Shalom Israel, Namaste India

Yesterday was insane. I got up and went to the airport for what the not-so-clever dude on the Lufthansa phone said was a 1:30 flight, only to find there was no such flight. There was a 10:45, which I'd just missed, and a 3:30, but no 1:30. Hmmmm. Needless to say Turkish Air had no record of my flight, so they had to scramble to get me on. But this was the least of my worries. The Israeli security people. That's my main worry. I guess something in my itinerary for my eticket raised red flags, because I got pulled out of line to the frosted glass area, where two 18 year old kids interrogated me for an hour. Why was I traveling? What was my occupation? Why do I say I live in Boston when the luggage tag says someplace else? Who, exactly, do I know in Lebanon? Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA? Not Lebanon their hostile neighbor? Isn't that funny...am I sure it's USA? Why would a city in America name itself Lebanon? What was my occupation again? And what do I teach? And how did I get the time off? And how did I get the money to travel if I'm not working? And what was my occupation again? And with whom am I traveling? A woman alone? Really? Isn't that difficult? Why don't I travel with somebody else? Why don't I find someone on the internet? So who do I hang out with, then? What are their names? Where are they traveling? What was my occupation again?
Finally I managed to satisfy them that I was not an evildoer, but they then were sure that one of the people I'd met in my many hostel stays had planted something on me. My luggage had to be checked. Thoroughly. What is this? A jar of peanut butter? Why would anyone carry that? Because it's a good cheap snack? I thought you said you had some money to travel with? Sigh. So after another 30-40 minutes of baggage checking, they were satisfied that my bags did not contain evildoer materials, but they were no longer sure that I was not an evildoer, so off I went behind two heavy steel doors to a curtined room where I removed my shoes to be checked (they took my arch supports out and put them back in wrong!), and then a full-body pat-down. We're not talking a quick frisk, here. I mean taking my hair down and checking for stuff in it, checking the seams of my underwear, every inch of me including the soles of my thinly-socked feet.
An hour and 45 minutes after I first walked up to the line, they were finally satisfied that I was harmless enough to board the plane. Who knew I was such a menacing character. I guess it's my natural teacherly-ness - the 18 year old kids were scared of me! :)

I arrived in India at 4:30 AM and proceeded directly to the Salvation Army hostel, which I think will only be a one night deal. I squashed 2 bugs on my mattress, and I have no interest in a repeat of Ghana's bedbug nightmare. I sprayed the heck out of my mattress with permethrin and I'll take my chances for the night, but today is dedicated to finding alternate accommodations for tomorrow night. Why not tomorrow? I'll tell you why not: because I'm gonna be a Bollywood star, baby. I guess the film studios always want foreign-looking extras, so they recruit at the local hostels, so my procedure at reception was something like this:
"Name?" "Katherine Taylor" "Nationality?" "American" "You wanna be in a movie?" "What?" "You wanna be an extra in a Bollywood movie tomorrow?" "Oh...ok. Yeah, that sounds fun." "They pay you 500 rupees for the day, you're in dorm number 6, have a nice day."

So tomorrow is the day I make it big in showbiz. I'll let you know how it goes.

Last day

So last night I finally got to do laundry. Yay! It was so gratifying, I could almost go and wash all my clean clothes again tonight. Ah, nesting...I miss those little rituals of home. I also had my first proper bagel in months (with smoked salmon and cream cheese, of course), and split a waffle with halvah gelato with Stephanie. All around, a good night in central city.

Oh, and I finally got to the Temple Mount, but it was a total anticlimax because I was so obviously unwelcome. Any time I looked too closely at the mosque (and god forbid I should walk toward it with anything resembling interest), a bunch of old guys shooed me away. I think the closest I ever got was maybe 20 meters from the door. Sweet. So I was there maybe 5 minutes, took a picture of the Dome of the Rock, and then left.

I also walked the Via Dolorosa, which was also kind of anticlimactic because nearly all the chapels were closed (well, closed to me, not to tour groups...grrrr). But there were a few very lovely ones that were open. And as I reached the Holy Sepulchre I somehow ended up chatting with a bearded fundamentalist dude (and I use the word intentionally) from San Francisco. He was one of those "Jesus is far out, man" kinda guys, so he was interesting to chat with for a little while. But his arrival was definitely the end of the more contemplative phase of my walk.

After the Via Dolorosa I went to St. Anne's church, which was really cool. They have a great archaeological excavation there of the Bethesda pool and baths. Lots of stairs and levels and funky bath archetecture that's all way below street level. Archaeo-nerd's delight. It started pouring, though, so that was the end of my excursion and I had to hustle home through flash flooded streets to dry off until the rain cleared. Freak storm, everybody's talking about it because apparently it never rains like that here....

I had hoped to make it to the Galilee and Nazareth today, but it just wasn't meant to be. Alas for colds taking up several days of good travel time. I had lots of last minute errands to take care of. Post office and the like. But I did squeeze in the time to go to the Armenian Church of St. Jacques for mass. It was really interesting - lots of monks bustling around in voluminous black-hooded robes. Plus, they sing the whole mass, which was really beautiful. I don't speak Armenian, so I had no idea what they were saying, but it was lovely to sit there and listen to the music and look at all the gorgeous artwork. I thought for a second there that I saw a miracle going on with a picture on the wall (baby Jesus appeared to be holding a flickering light in his hand). Turns out it was just a little lantern and the angle I was sitting at...plus the fact that without my glasses, it turns out I'm blind. Oh well.

