Jerusalem.

A close friend described Jerusalem as 'heavy;' the term fits extremely well.

It's hard to sum up my time in Jerusalem. Ranging from a Fez-like experience ('come into my shop and have tea' swiftly becoming 'sit here while I show you carpets you don't want.' This time, with a worse exchange rate.) to the reverance of the Western Wall, there's too much to sum up easily.

So let me summarize those few, incredible days into just the most interesting parts.

My first day there, I wandered into the Old City, the place where the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are all located. I wasn't even through the Jaffa gate before some older storekeep came up, acted like an honest gentleman offering hospitality, and proceeded to take me to his shop. The tea was okay, and the carpets were gorgeous but pricey. I apparently looked more mercantile than I intended to that day.

From there, I walked all around the Old City, weighing my feelings about going to see the Western Wall on my first day there. My feet decided that I would see it, and it was.
Striking.
In a way that doesn't capture well in pictures, since, objectively, it's just a big ol' wall of stone. The atmosphere, the feel of ancient stone on one's hands, isn't something so easily snapped up as a picture.

That night, I unwound with some folks from the hostel. One was a woman from Costa Rica who, until just days ago, had been living and working in Jordan. She had flown from a husband who, in her words, confirmed by her bruises, had tried to kill her.
Another was an interesting Catalan artist from Barcelona. I'll see if I can post some of his work in another post - it's quite good, with a street-art kind of style.

The next day, I walked north of the city, up to Ammunition Hill. You can see the post about that for more details. Long story short: A powerful, personal take on a war-memorial, and a good place to tease at ghosts of cultural memory.

Later that day, I went on a walk with Aleix, the aforementioned artist. We saw a bit of the nearby city and later got some decent pasta.
Along the way, I heard my name yelled from a cab. The one who yelled it was a friend from college, who I'd not known was in Israel at all. Hooray for chance encounters. He and I caught up later in the week.

That night, I hung out with the hostel folks again. The three of us were joined by two newcomers, Bez and Rose, a young couple from the NYC area. It was the Costa Rican woman's last night in Israel before returning home to Costa Rica. She told us her story, and we listened, moved.

The next day, Aleix, Bez, Rose, and I went to the Rockefeller Museum. It's a building from the 19th century, which houses a vast array of artifacts ranging from deep pre-history to the early era of moden Jerusalem. There was a lovely courtyard in the middle, which brought to mind the glory-days of British imperialism. Despite such flights of fancy, nobody brought us tea.

It was also probably the hottest day out of the entire week in Israel; a good day to spend a bit of inside a dusty museum.
That afternoon, Aleix was on his way back to Tel Aviv and Bez and Rose returned to their family's place in Ashkelon.

The day after that, I took a bus up to Tel Megiddo, a little old hill that you might know better as 'Armageddon.' This trip gets a post to itself, when I get the chance.

That night, Shabbat began. I'd read that everything closed from around 15:00-16:00 on Friday until around 20:00 on Saturday. When they said everything, they meant it pretty literally.
The pedestrian square across the street from the hostel had been loud and crowded all the other nights. On Friday evening, it was all but completely deserted.

I had an interesting discussion on the ethics of legislating cultural integration among Muslim/Arab populations in Western Europe with a stoned Hollander. It was fun. I, perhaps too optimistically, think I swung him from a position of 'This is what the A-rabs do' to 'this is a social problem in parts of Europe and it's tragically complex.'

Early the next morning, I caught a Sherut, or group-taxi (basically a VW Eurovan full of tourists) to Tel Aviv. The driver was one of those rare taxi-drivers who, either previously or in a former life, had been a fighter-pilot, and handled highway traffic like some kind of high-speed dogfight.
It was great.