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Published: April 22nd 2018
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Opportunity to sleep in today but still woke up early at 7am. We took our time showering, packing and having breakfast and checked out of the hotel around 10:15am. Short walk to what we thought was our Intrepid tour hotel, Holy Land but it turned out it was another Intrepid group booked, not ours. There was conflicting information in our tour notes, so I was half expecting this. Anyway, the Holy Land people were good enough to call the Azzahra Hotel to check that we were booked in there and sure enough we were. Fortunately just another short walk to the Azzahra. It was too early to check-in so we just left our bags there and asked the very nice lady at reception how much it should cost for a taxi to The Israel Museum. She said 70 - 80 ($AUS60) New Israeli Shekels (NIS), which we thought was rather expensive but we decided to go anyway . We were lucky and got a driver first up who quite willingly used his meter and to our surprise it was only 40NIS so obviously she had meant 80NIS return, to our relief.
We got to the museum around 11am and it
was fabulous. The first section was the Archaeological section going chronologically through time, the different civilisations that occupied Israel and it was excellent. We had noticed some of the Museum shops were closed because it was Saturday and saw a closed café so thought we would have to miss lunch but Daisy found out there was a cafeteria open next to The Shrine of The Book, where the Dead Sea Scrolls are displayed.
So we quickly looked through the Jewish Life exhibit and around 2pm walked out to the cafeteria, had a quick lunch then checked out the huge outdoor scale model of the Jerusalem Old City at the time of the Second temple, a massive structure which was completed by Herod and destroyed by the Romans in 70CE.
Then on to see Jerusalem’s Dead Sea Scrolls in the purpose built building designed to reflect the jars that they were found in. It’s an impressive structure both inside and out. This exhibit was much bigger than the Jordanian one and we really enjoyed it.
By the time we finished there, it was 4:30pm so we decided to head home rather than try and complete the museum. The
only sections we missed were the art collections so we thought we could see them if we return with the tour. Now we had to catch a taxi home but all the taxis' waiting at the museum wanted 80NIS, twice as much as we knew and they wouldn’t use their meters so we rejected them. One driver went down to 60NIS but we said no and decided to walk to the main road and pick up one there. We walked about 10 minutes towards our hotel and flagged a taxi down, we asked if he had a meter and he just kept asking us where we were going, so we told him and he said 60NIS. We said no and offered 40NIS and luckily this time he accepted and we hopped in. Just as well or otherwise we would have been late for our 6pm Intrepid meeting.
We had 15 minutes to check in, carry out bags upstairs before the meeting. The room was quite big with a large private balcony and nice bathroom , so much better than the hotel we had on our first 2 nights. At 6pm we went downstairs and met our new group leader,
Mahdi and fellow travelers, Greg, Steve (brothers) and Juliette from California, Slade from Portland, Louise & Kelly from Sydney, Tash from Brisbane, Annie & Ina from Melbourne, and our friend from the Jordan tour, Pierre from Brazil. They seem another great bunch of people to be traveling with. The first five had come from doing Egypt and Jordan with Intrepid. Seems Intrepid mix and match the tours which is the reason you could end up with different people on each leg.
Mahdi took us on an orientation walk and we ended up at the Holy Land Hotel again as they have a rooftop bar and restaurant. It was a tapas style restaurant, so Daisy and I just ordered crispy chicken skewers and sweet potato chips which was nice enough. It wasn’t exactly inexpensive, so some elected to just have a drink and they ate elsewhere after we left. Got home fairly early around 9pm.
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