Jerusalem

Backtracking the romans

pajje 2016 Holy land , , , , 0 Comment

One of the reasons I went to the holy land is to see on of the wonders of the world, Petra.It would however both the stupid and boring not use the opportunity to see as much as possible once I packed my backpack so this trip went to Israel and using Jerusalem as some sort of base, from here its quite easy to go to Jordan and Petra, With easy I mean you can join a guided tour or buy a bus ticket and its just crossing the Israel-Jordan boarder (leaving Israel is not a problem) and you are there, however Petra is kind a far away from Jerusalem so I really recommend at least a two day trip so you really can enjoy it, Thats what I did and the schedule for the first day is more or less just to get there with a stop at Jerash and Amman Citadel.

Jerash is an old excavated roman city. What make it special is that it was burried in sand which makes the city very well preserved. I must confess that I was sceptic to the idea to spend a few hours at another roman ecavation site but it was amazing and totally worth it. From starting with an huge arch there was and racing track, temple and a lot of different buildings/ruins so it never went boring. However instead of me just mumbling facts which I might not remember correctly I let my photos speak for them self instead.

Amman citadel is located more or less in the middle of Amman which is the capital of Jordan. You have a lovely view over the city and this is one of the places which has be inhabited for the longest period on earth. Of course there has been different leaders during time which gives the place different kind of styles and you can find churches, mosques in all kind of variants. I really want to go back to Amman and explore the city more and you are unsure if its worth a visit or not, i would say go go go.

As the evening arrived we left Amman for the last trip to Petra. You are not allowed to sleep in Petra but there are hotels just outside the area. I however had arranged a night in a bedouin camp. Great food, a lot of tea, singing and chatting before it was time to go and sleep in my tent, lifes good!

Jerusalem

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Jerusalem is not a big city, with its humble number of 850 000 citizens its more like my own town Stockholm than for example Tokyo, however it has far more interesting history. According to Wikipedia it is one of the oldest cities in the world and two countries has declared it as their capitol. If this is not enough to make it interesting the three major Abrahamic religions (Islam, Christianity, Judaism) has declared the city sacred and of course they share sanctums. Does it work? No, not really.

By above reasons its not an uncommon view to see soldiers with automatic weapons or police officers running around with the gun in their hands and during my free tour around the old city we ended up right then police stormed a house, since it was only we tourist who looked with a mix of freighting and curiosity I guess thats a pretty common sight in this city.

After the tour and when I thought that I had learned to navigate in this maze of streets and roof tops (yea, you walk on the roof tops then you go somewhere quick) I started to walk along by myself and it was no problem to get up on the roof, but where is the exit and which exit should I take? Instead of admitting my defeat I chose to ask my way around and even if my Hebrew is not the best (actually none existent) it went pretty and its the closest I ever get to Assassins Creed in real life.

Nothing new on the west bank

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Today I went back to the west bank and more exact to the city Hebron, maybe one of the cities which best show the situation here in Israel. In the city we have Israelites,  ultra orthodox jews and Palestines and the conflict between them started way back in time, long before the state of Israel was founded. Both sides has been doing massacres so none are innocent and both sides are trying to show proof that they were here first. To solve the issue Israel split the city in two zones, H1 which is the Palestine part and H2 which is the jewish part. A jew is not allowed to H1 and vice verse and the city has somewhere around 200 000 Palestines against 700 jews. Even if Sweden among some other countries have acknowledge Palestine as a country Israel has not and its clear that the around 2000 soldiers which are deployed here has one mission, protect the jews.

To try to understand or at least to see it and be able to form an opinion by myself I took a guided tour where you during the morning spent time in H1 (jewish zone) and during afternoon spent time in H2 (Palestine). Since its really strict who are on which side its only us tourist who can visit both sides which means that we had different guides and in that way heard two completely different stories about whats going on. That setup was really good and I can really recommend it. Both guides let us meet an local families who lives in the city and both describes how good, friendly they are and that they only want peace but at the same time how blood thirsty the other part is.

To summarize my experience is hard and to be honest I still cant take any part, both sides act childish and I think our guide Muhammed said it best, “if we want peace we need to work together but neither side are interested in that”. In my view I think that both sides makes to much money on the conflict and as long as they make money on it, the conflict will continue and the common man are the one who gets stricken.

 

Rainy Jerusalem

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A rainy and rather gray day in Jerusalem screwed my plans of going swimming in the dead sea and enjoying some nice sun bathing, instead I hanged around in a wet Jerusalem. Indeed it was nice too and it gives me an perfectly valid excuse to return to the area another time. Anyway, I started the day browsing through the local market which is located more or less just outside my hostel. Everything looked so nice but I’m not sure its the best way to start the day with an basket of olives, instead I played safe and took a regular cup of coffee and croissant. Together with a cigarette or two its for sure a breakfast for champions.
After breakfast I tried to hunt down the book “Catch the jew” by Tuvia Tenenbom which a couple of people recommended me to read but even if I visited several bookshops I couldn’t find it, guess I have to buy it online once I get back home.

During the afternoon the rain stopped and I moved to one of the holiest place ever, at least if you are christian. I’m talking about the church of the holy. I’m not religious myself but people from at least six different branches of Christianity make pilgrim trips to this church so it  must be worth a visit and yes it was. The church is huge and it was packed with people and just a briefly look at the queue down to the actual grave made me decide that no matter how holy this is, I will not stand in that queue. Instead I randomly walked around in church and once I felt that I know this now the big question raised, how do I find my way out? A couple of floors later and once again I see the sunlight and of course gets jumped by people who try to sell junk to you in form of souvenirs, tourist trap deluxe.