Tonight will be a mellow evening. Lying low, packing up, getting ready to move on. It's kind of sad, but I'm excited to get to India. I'll have to spend tonight planning out my Mumbai itinerary and figuring out where else I'm going to go...so exciting!

Masada

Yesterday we took the bus down to Masada to see the ruins. For those of you who don't know the back story, it was the last refuge of the last Jewish rebels to hold out against Rome. They holed up in this cliff-top fortress while the Romans, ever the engineers, built a giant ramp up to it and breached the walls with fire and a battering ram. Rather than go down in defeat and be enslaved by the Romans, the men killed their wives and children, then drew lots among themselves to find out who would kill the others and then kill himself. When the Romans finally entered the city, everyone was dead. It's a highly symbolic place for Israel, and also a really cool archaeological site.
We walked up the Snake Path, which is mentioned by the Roman author Josephus as a very scary and strenuous trip. It's all safe and groomed now, but it does still have 700 stairs (what's up with me and things that have 700 stairs?), which is a hike. Poor Stephanie, still recovering from the same cold I had, was pretty tired.
We got up there and barely had time to see everything. It rained just as we were getting to the coolest part of the ruins (who knew it rained so much in Israel?), but we soldiered through. We hurried a bit, so if I ever went back, I'm sure there'd be more to see. I don't know how the tour groups get through it in an hour or two. We were there all day poking around houses and guard towers and cisterns and suchlike. Fun times.
The museum at the base of the hill was kind of boring, but it did have the 10 ostracca (fragments of broken pot) that the last 10 men wrote their names on to decide who would have to kill himself after killing everyone else. Very eerie.
Today got off to a slow start (the people in my dorm apparently sleep all day, but I feel bad banging around while a half dozen other people are still in bed). I'm headed to the last few monuments I haven't seen in Jerusalem (Temple Mount, some churches on the Via Dolorosa) and then off to Center City for laundry and souveneer shopping and shipping. Yay! Tomorrow will hopefully be the Galilee and Nazareth, then off to the airport on Friday to go on to Bombay/Mumbai!

Yad Vashem

Almost forgot I didn't post yesterday! Yesterday was supposed to be high mass in Latin, but apparently "winter" starts early here so the winter mass time is 5:30, not 6:30, so we missed it. Alas. But we did get to see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre without a thousand tour groups milling around. And we caught a glimpse of the Armenian and Greek Orthodox services going on at the time, so that was new to me and very interesting. The sepulchre itself is kind of nice. It's inside a shrine within the church, and no matter how many tour guides are droning on outside, only two or three people can fit in the shrine at once, so it's always peaceful and amenable to reflection, which despite my personal feelings on religion is what I like best about churches.

After that, we toyed with going to Masada or the Galilee for the day, but having gone home to cook breakfast (cooking! what bliss!), it had gotten late so we headed to the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem instead. We figured we'd be done in a few hours, but that place is amazing. It took us nearly 6 hours to get through. And we could have taken longer. There is so much material there. Infinite photos and artworks and artifacts, plus hours worth of video testimony by survivors. There were a lot of different people, but some of them repeated several times throughout the museum so by the end it really felt like I'd known them for years and had been hearing their stories all my life. It made the whole thing very personal. I've seen a lot of material on the Holocaust, and of everything I've seen, this was truly a monument to the lives of the victims, not just to the tragedy of their deaths. It was sad, but really beautiful too.

At the end of the museum is the room full of files - one for each victim. They have about 3 million testimonies so far from friends, relatives, co-workers, anybody who can provide information. Each file has the name of the person, pictures if possible, and anything people think the world should know about the person who was lost. The files are kept in a spherical room, which you enter by a platform through the center. In the inside of the platform is a deep rough-cut stone pit. On the outside is a wall of black and white file boxes that curves up from below you and rises up toward the cieling. It really gives you a physical sense of the enormity of the loss, of the emptiness left behind, and it's very powerful.

Wierd morning, great afternoon

Ah, the moment I knew had to come has finally arrived. I've been evangelized. Twice in one morning, no less.

This one guy tells me that he's been having visions of the future ever since his near-death experience in 1974, and that he is a prophet. He actually went to the national hurricane center in 1995 to tell them a catastrophe was coming. Lucky for us, news broadcasts confirm his visions, so I'm told that the end times foretold in Revelation are coming. Did you know that the fact that the world's economy is collapsing means that the rapture is right around the corner? Now I do. Also Rabbi Akiva is personally responsible for the fact that the whole world wasn't Christian by the end of the 2nd century. Sweet.

And this older lady told me her life story for three hours (we got "cut short" by the fact that I had a life to attend to, but she promises she'll tell me the rest later), and the moral of that story is that I'd better get right with Jesus and forget about all the rest of the world's heathen religions, because Jesus will be appearing on the Mount of Olives any minute now.

So that kept me busy from about 9AM until 1PM. When I finally escaped the lounge of the hostel, I actually had a great day. I went to the City of David, which is still an active excavation, and because I missed the tour group, I got to go through Hezekiah's tunnel all by myself. Woohoo! It's this long subterranean tunnel that goes beneath the ancient city walls of Jerusalem to the spring that provided the city's water supply. This secret tunnel made sure that even if the city was under siege, there would always be plenty of fresh water. And more importantly, it provides me with the opportunity to feel like Indiana Jones! Woohoo! This was by far the coolest thing so far in Israel. I had a blast getting into my board shorts and tevas and wading along by myself by the light of my trusty flashlight. As you can see, the passage is very narrow and dark and spooky. Perfect.

Off to do some shopping in the New City tonight...provided it doesn't rain.