I am back in Amman!! Living in my new swanky flat with Jasmine, which means that we get to cook and clean and do everything ourselves in the way we like, which we love! We have got into a sort of routine where I cook the dinner and then she does the washing up, which seems to work wonderfully. There is no denying that I am somewhat of a domestic Goddess!
Howe'er this is not the reason for this post. I am writing, because before I came back to Amman a took a slight detour across Israel/Palestine, which was simply amazing!
We started of in Tel Aviv, where we nearly shat ourselves with fear whilst waiting to go through the infamously difficult Israeli Passport Control, only to encounter a rather bored and grumpy woman who let us in with the most minimal of hassle. By the time we reached the hostel it was dark and the lady who greeted us was equally as stony faced as the lady at passport control, to which we thought maybe this is an Israeli thing! Thankfully the trend did not continue!
We woke up the following morning to a Mediterranean haven! LA in the middle east. Much to Lottie's despise, short shorts were in abundance along the esplanade, where people could be spotted running, cycling, doing yoga, playing the guitar, taking a stroll, walking dogs (basically everything that we never see in Jordan). To top it all off there was grass! There was actual greenery! Safe to say, we fell in love with it!
Tel Aviv is also known as the party central of the Middle East and boy did we party we found a couple of cool bars and we had a really good time with our new friend Oreo, who was great fun. We had so much fun there that we want to go back as soon as possible, probably for Lottie's 21st birthday!! Bring on the partayyy!
We left Tel Aviv amongst crowds of young Israelis garbed in khaki, wielding guns, boarding buses to go off to wherever they were posted for their National Service, which is compulsory for all Israeli citizens, both men and women. Woo for equality! However, it did mean that we had the barrel of someone's gun digging into our legs for the entirety of the journey up to Nazareth. Our next stop!
When we got to Nazareth we realised that we were following around the days off; being in the mainly Jewish Tel Aviv on Shabbat and then up to the predominantly Christian Nazareth on Sunday. Maybe our planning could have been slightly better.
Wandering around the empty streets of Nazareth with our suitcases in the rain we felt a like we had come down from a massive high, this being the amazingness of Tel Aviv. It was here that we first saw the divide between the different denominations of Christianity. The Annunciation of Jesus' birth to Mary isn't important in every church, but to the Catholics and the Orthodox churches it is highly celebrated and in Nazareth there are two churches of the Annunciation in different places. The first is the huge half church half archaeological site where the Catholics believe the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary. The other is at the top of the hill where the Orthodox church believes that Mary encountered the archangel whilst collecting water. Personally I think it is a bit of a silly dispute, but hey it gives tourists like ourselves more churches to look at.
An argument with a taxi driver, who was trying to charge us a frankly ridiculous sum of money for a trip to Tiberus, caused us to nearly miss the bus and lead to me running case in hand down the road trying to flag it down. We got on it, thankfully. By this point we had learnt a bit of Hebrew, enough to say hello, how much, thank you etc. However, the problem comes when you don't actually know what they say back thus rendering your attempt at speaking the language pointless, because it was quickly followed by "sorry? I don' speak Hebrew.'
Tiberius, we were warned, is a bit of a tacky resort town, but this is not what we saw. There was the odd party boat going out onto the Sea of Galilee, but we mad friends with the Tiberus Rowing Team Coach who offered us to go out on the water, as we were both rowers, but Unfortunately we didn't want to hang around, because that night we were staying in Jerusalem. So we took a couple of pictures of us pretending to walk on water (I know, we are going to hell for such blasphemy!) and then it was back on the coach.
Next stop Jerusalem! Words cannot describe the eclectic mix of old and new, religious and secular, united and divided that is the city of Jerusalem. It is both a really interesting and amazing place as well as quite shocking and frightening.
When we first arrived we were amazed to see a tram! Public transport! After living in Amman for three months, public transport in city is like heaven, God know why they haven't introduced some sort of public transport in Amman! We were very aware of the vast number of things to see in Jerusalem and as our time and money was dwindling we knew we had to be savvy. So we planned our day ruthlessly only to find that of course following the trend, the next day was the birth day of Mohamed the Prophet and thus the Dome on the Rock was indeed closed off! We were not being very lucky.
However, at the drop of a pin we changed our plans and our new plan was even better. We started off the day with the Western Wall, the most revered place for Jews as it is the last remaining walls of Solomon's Temple. I donned a kippah and Lottie pulled her skirt down below the knew and we entered our separate entries to advance towards the wall. I must admit that I felt more spiritual up against this bit of wall with people wailing the words of the Torah than I did in the hordes of people rubbing their scarves on a slab of stone in the Church of the Sepulchre and I know this is hardly the point, but I quite suit a kippah.
