Today, however...
AHHHH! I'm in Jerusalem! This is so amazing! AHHHHHH!
After breakfast we went through a tour of the city. Guys, I'm in Jerusalem. The legit Jerusalem. I'm just so mind-blown right now.
An important thing to know is that Jerusalem is kinda in three parts. East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem, and the Old City. East Jerusalem is the Palestinian half of the city, and where the Jerusalem Center is. It's not very modern, and there is trash everywhere. According to Sister Shade, our tour guide, Muslim people do a great job of keeping their homes very neat and tidy, but there's no sense of community to keep the rest of the town clean. She said that we'd get used to the trash eventually. We walked from the center, through East Jerusalem to the Damascus Gate of the Old City. Damascus Gate is apparently THE gate, the one that was made to be super ceremonial and beautiful by Suliman the Great, the guy who built the current walls. It's also a great place to get pick pocketed. While walking through the gate, don't keep anything in your back pockets, and put your backpack in front of you.
And then we were in the Old City! It's Holy Week for the Greek Orthodox church, so there were several sections of the Old City that were particularly crowded. There was one time, there were so many people trying to get through at an intersection that nobody could move at all, we were just stuck there, with people pushing on us in all directions. Crazy. We walked down a part of the Via Dolorosa (I have no idea actually how to spell it) which is the path that Christ was supposed to walk from Pilate's to his crucifixion. We passed by the place where Simon helped Christ with the cross. We also walked by the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, but didn't go in because it was so busy. The church is the place where Christ was thought to have been crucified and resurrected. There has been so much fighting over that building, as to what religion owns what parts of it, that each religion knows to a centimeter what they own in that building. Like, one church will own one step, and another will own the next, it's just crazy and confusing. There's a ladder on the front of the building that's been there for centuries, apparently one church owns the ledge that the ladder rests on, and another owns the window sill that the ladder rests on, and they still quarrel about who's job it is to take down the ladder.
From the church we left the city through the Joffa Gate to West Jerusalem. West Jerusalem is the Jewish side of things. It's very modern, with big, open paved streets and something like a Trax. In our orientation packet we were given 30 sheckels, and we were shown a fairly busy street with several food places, and were given the chance to get some food. I tried falafel for the first time, and it was so good. Just so good. You take a pita shell, and put in hummas, then these balls that are chick peas ground up, mixed with spices and some other things, then deep fried, and then an assortment of veggies (one girl in my group described this part as like being at Subway). Just so good! It's kinda lame, because we have everything cooked for us, I'm never going to really learn how to cook middle eastern food. But oh well.
After that it was back to the center! It it completely surreal being here, and just crazy and amazing. I can see the Dome of the Rock from the back door of my apartment. It's just so surreal. It's weird to think that I'm actually going to be here for three and a half months. I'm going to have the chance to explore every part of that city, know it back from front. It's going to be so great.
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