Jerusalem

Today was a quick whirlwind tour of Jerusalem as we only have one full day here. Tomorrow we leave for a tour of North Israel.

After breakfast we went for a stroll around the streets next to our hotel, off King David Street and headed for the Jaffa Gate in the Old City. There were markets set up on the cobbled streets of the Old City, along steeply stepped lanes, with small alleyways going off in many directions. The narrow lanes were lined with colourful scarves, beads, jewels, carpets, spices etc. It was nice to be told “I want to make you happy! What would you like?” by the male street owners, a very convincing argument in order to clinch a purchase from a girl. At one point, a young boy was trying to sell me and Mum a necklace with big blue stones and a silver clasp, going from asking 400 Shekels and then ultimately going down to 10 shekels, as we were walking away. Dad stood out like a very sore thumb on these streets (more so than me), wearing his Great Gatsby inspired beige linen coat over a shirt with black dress pants and closed toed shoes, as well as standing a good 3 feet higher than most. From now on he is going to up his ‘discretion’ level, which at this point has been very poor…for all of us. This came to a head when Zac set off the alarm of a motorbike in the middle of the Old City after climbing on top of it. Typical Zac, but embarrassing nonetheless.

We had an incredible tour of Yad Vashem by a man called David Metzer, he was organised to guide us by a friend of Mum and Dad’s, (he had actually taken Julia Gillard around the museum last June). The design of the museum building is very beautiful, being a long triangular prism shape made out of concrete and dug into the earth, gradually angling in deeper the further you walk through the galleries. The interior walls also angle inwards toward the end of the structure, in order to create a feeling of being trapped before opening up again to a panoramic view of Jerusalem to represent the ‘eternal hope’ of the Jewish people. One thing that David really accentuated throughout the tour was the fact that the museum is ultimately about ‘life’, not death. He explained how many of the survivors of the Holocaust do not see revenge against Hitler and the Nazi’s in terms of the death penalty and further death, but through Jewish life, in their children and grandchildren. The heart of the museum is the ‘Hall of Names’, which is a circular room lined by shelves with folders that hold the names of people who were killed during the Holocaust. There is space for 6 million names, but obviously half the shelves are empty. The idea was for this space to be a like a ‘virtual tombstone’, as most of those who died would never have had a Jewish burial. The tour was very comprehensive, but what I loved most about it was that the focus was not purely on the factual history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, but the many complex moral and social dilemmas intertwined with this like why the allies didn’t intervene, and why Jews didn’t try to escape Europe earlier?

We ended the day with a tour of the Kotel Tunnels attended by me, Henry and Zac and dinner at the Foccacia Bar in Rabi Akiva St, which again looked like turning into a farce, as Mum and Dad, and Zac, Henry and I all got lost trying to find the restaurant. We all eventually did find it, after asking about 10 different people for directions. Getting back to the hotel was easy, and sleep was sorely wanted.

B

NOTE: There has been a request made that I add in the following anecdote. After arriving at our hotel in Jerusalem at 1am in the morning after a 12 hour flight from Hong Kong, there was a mistake (well ,various mistakes) in our booking. The man checking us in kept getting confused with what was available so it ended up taking about an hour to get our rooms. By this point I was exhausted, hungry and already 'over' Henry and Zac's 'antics', so I ended up bursting into tears when I was told I would have an inter-connecting room with them. The man obviously empathised with me, because he ended up working something out to avoid this and wanted to 'see me smile'. There it is boys, my moment of weakness.