Advertisement
Published: June 12th 2017
Edit Blog Post
Geo: 31.7738, 35.2252
Still soaking in the news of the promotion and adjusting to the new crowds of the Tel Aviv airport, we headed outside and secured a shared taxi (Nesher) which would take us to our hotel in Jerusalem. The Nesher taxis are 12-passenger minibuses which deposit people door-to-door. You tell the driver your destination, and once the bus is full, he is off. It should have been a 30-minute ride to Jerusalem, but we encountered very heavy traffic on the way, which extended the trip quite a bit. I noted earlier that we were visiting due true high season, with passover and both the Orthodox and Latin Christian Holy Weeks lining up together. Passover is a huge holiday in Israel, with most people off for the week. We also learned soon enough that during passover, Jewish areas do not bake or sell any leaven products. All non-Kosher products are banned. You'd walk into a supermarket, and they will have draped paper over all of the bread, chips, cereal, etc. You're not even supposed to see it, let alone eat it. Another rite of Passover are large family picnics, and the primary source of our unexpected traffic jam was going past
a huge picnic area set among a large pine-tree forest.
If you look at a map of Israel, you'll see that Jerusalem sits at the eastern most edge of a spit of land which is under Israeli control, surrounded by the Palestinian territories. I'd read and heard much about the physical wall Israel has built between Jewish and Arab-controlled land, but I of course had not yet seen it. As we hit the edge of the finger of land which connects "mainland Israel" with Jerusalem, we came upon a military checkpoint on the highway. From this point and all the way until we reached the city of Jerusalem, there was solid wall and barbed wire surrounding the highway. It was truly a closed-off road. We wouldn't get to cross the wall into Palestinian territory until our visit to Jerusalem on Friday.
We booked an apartment-hotel for our stay in Jerusalem, as we were to be here for three nights. The location was great, at the edge of the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall area, which is filled with restaurants, stores, and boutiques. It is also a 15-minute walk to the Jaffa Gate of Old Jerusalem. The apartment was really nice, with plenty
of room, and Anna was very glad to have a room all to herself for a few nights...not to mention a great bathroom and shower.
We asked for dinner recommendations, not knowing the area and equally uncertain what the Passover restrictions might present. We decided on a seafood restaurant close to the hotel, and it was fantastic. Both Anna and K had the "St. Peter's Fish" from the Sea of Galilee, which was served whole -- head and all. Jerusalem is so cosmopolitan and western, you could easily think you were in Florida. Our waitress was Israeli but had no accent whatsoever. We enjoyed our first alcoholic drinks of the trip, and following another very long day, the meal and drinks were extremely welcome.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.07s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 12; qc: 25; dbt: 0.0499s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb