Day of 1000 stairs

I don't think I'm exaggerating, If anything, my 1000 stair estimate may be conservative. We were up and down all kinds of stairs all day long. Old Jerusalem touring is not for sissies.

I was up early, before the 6am alarm sounded. I had explosive diarrhea last night with cramps and gas. It hit with a wave of dizziness and nausea about an hour before the lecture. I may have not appeciated the lecture as much as I should have because of that, but Clay didn't seem too thrilled either. Anyway, I am not sure that either of us learned anything new or formed any new opinions or impressions of Israel as a result of the lecture. After the lecture, given my condition, we just went to the Lobby Bar for their snack menu. I didn't want much. We ordered a cheese pizza to share with a beer and a Coke Zero. It was good and the perfect amount of food. It was also crazy overpriced. My small glass bottle of Coke Zero was $5.50 USD. After dinner, we walked one block uphill after turning right out of the hotel door and hit a small supermarket, more like a convenience store. We bought a 2 liter bottle of Coke Zero for a fraction of the cost. We also bought a bag of chips and a box of chocolate cookies. We were laying supplies for the onset of Shabbat. We've had dire warnings about restaurants being closed and requiring reservations for those that aren't. We won't go hungry now.

The buffet breakfast this morning was good and came with a view overlooking the old walled city. Ori asked on the bus this morning if anyone had a room with that view. NO! Anyway, I learned at breakfast that I was still in intestinal distress. I finally broke down and took 2 loperamide when we came back to the room to brush our teeth. Good news is it worked! Hopefully it will wear off naturally but we'll be home within 4 days anyway. This was always a short trip, but it is flying by.

At 8am, the bus departed for the Mount of Olives. We had bus number 3 today as Misha's bus couldn't climb hills yesterday. We can't remember today's driver's name but it isn't clear if we'll finish the trip with him or not. We only spent a couple of hours today with him.  From our vantage atop Mount of Olives, we could see an overview of many important Christian sites. We saw where "Jesus wept." Where Peter denied Christ 3 times before the cock crowed. Where Jesus was crucified. Where the Ark of the Covenant was once kept. Where the Last Supper was held. Where Pontius Pilate tried and sentenced Christ. The 2nd of 2 places where the Virgin Mary is said to have died. The list went on and on. It was astounding but the atmosphere was of a carnival. There were people selling trinkets and photo opps on camel and white donkeys. It seemed surreal and disrespectful.

We loaded the bus again and drove back to the Dung Gate of the Old City. We went first to the Western Wall because our guide in the Davidson Centre had not arrived. The Western Wall is also known as the Wailing Wall. It is an outside base layer close to where the Ark of the Covenant was once stored and therefore thought to be a place to be close to God. We had to divide by sex to go through security to go there. Then we had to divide by sex again to approach the wall. The men get the wall on the other side of room that held the Ten Commandments, the women get a smaller section further away from the holiness. Men have to cover their heads and women don't. Clay got a souvenir yarmulke or kippah. The tradition is to touch the wall and pray and to write a prayer and fold it up and place it on the wall or in a crack. Clay said he put his hand on it. The women though were packed in 3 and 4 deep at the wall and we only had a short time allowed there. I got to be 2 back from the wall and reached in between 2 women who were standing touching the wall to set my prayer paper on a ledge. The woman to my right evidently didn't like that and elbowed me. I hadn't touched her! Since women were sitting on chairs in front of the first row of standing women reaching over them, I didn't think I was breaching etiquette. Anyway, I got out of there after that and got taken for a shekel at the free ladies room. At 10:45am, we all regrouped and walked back to try the Davidson Centre again. Our guide was not organized and though he knew a lot, he didn't communicate it very effectively. The good news was that the half hour of our lives that he wasted sitting in the dark in a sub-basement was at least dark and cool and quiet. But we were here, and it seemed silly to sit looking at computer simulations when the real thing was outside and above us. Anyway. It seemed that was the low point of the tour for the group. It wasn't just us. We came back outside in time to hear the muezzin call to prayer for Muslims. We had to go through the security checkpoint again. We walked across a good portion of the Old City for the rest of the day. We were warned to take water and our belongings when we left the bus at 10am or so that we wouldn't be back until afternoon. It isn't clear why then since we exited through the Jaffa Gate which we've been told is a 5 to 15 minute walk from our David Citadel Hotel. Here is a map that might help. So as the call for noon prayer was sounding and the noon church bells were ringing, we began the Via Doloroso and the Stations of the Cross. This was not on our itinerary, though Ori had mentioned it when he was pointing things out from the Mount of Olives. It was a surprise. A good one. We started at 3 since 1 and 2 are not accessible according to Ori. We went through 8 I think before we stopped for lunch at about 1pm. It was the latest we've had lunch and it was a hard walk with all the stairs and cobblestones and blazing sunshine and crowds. People seemed stressed. It didn't help that lunch was sidewalk seating at a shwarma/falafel stand. We were fine with it. It wasn't as good as the shwarma we had in Tel Aviv though. After lunch, we went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to finish the Stations of the Cross. The carnival atmosphere picked up again here. It did not feel sacred. I was surprised. It was a super crowded noisy maze. I'm glad we went, but what a mess. After a near revolt by about half the group over Ori refusing to stop for souvenirs or shopping of any kind, and after Mick had promised it to them, Mick yanked Ori aside and insisted. We got 15 minutes in a market area. Ori first derided the experience and described something like a long ago Turkish market. They stopped doing that even in Turkey and nothing like that was seen by us. I don't know what his deal is about riding us for spending our time in Israel in toilets or souvenir shops. What difference should it make to him if that is what happens. People, especially old people, go to the bathroom alot and enjoy shopping. I finally found an Israel flag patch in the last shop I checked. So, I'm done!

