We made the most of our last day in the Holy Land and made every minute count! We started off in the Old City this morning. I wanted to visit the Aedicule (pronounced eh-dih-kyool) in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but the line was crazy long, even first thing in the morning, so we headed over to the Garden Tomb instead. On the way there, we ran into Matthew’s new friend that he made at church on Shabbat. His family is of Jewish descent from Chile, and he only speaks Spanish. So we (Matthew) stopped and chatted for a minute.
Now, I think there are more tourists, overall, than there were when I was here last. I was expecting the holy sites to be a little quieter on a weekday, but they were as busy as any of the other times we visited. But we found a little nook and sat and talked and reflected for a while, then visited the tomb once more.
We spent some time wandering around East Jerusalem in search of falafel, but it turns out that with Ramadan, no one is selling them a la carte like usual, so we ended up going to the Jewish Quarter instead. Their falafel was pretty good, though, and I did get some other errands taken care of (including replacing my sunglasses that broke like a week ago; I’ve been holding them together) while we were wandering.
After lunch we went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and stood in line for the Aedicule (it was still long). I actually was kind of shocked the first time we went into the church the other day, because the Aedicule looked absolutely nothing like I remembered, and I was wondering, could my memory really be that bad? (Plus, I swear I have pictures of it looking like a massive wood structure, not red limestone…) But as we stood in line today, Matthew was looking up the history of the church and found out that it was fully restored in 2016, and before that it was being held together by iron scaffolding (so not wood, but at least my memory of the look of it was correct…). The structure is gorgeous, though. It was really a pleasure to see it all restored.
It was mid-afternoon by this time, and we decided we had time to do the wall ramparts walk, which we did. When I did it before, we bailed at Damascus Gate and went over to the south side, so it was my first time walking the northeast section. It was amazing how many, like, soccer fields and basketball courts we encountered, just right up against the wall.
Then, since the sun was still up, I decided I wanted to go to the Russian Orthodox gold-onion-dome church that I’ve always seen on the hillside of the Mount of Olives but never visited. Turns out it’s a convent, and “visiting hours” are only on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. So we decided to hike up to Pater Noster, which is at the top of that hill. It was a crazy climb up SO MANY steps, but did it… and then the church had closed about 20 minutes ago. BUT as we were lingering outside the door, catching our breath, hydrating, it opened and a man started making conversation with us. We told him we were from Utah and he said that he knew a former JC director (“your boss” he said), and then he asked if we wanted to come in and kind of prodded his security guard friend (who he was visiting) to let us (he also encouraged us to give the guard a tip), so we got to wander around Pater Noster, which is a church dedicated to the Lord’s Prayer—they have it inscribed in every language imaginable on the walls of the church—all by ourselves for about ten minutes.
Then we took one last walk through the Old City (Matthew logged 30,000 steps on his Fitbit today) on our way to the light rail. It was getting closer to sunset by now, and the Muslim Quarter lights were on, which was super magical. We spent our last two shekels on three gummies from one of the candy stores by Damascus Gate (Matthew went up to the guy and asked what he could get for 2 sheks, basically about 70 cents, lol).
Once we got off the light rail on our way to the hotel, we came across a stream of protesters heading toward wherever the protesting was going on (not in the Old City, is all I know). Apparently there was a nationwide strike today that grounded all flights, so we’re hoping with Netanyahu’s announcement tonight (which we just watched on the news), all of that will be resolved in time for us to go home… Our tour organizer already moved our shuttle up an hour earlier in order to account for possible traffic, so… fingers crossed!
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