Tom and I decided to spend our Christmas heading to a place that had been on our "must see" list for some time. So, we spent our holidays travelling around Israel for the week. What we found most interesting at first were the flight times themselves. Our flight left Warsaw at 10:00 pm and arrived in Tel Aviv at 3:30 am. We just could not figure out why...and guessed that maybe the flight from Poland wasn't very popular therefore it got a bad timetable. After arriving and asking a few folks we got similar answers. Basically, the Tel Aviv airport it ALWAYS busy therefore they have to have flights literally around the clock to fit them all in. This made total sense since the airport was packed with people and buzzing when we arrived in the middle of the night. After arrival and an easy pass through customs we headed off to our hotel. Being that we arrived in the middle of the night we weren't quite sure what to do about our hotel reservation. So, we had not booked a room for the morning that we arrived. Fortunately, the hotel staff were amazingly friendly and helpful and let us check in very very early to get some sleep. But, before we went to our room they let us go up to the roof top patio to watch the sun rise over the old city walls of Jerusalem. It is quite an amazing site and made being up in the middle of the night all worth it. Then, we headed for a few hours of sleep.
We set an alarm to get out and explore. We spent our first day wondering through the streets of Jerusalem taking in the sites and sounds. It was so amazing to be walking around a place where so many major events happened in the three major world religions. Honestly, I had been a bit nervous about travelling to Israel and if I would feel safe in an area that is known to have conflict. We felt totally comfortable walking between the different quarters of the old city: Jewish quarter, Christian quarter, and Arab quarter. We knew we would be touring Jerusalem in more detail the next day, so we spent our afternoon on a tour of the Mount of Olives. The Mount of Olives is a mountain ridge on the East side of Jerusalem that was originally covered in Olive trees. It is quite famous and special because it is on this area Jesus spent many days and also gave a prophecy about the end of his time. There is also a famous Jewish cemetery on this site that is over 3,000 years hold covering over 150,000 graves. The cemetery was built right outside the walls of the Old City as the Jewish people wanted to be buried as close as possible to the walls of the original temple so that when the Messiah comes they will be close to one of their holiest places. The tour was really really interesting and it provided beautiful panoramic views of the Old City of Jerusalem. We were fortunate to be on a late afternoon tour so we even got to watch the sunset across the skyline.
After our tour we headed back to our hotel for a little R&R. We were going to need it....as it was December 24th and we were headed out for our next adventure later that evening...Midnight Mass!
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| Arriving at the airport - 4:00 a.m. |
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| View from the roof of our hotel...overlooking the old city walls of Jerusalem |
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| Excited and exhausted... |
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| Sun is up...time for us to go to bed! |
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| The sabbath elevator button...had never seen one of those before. It automatically stops at every floor so you don't have to press the button |
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| The Old City Walls of Jerusalem |
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| The church where Jesus walked and the "Our Father" prayer started |
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| People leave prayers inside the church |
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| Outside of the church |
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| The prayer was in every language you could think of...including Polish, of course! |
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| Prayer in english |
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| The view from the Mount of Olives looking towards the Old City of Jerusalem |
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| An enormous Jewish cemetery on the Mount |
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| Great views |
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| On the Mount of Olives with a view of the Dome of the Rock |
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| The grounds where Jesus spent his last night before crucifixion |
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| Inside the Church |
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