Yesterday: The Old City

So I may have mentioned before that we went to the kotel to daven shachris on shabbos. Well, yesterday, being Sunday, we decided to tour around the old city a bit and take an organized walking tour.

We walked to the Old City and found the Egged tour office. We still have yet to book our Artzenu tours, which are more preferable because they have more of a Jewish emphasis. At any rate, we wanted to see the other parts of the Old City, aside from the Jewish quarter. We figured this would be the best way to go.

Our tour guide was a nice Armenian man named Aram. He took us around the Armenian quarter first. Unfortunately, most of this tour ended up being Churches. Our first stop was the Armenian Church and Seminary. So we listened to the breif history outside and then waited when everyone else went inside.

Aram was very informative and respectful of the fact that we could not go inside his [or any of the other] church[es]. He made sure to make time to explain the history and what not of the places before he took everyone else inside for the in-depth part.

Waiting outside the Armenian Church was rather boring though. We took some videos and goofed around. We had fun. He took us through the Armenian quarter and then through the Jewish Quarter where he breifly spoke about some of the archeological finds there.

We also saw har hazeitim and took some pictures. That was truly moving for me. Here's a photo.
Pretty much everyone else in the tour group was a Christian. This one man made a really rude comment about the archeological stuff. Something about the Jews stopped digging when they found what they wanted to call everything their's but there's more stuff underneath that belongs to other people blah blah. I got pretty upset but just ignored him. Thing is, he said it directly to us, not the whole group. Though I'm sure others heard him. He was a rather fat lout of a man. When we went through the Arab shuk, he was taking the foods and just eating them without paying. No comment.

Anyhoo, we went through the Muslim quarter a bit, but it was prayer time for them so it was closed off to non-Muslims unfortunately. We got some nice shots of the shops though.

After that, Aram took us through the stations of the cross and there were more things that we couldn't go into. For example, the tomb of Jesus. Yea, Michael's a kohein so no dead people and also, no churches.

So pretty much by the time we were done it was about 4pm and really super hot. I wasn't feeling well again so we stopped for some Pizza after the tour was over and then we started home.

I got severely heat-stroked and had to lie down when we got back. It was pretty bad. I pretty much passed out until this morning.

We'll see what we'll do today. Shopping, hopefully. We have to book some tours with Artzenu. There's also a wine festival towards the end of the week. It's really cool. For under $20 US, you get one tasting glass each with unlimited refills! My kinda festival!

I'll leave you with some video taken while waiting outside the Armenian Church.