We rode the bus a long and circuituous route to arrive back at the hotel around 4:30pm. One of the women on our tour had shown me her free H. Stern charm from the voucher with our hotel keycards and told us where to find the store. I have another H. Stern charm from Manaus and I wanted to get mine. I had the voucher in my purse so hoping to beat the Shabbat shutdown, we went straight to the mall across the street to find it all shut down already. We had been told it would be about 5:15pm but it was earlier. We went ahead and walked all the way back to the David Tower to find the store for later reference. It looks like maybe Sunday afternoon on our last day.

We walked straight on to the Mandarin Chinese restaurant that Clay had found near our hotel that would be open as non-kosher on Shabbat. We walked through a bunch of open pubs and coffee shops on our way there as well as past an Italian place named Cielo that would open at 6:30pm. We were inside Mandarin and upstairs eating when we heard the citywide sirens sounding to give the 5 minute warning that Shabbat was beginning. Clay had to make 2 trips up the stairs because Mandarin didn't accept credit cards. He had to go to an ATM across the street. The Chinese food was good. It was a nice change. We got back to find that our setting the AC Shabbat settings per directions had left our AC running, but the lights being out was a problem. The bedside reading lights worked and the maid had left the bathroom lights on so we won't touch that switch all night to have light in there for showers in the morning. According to the hotel guide, the outlets should still work, but all the lamps have wall switches and since we didn't leave them turned on before we left, we can't use them now. The closet lights come on when the doors are opened which the hotel guide wouldn't work with the overhead lights. The elevators work and the hall lights are on. The lights are on in the ice machine room and the ice maker works. The TV works as do our tablets, so the dark is the only issue.

Tomorrow we visit Masada, the Dead Sea and in the evening Ori suggested we all go to an evening show at 55 shekels each. I think everyone took him up on that. Shabbat should end about 8:15pm tomorrow. The show is at 6:30pm, I think. Mick told us right before we got off the bus that tomorrow the tour would provide everyone of us a ticket to some kind of Dead Sea bathing, so to either bring a swimsuit or buy one in the hotel tonight. We didn't bring or buy swimsuits and neither of us would be seen in one any way. He didn't really explain what was happening tomorrow so if you can't just take off your shoes and roll up your pants to test the water, I'm not sure what we'll be doing while bathing is happening. Mick told us we'd all be impressed by Masada and they both think we'll all be impressed by the evening show. It will be another long day. We'll be ready to go home on Monday and just wish it wasn't such a long flight! We still haven't heard from Mick about our airport transfers which we prepaid for when we bought the tour. We have our fingers crossed that our Air Canada BC upgrade bids are accepted too! We won't know before 48 hours.

Photos