Day 1 - The Plymouth - Jerusalem Express
Trip Start
Mar 21, 2008
1
15
Trip End
Apr 05, 2008
Tel Aviv,
Israel
Friday, March 21, 2008
We're back on the travelling scene! This time it's something really special. As a late wedding present, Regine's parents, Eva and Udo, invited us for a 2 week trip to Israel for 2 weeks around Easter. And Regine's brother Steffen came along, too. Why is it so special? Because Regine and Steffen spent part of their childhood here, Udo worked in Israel for many years, Eva lived and studied here for years, they both met here and got married in Jerusalem, and Regine then spent over a year there working in a kibbutz looking after learning disabled adults after finishing school. Now that's plenty of reasons to have been really look forward to this trip for a long time! And what a great journey it turned out to be!
First realisation: Israel is tiny by any nation's standard. It's 15 km across at it's narrowest point (southern tip) and a measly 140 km across at it's widest point and only 424 km long north to south. Now that's an easy day trip through a country about the size of New Jersey. It's difficult to get these numbers right, though, as you never know if you should count the annexed Golan Heights, the partly Palestinian controlled West Bank or the rebelliously independent-ish Gaza Strip.
Despite it's puny size the variation in landscape is fantastic. Climate-wise it's semi-arid and certainly dry as a camel's bone in the large southern Negev desert and the Judean desert. But even in the empty desert there's ample life and the landscape is incredibly diverse.
This is Israel
If you then contrast that to the lushness of the northern agricultural plains and hills and the vibrancy of the populous coastal strip you'll understand that Israel may undergo a complete makeover of its appearance within just a few miles. Although only 2% of it's surface are covered by water, the country conveniently borders on the Red Sea in the South and has a 273 km coastline on the Mediterranean. Israel also covers quite a bit of altitude ranging from mountain ranges with peaks as high as 2814m (Mt Hermon with its ski field) to the world's deepest spot at 418m below sea level at Dead Sea. It also claims Asia's hottest temperatures at 53 degrees. Israel's 7.2 million people are as varied as its Landscape. The majority of inhabitants (75%) are Jews and Israel has a very open immigration policy to anyone with Jewish roots. This has most recently led to a surge of largely agnostic Russians with some Jewish grandparent who are certainly watering down the percentage of practising Jews. Many Russians in fact don't even bother learning Hebrew. Otherwise the majority of the population draws from the European Jews who fled the Holocaust. Numbers are augmented by middle Eastern and northern African Jews. The greatest minority are the largely Palestinian Muslim Arabs (20%). Keeping in mind there are quite a few Christian Arabs around Jerusalem. The 2 official languages are Hebrew and Arabic, yet most Israelis can converse quite well in English, too.
So that's your introduction.
Temple Mount (wailing wall on left)
Let's check out our itinerary!Day 1 - Good Friday.
We took the bus from Plymouth to Heathrow and took a British Airways plane to Israel's only international airport, Ben Gurion, near Tel Aviv. I was amazed by the laxness of the security at Heathrow, especially as I had been warned that on flights to Israel you and your belongings are supposed to be practically turned inside out. It was a bog standard security check and the only time anyone ever asked to see our passports was at the gate. When we arrived I quickly took a liking to the Israelis: Many of them were wearing colourful costumes and wigs similar to those seen at our German carnival. Turns out it was the Purim festival which apparently goes along with masquerades to commemorate the exiled Jew's deliverance from certain Persian annihilation by Esther. We met with Eva, Udo and Steffen at Immigrations, rented a car and set off to our first hotel at Newe Ilan. The best bit: 30 degrees and sun! After we'd left home at a windy 2 degrees that morning. But there was no time for rest, we just dumped our bags, jumped back into the car and embarked on an evening ride into nearby Jerusalem.
It was Sabbath, so cruising along the otherwise usually crowded highway and the streets of Jerusalem was very tranquil indeed. Whereas the coastal metropolitan area around Tel Aviv is mainly secular, the majority of Jews in Jerusalem are very religious, a large number of them ultra-orthodox so-called Hassidim.
Head banging traditional styley
That's the dudes in the black suits and hats with the twirly locks and the beards. Plenty of them around on a Sabbath stroll to and from the synagogues with their huge families. The men often don't work as they are too busy praying. So the ladies work, if they're not tending to the copious offspring. Ladies wear long dresses in plain colours and either wear their - always covered - hair short or pack it up a bandanna so as not to arouse other men. The young girls have long hair and also wear dresses. The small boys don heavy plaid shirts or daddy-style suits, and little kippa caps on their heads. Of course they don't drive. Hey, it's Sabbath, they don't even push buttons on Sabbath: the elevators are programmed to automatically stop at every floor. I dare you to drive through an ultra-orthodox neighbourhood on Sabbath. I'll give you $10 if you don't get stoned...same goes for publicly kissing on any day, by the way.Under the amber gleam of the equinox full moon we drove around the entire city wall of Jerusalem peeking in through the various gates before we strolled inside to a vantage point overlooking the western wall and the temple mount with it's two mosques at the top: Al Aksa and the Dome of the Rock. All this time we got great explanations to the sites, their history and the people from Eva and Udo. It was a truly magical night and a taste of further great adventures to come. As we were about to leave we witnessed a parade of enthusiastically singing and dancing young men from a Torah school winding past us on their way back from the western wall. It was good to see such jubilant spirit keeping in mind that only 2 weeks prior to this a gun-crazed massacre had taken place in a Jerusalem Torah school. We didn't see any Good Friday processions, but we were probably too late anyway...and in the wrong part of town.
