To Jerusalem

The alarm Clay set woke us this morning so we could watch the sun come up again over the Golan Heights and the Sea of Galilee. That happened about 6:45am. Breakfast began at 7am. Bags had to be out by 7:15 and identified at the bus by 7:50am. We went ahead and put out the bags before we left the room and checked out of the Scots Hotel between sunrise and breakfast. It seemed like our best plan since we only had 50 minutes available.

The bus left at 8am and we had our original bus and driver back today. Good news and bad. We all appreciate Misha, our driver, but our bus has little power going up hills. We had some hills again today and we crawled them. We had to get back above sea level leaving Tiberius. We drove almost all the way back to Haifa for our Druze lunch today. First stop at 9am was Megiddo, or Armageddon. It is a ruin of fortresses piled atop one another for thousands of years. It was impressive. We walked uphill to the top and across it while Ori told us about it. When we had walked across we enter a well hole dug to reach a spring outside the fortifications maybe 700 years ago. It was 183 steps down and through a tunnel and up 80 steps to another parking lot to meet the bus. It was very impressive.

Lunch was about 12:30pm in the home of a Druze family in a Druze village called Usfiya or Isfiya. This was bizarre if still enjoyable. We had a 20 year old Druze college girl as our local contact or guide. She took us through a section of the Druze village to a private home where the inhabitants cooked for us, served us and spoke to us but didn't really welcome or greet us or invite us in. It was weird. The food was good, the setting was scenic and the people welcoming but it was slightly uncomfortable. The Druze religion as explained to us was one of the more bizarre, but in my opinion at this point they're all bizarre. As we've recently learned we'll be pretty severely impacted by Shabbat here in Jerusalem at the David Citadel Hotel. I guess we didn't see anything close to this in Tel Aviv last weekend.

Anyway, the rest of the afternoon was spent getting to the hotel. I have so long looked forward to arriving in Jerusalem and I am sorry to say that my initial impression is of immediate dislike. I had been marveling at how comfortable I had felt in Israel. It is like Singapore is to Asia as I felt Israel is to the Middle East. But I don't feel that way in Jerusalem. It feels completely different. Clay is impressed with the David Citadel Hotel, but other than the ice machine across the hall, I much prefered the last 2 hotels. I hope I get over this since our last 4 nights, or the majority of our trip, is spent here. We'll see. There was a major bumble over luggage here with Mick telling us to just go to our rooms as they were assigned and let our luggage be delivered. I bypassed the snacks and welcome drinks and there by found myself as the first asked to check in. I guess that meant we were gone when someone said that every bag had to be identified outside the hotel before it would be brought in. Clay went out and learned this after we had waited about an hour. I suppose this dead time this afternoon was meant to be relaxing but we were pretty stressed. The other thing is that this hotel photocopied our passports and a little bar code/UPC code slip of paper we got at the airport when we arrived. The immigration woman who handed this slips to Clay with our passports did not say a word about how important they were. Evidently, it is like the slip you get in Vietnam or Argentina. You MUST have it on you at all times, it is required for hotel stays and to leave the country. We had to show only Clay's at the Carlton on arrival and then we showed nothing at Scots Hotel. So we didn't know until today. It is just dumb luck that we stuck them in our passports after we left passport control at the airport after using them to scan open the turnstiles and that we didn't drop them in a trash can since the issuer said nothing. In fairness, after we got them back this afternoon at the hotel with an hour or more waiting, I found in small print on the back of the slip that you need to keep it with your passport. That was pretty subtle given the importance. Anyway, now you know.

We have a lecture on Middle East politics at 6:30pm tonight. We have to meet at 6:20pm to walk to another hotel to use a meeting room. We are on our own for dinner every night in Jerusalem except our final farewell dinner on Sunday night. We are told it will be problematic to dine here because of Shabbat from 5pm Friday to about 8:15pm Saturday. We can stand to miss some meals. We'll just see what we find to eat after the lecture tonight or if we'll skip dinner every night here but the last.

We have another early start tommorow so I'll post this now.

Photos