Day 4: Tour of Old City

The days are all starting to run together and I'm going to be leaving things out but there is little time to blog! We are so dead tired when we get back to our hotel room in the evening after full days of walking and seeing and wrestling (a baby in a bus). I really want to document it all though, and since I'm a terrible journal writer this is my only way.

Our first full day in Jerusalem involved touring the classic Jerusalem-y sites including the religious sites like Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was a long day and I don't remember terribly much about it, nothing really stands out too much. The Dome of the Rock is stunning, but you cannot enter unless you are Muslim (which we are not, though we have contemplated converting).

We went St. Anne's Church and sang hymns. That was pretty neat and the acoustics were great. We walked from there down the Via Dolorosa, the path that Jesus carried his cross to Golgotha. We visited a few churches on the way, each signifying a certain aspect of the passion of Christ. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (where Golgotha and the tomb most likely were) was dark, dank, and very un-spiritual. The guidebook said of it: "those come to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre empty and wish to be filled... they leave desolate." It just was not a very nice place, and it is full of contention. Different orthodox churches (Catholic, Russian, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian) claim different areas, and it is taboo to encroach. And maybe taboo is a soft word, because they get downright violent. Something funny is that there is a ladder leading to the roof but no one will claim that territory so it has been there for like a 100 years or something. Also there is a stair that belongs to one church but the patio belongs to another so the patio gets swept but the stair doesn't. Since the churches couldn't agree on who gets to lock up the Church at night, a Muslim family has done it for like 10 generations.