After a long and
I was operating on less than 2 hours of sleep for our day trip to Jerusalem, so I'll keep this one short, mostly because I don't remember much of it, haha. I think the smartest thing we did was get up at crack of dawn to catch a 'sherut' (shared taxi or van- more here on different ways to get to and from Jerusalem) into Jerusalem in time for a 7:00 am divine liturgy at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. To participate and receive holy communion, watching tendrils of smoke lace their way through light and darkness in the lofty Greek chapel, was something I'll never forget.
The rest of our time at the Holy Sepulchre was a mix of fascinating, reverent, and feeling like we were being herded around like chattel. There were SO many different groups of pilgrims it made it hard to move around, although it was nice to see so many people coming to worship and pray. If we had one take home lesson from our experience, its that a lot of these religious sites should be visited as early as possible. By 9 am it was hard to feel serene with the level of crowds that had amassed.
Other than the massive crowds, our experience was great. Jerusalem is definitely a less secular city than Tel Aviv, and we really enjoyed wandering through the various quarters and exploring a place that's been occupied by people for so many millenia. My only other piece of advice is to do research online- this trip was a last-minute tag along for me to one of Peter's work trips, which meant we didn't know a ton going into it. For example, we totally missed out on seeing the Dome of the Rock because there's only a couple short periods each day that its open to non-worshippers (you can find the hours here.)
Hopefully someone finds this interesting/useful for their upcoming visit to Israel and Jerusalem. I'll try to post one more time before my classes start up again.
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