The Holy Land

I got the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and booked a cheap hostel for 3 nights near the old city, where most of the sites and history are located. I wasn’t familiar with the landscape around Jerusalem. Rolling hills for days, olive trees scattered around, towns and villages thousands and thousands of years old scattered throughout, dotting parts of Israel and the West Bank. As we were driving around Jerusalem towards the bus station I got my first glimpse of the masses of Orthodox Jews that populated most of this part of the city. When I saw their black hats, robes, glasses, and long hair growing on each side of their head, I began to ask myself questions nonstop for basically my entire time in Jerusalem. Why are they all dressed like this? What does each detail mean? What are they up to? Why does nothing make sense? While being confused about everything that was going on, I made my way to the hostel and set up there. I knew that I was going to be busy here and wouldn’t have much time to do anything outside of sightseeing and trying to make sense of everything that goes on in this place.

Western Wall Selfie

Not long after I arrived I wanted to walk around the old city to get a feel for this place. I honestly didn’t know a lot about everything to see here, and planned on doing a free walking tour the next day to learn about everything. But because I couldn’t do the tour the first day, I found myself walking through this place asking myself even more questions as to what the heck was going on. Why are there so many Arabic people here? Why is everyone speaking Arabic? How old is this place? – more and more questions about what I was looking at and where I was going. I knew the basics – The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the holiest place in Christianity, allegedly where Jesus was crucified and laid to rest before resurrecting again. The Western Wall is the holiest place in Judaism, the last remaining piece of the old Jewish Temple and acts as an open Synagogue, and the Temple Mount is the third holiest place in Islam, where the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. I actually didn’t know that much about these three places until after the tour, but I at least knew they existed beforehand, hence the confusion of significance when I first arrived at this place. But the tour was good. I learned a lot and still had a bunch more questions.

Dome of the Rock

Another crazy coincidence that happened was when I Skyped my parents a few days before arriving and they told me that there was a group of people from their church going to Israel on a tour, and one of them went to High School with me. I thought it would be cool to meet up with someone from back home so we arranged to meet on my first night in Jerusalem. They were staying at a hotel that was only a 10 min walk from my hostel so I met up with her and had a nice dinner, catching up on our trips and saying hello. It was really cool, and it was great to see someone else from back home after so long.

I did that tour the next day and wanted to go to the Israel Museum after but had to kill some time before it opened that evening, so I decided to go to the Garden Tomb, the second and ‘less popular’ location where Jesus was allegedly laid to rest before resurrecting. This actually turned out to be a more memorable experience than expected. When I first arrived there by myself it was right after another tour group arrived for their own tour of the area (there’s tour groups everywhere all the time). But the guy working there suggested that I should join in, and everybody in the tour group welcomed me to join them on their little tour of the Garden tomb.

I could quickly tell that this was a church group on a tour through Israel, just as most tour groups were. These people were from Southern California, which wasn’t too far from home, and they were mostly older, very nice people. The tour guide was great, and overall it was a very pleasant 30-45 minute tour. We saw the tomb and everything, and of course I made some friends with the nice old people along the way. After the tour they were going to have communion together and reflect on their experience with some praying in between. One of the nice old ladies insisted that I join them, and although I’m not a religious person I happily obliged. The service was great, and in the end I introduced myself to everyone and they all said a prayer for me and the rest of my journey. It was kind of a special moment, and even though I’m not religious I still really appreciated the support and kindness from these people, and the Garden Tomb ended up being a great success. I hit the Israel Museum next, which was also a success. I easily spent 3 hours there and saw the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest original biblical documents in existence, which of course was the highlight.

The next day was really interesting. After walking around Jerusalem and seeing what everything's all about I knew that I wanted to get a different perspective and make my way further into Palestine. I wanted to go to Bethlehem, to see not only where Jesus was allegedly born, but also get a feel for Palestine as well. The Church was pretty impressive but what I took away the most from this visit was the completely different perspective of the situation of the Palestinian people living in the West Bank. First off, there's a massive wall separating the West Bank from the rest of Israel in order to keep the Palestinians out. The wall is over 400 miles long and it's massive. There's a lot of graffiti covering parts of this wall, including some famous artwork from Banksy and a lot of political messages about the situation there. The messages definitely had an impact on my experience there and what was going on. We had a local guy take us on a little tour of a refugee camp not too far away, and I got a glimpse of the living conditions of these Palestinian refugees which was extremely interesting, and really opened my mind to the situation here. I never really saw anything like this on my trip so far, and I'm really glad I got to see it. I got a lot out of it. It was interesting to hear things from the Palestinian point of view, and for someone who doesn't usually bother with paying attention to these things, I definitely thought this was a good overall experience. Hopefully things will improve with this crazy situation between Israel and Palestine.. but one thing's for sure, the struggle is real.

The following day, before visiting the Dead Sea, my hostel friends and I decided to see Masada on the way; one of those fortresses on top of a mountain that overlooks the Dead Sea and provides fantastic views of the surrounding area. There were parts of this place that reminded me of the Grand Canyon. Much smaller, but same concept and similar landscape and rock formations. It was really impressive, and after spending a few hours up there we headed back down to the lowest place on Earth. We took a cab to a public beach on the Sea, changed into some swim gear, bought some mud, and headed into some of the saltiest water in the world. It was crazy. The Dead Sea is almost 10 times as salty as the ocean, and because of science you almost float out of the water. If you don’t know much about the Dead Sea then look it up; because of its saltiness there’s no need for swimming. You just effortlessly float on the surface of the water and relax. It was trippy, and we all got a kick out of it. After that, we covered ourselves in Dead Sea mud which is supposed to be good for your skin, and that was interesting. I never really did anything like that before but it was a lot of fun, and we had some good laughs while lathering ourselves in this weird stuff.

Dead Sea in the distance

It was a long day and we were pretty exhausted after the swim. We had to wait a while for the bus back to Jerusalem and when we got back we were exhausted.

The next day we went back to Tel Aviv, spent my last night at a great hostel there, got a cab to the airport the day after that, made more friends in the cab who had the same flight to Istanbul as me, and went to the airport. They say getting out of Israel is even harder than getting in, so you should show up 3 hours before your flight to get through security. They weren't lying. 4 interviews, a full bag search, a full body scan, and a friendly pat-down later, and I was out of security after almost two hours. That was by far the most security I've ever been through anywhere ever but I made it to my flight back to Istanbul, and after an incredible 12 days in Israel I was excited to return back to this city and figure out my next plan of attack.