We started the day with lunch at the American Colony Hotel. It's a famous old hotel, popular with "international diplomats" as the 1000 places to see before you die book mentioned. Well, I was there and we ran into another woman from the embassy who just happened to be there at the same time, so that book was pretty accurate. The hotel is a calm oasis amid a densely packed city full of sounds, smells, and sights you are unlikely to see anywhere in the US. I was not thrilled with my lunch, a curry chicken sandwich in which the chicken was positively drowning in mayonnaise tinged with an almost tasteless yellow seasoning masquerading as "curry," or the inattentive service we received. An order of bread arrived just as I was delivering my last spoonful of pasta to my mouth. In spite of that, the grounds truly were beautiful and other menu items did look quite tasty. Hopefully the brutally honest remarks I left on the comment card on the table will have had time to make a difference before we return. A much better meal was had later in the evening (in spite of some language difficulties) at a small cafe called Sambooki where we had an enormous, delicious salad and got to pick out everything we wanted. It's also a bakery so there were delicious cookies for dessert.
I don't have any good pics of what it looks like inside the Old City, but it is typically densely packed. Narrow streets are really just sidewalks and no vehicles enter. You walk through packed bazaars to get to the main sites inside so you have this real feeling of being transported to another era.
Here is the Temple Mount/Wailing Wall/Dome of the Rock. It's not a great picture of the wall because it's obscured partly by that footbridge.
The Mount of Olives (covered in tombstones).
The next three pics are from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The final three stations of the cross purportedly took place on these grounds, although there is considerable controversy regarding the resting place of Jesus before he rose. Some believe it was the Garden Tomb outside the Old City walls on the way to the American Colony Inn (which probably wasn't there back then :). We ended up getting stuck in the church for a very long time, first because my friend wanted to stand on line to actually enter the Holy Sepulcher and see the rock under which Jesus was buried, according to some. However, when my friend was almost at the front of the line, the Armenian archbishop and cronies decided to have a ceremony there with singing and candles and lights which halted the line for a good 20-30 minutes. Then once the tomb was visited and we were preparing to leave, brothers of another Christian sect were blocking the only exit while they performed a similar ceremony at the Stone of Unction. It was a very interesting visit, but was definitely ready for some fresh air when we were done. It was very dark in there. I've never been in such a poorly lit church before.
The site of the where Jesus died on the cross. You have to duck down as the woman in the picture is doing and you can put your hand into a hole and feel where the cross once stood.
The Stone of Unction...where Jesus was laid to prepare for burial. People rub articles of clothing on the stone so that they will be blessed. We left with some of our items being newly holy.
The exterior of the Holy Sepulcher...not sure why the guy in the pic seems so happy.
Ok, so when we got out of the Church, it was already getting dark. So the next few pics are some evening shots of the Old City walls and surrounding area.
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