After we have lingered long enough amongst the Jews we joined the Christians following the Via Dolorosa (Way of Sorrows) which is the route on which Jesus carried the cross. Whilst we were walking the route a group of Americans were carrying around a dummy cross around and singing, and the tight cobbled streets of Old Jerusalem filled with the smell of incense. The closer and closer we got to the Holy Sepulchre the more crowded it became as we reached the point where Jesus is supposed to have hung on the cross and was taken down and laid in a tomb. Personally I did not go for the whole thing. I felt that the crowds of people queuing up to kiss a bit of cross, the true cross, that some crusaders found some millennium and a half after the death of Jesus. As far as I was concerned this was idolatry and I didn't feel that is was very spiritual at all.
We left and went to the Mount of Olives where we went into the Garden of Gethsemane and also the point where Jesus was supposed to have Ascended into heaven (there is a footprint of sorts in a stone, that I think was possibly just a grove in the rock, but is where Jesus, similar to Neo flew up into the sky with such force as to leave behind a mark in the ground.) One of my favourite churches, the Pater Noster, is atop of the mount and it has the Lord's Prayer written in a something like 180 languages around the walls. We joined a group which meant that we heard the prayer read in French, Spanish, Ukrainian, English and then we tried in Arabic. It was one of those places that reminded you of how much unity religion brings, whilst at the same time causes such divides that are so clear within the city of Jerusalem.
The irony of this of course is that from this point on top of the hill you have a clear view of the huge wall that the Israeli government are building to shut out the West Bank of Palestine. This juxtaposition really rams home this injustice of the whole conflict, however it is good to see that the Palestinians can still laugh about it a little bit. This fantastic sculpture of the Nativity shows the before and after the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
We got a taxi to Bethlehem where we were given a tour around the churches, which are of course split into different denominations and got an awful picture touching the place of the birth of Jesus. Once again I detested the lack of spirituality in it all, as people pushed and scrambled to touch this spot. It seemed ludicrous. I would hate to think what it must be like in high season.
Back in Jerusalem we wandered through the sprawling Jewish Cemetery and went back to our hotel where we changed in order to hit the town, new Jerusalem! After a day of religious spectacles we decided to exchange spirituality of a different type of spirits, namely 2 for 1 cocktails. Lottie at this point was searching for cigarettes, which her host Uncle in Amman had asked for, and she made the fatal error of speaking Arabic. The shop assistant just grunted with a face like a smacked bottom and said "I don't speak Arabi!"
Another example of a ridiculous rivalry that I suspect will never heal. At this point Arabic went off the table again and we went back to Hebrew. We decided that the next person who tried to get us into there bar in Hebrew we would just respond, low toda (no thank you in Hebrew). It was brilliant, he immediately gave up and we burst into laughter as soon as we turned the corner.
The next day we returned to the Dome on the Rock only to find that it is only open at 12:30 - 1:30. At this point we were loosing faith as it felt like we were destined to never see the Temple on the Mount. With two hours to go we made the trek to the Mount Zion, where Jesus ate his last supper, Mary died and David is buried. We meandered through the class of giggling Jewish girls, I donned my kippah once more and we entered the Tomb of David, where of course the men's section is much larger than the women's, much to Lottie's despise.
Afterwards we took a quick trip on the tram to the Market in East Jerusalem. It was a fantastic market and I just wanted to eat everything in sight, but we had to rush back to the Old City for the Dome on the Rock. We joined the growing queue of eager tourists to see what apparently is so hard to get into for non-Muslims. We thought to ourselves, that we had done it! We were finally there! Only to find that non-Muslims are not actually allowed inside the mosques! Luckily the outsides are so beautiful otherwise it would have been a complete waste of time. Lottie was happy because she got to hijab up again and we wandered around the grounds of the Temple on the Mount and took some mosque selfies before our hour was up and we had to leave.
Now came the hardship of border crossings, after the fear of being turned away at the border on entry getting to a border to leave the country turned out to be a lot harder! The border closest to Jerusalem doesn't issue Jordanian Visas, because it is into the West Bank where Palestinians are allowed to cross freely. So we had to get a bus the length of Israel up to the Northern Border Crossing. Here we waited on the street corner, where we dropped off, for a taxi to actually take us to the border. At the border I was asked if I had any weapons and I thought they said parents, just before I answered "Yes, two." They repeated the question saving me the hassle of being strip searched. Apart from it taking a long time, the crossing was quite easy and at a long last, after a week of great adventure we were back to a country where we could speak Arabic freely, a country which we knew and oddly were calling home.
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