spot in Judaism, namely the Even ha-shetiya or Foundation Stone, which lies on the Temple Mount. At the site of the wall, we found it was separated into two sections, one for the men, and one for the women. (the women's section was smaller of course, about a 1/4 of the size of the mens.) In the stone of the wall there are tiny crevices which are filled with tiny balls of paper that carry written prayers. You can't even begin to imagine how many of these there are. The wall is magnificently huge and nearly every space has been filled with these prayers.

Fun Fact: The Israeli Telephone Company has established a fax service to the Western Wall where petitioners can send notes to be placed in the Wall. Hilarious!

So after all that excitement we went out for a beer down near Jaffa St - which is one of the main ones that runs through the city. Really it was quite cheap - something like 10NIS for a beer which is about half the usual price. Plus free popcorn. More bars should do free popcorn. I got my nose re-pierced, as I'd lost my nose ring in the Bedouin Tents earlier in our trip. By lost I mean, I think the women saw the shiny pretty thing and took it...nothing against Bedouins at all. What you have to know is that they don't have much - so for them, anything that I had in my bags was really something special. They even wanted some of my panty liners. Go figure!

I did start to get sick after a couple of days and so didn't really feel much like going out to see things. We did however go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre just before I left for Tel Aviv. It's a rather ominous place, and we managed to arrive just as there was a service/prayer. It was an interesting thing to be a part of and the singing always sounds so beautiful in such big churches with great acoustics. There was also some amazing carvings in the wall of crosses - there were hundreds of them - which can be seen in one of the pictures above. There were lots of people in the church and you know what it's not really the kind of place that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy but it is amazing and the paintings and artwork in there are amazing. We really didn't stay long but it is the kind of place I'd like to go to again and look around properly.

In other news I ate some really sensational Ice Cream, Milk Duds and went to the Dead Sea, but that's a story for another time...