First day in Jerusalem

After our night in Aqaba we woke up early to cross the boarder back to Israel and then drive up to Jerusalem. Of course we had to take advantage of the hotel breakfast first. Then we caught a taxi to the boarder and started to make our way across. We thought coming back to Israel would be easier since we didn't need a visa to enter Israel and we were coming from there. Everything went smoothly on the Jordan side. They even gave us our money back for our visas ($120) since we stayed in Jordan for three nights. As we were walking across to the Israel side it looked like the guard was a little suspicious of us. I saw him use his walkie talkie to call someone. Then we saw someone from the military appear with his machine gun out and his finger on the trigger. He wasn't pointing it at us at least, but he asked us to stand to the side outside of the boarder. We weren't too nervous because we didn't think we looked very threatening and we only had a backpack with a few clothes in it. Well I guess that is what they were so worried about. An interrogator came and started asking us lots of questions. Mainly, the questions were about how we could be in Jordan for three days with only a backpack and who we had talked to while we were over there. Eventually we were able to convince them that we were just tourists and we were on our way.

We drove the two and a half hours to Jerusalem, again going through the West Bank. When we got there we still had a few hours with the car so we decided to go to the Holocaust museum which was about 5 miles away from where we were staying. Driving around Jerusalem was just as dizzying as the other cities in Israel, only a lot more people. We stopped to ask directions once and were able to get a new map that led us right to it.

It was an excellent museum! The main part of it is a huge triangle spike going through the top of the mountain (they call all of their big hills there mountains. One side sticks way out and hangs over the edge. The rest of it goes into the mountain with only the top of the triangle showing. The museum was very similar to the Holocaust museum in Washington DC. They even had a lot of the exact same displays. It was interesting and informative and it definitely encouraged you to think a lot more. Rebecca and I wandered around in it silent, just reading, for a few hours. Once we got outside there were gardens and memorials that we walked through and talked about what stood out to us.

I didn't end up taking any pictures inside. I can't remember if it was allowed or not, but it didn't seem like something to take pictures of.






After the museum we dropped our car off at the car rental spot. It was just about a mile from our hotel so we made the walk there. Our hotel was really perfectly situated. It was about a mile to two miles from most of the places we wanted to go to, including the conference site, a market, and all of the old city. It was located in what seemed like a more young, trendy area of the city, with lots of shopping, restaurants, musicians, and people walking around in the evenings. The area wasn't too crowded where it was noisy though. We picked a boutique hotel through priceline. It was supposed to be a four star place and it was really nice. There were only maybe five or so units in it so it seemed really personalized and the staff were always there to help us out. At the same time, because it was so small they didn't seem to have all of the regular hotel things down like making sure the toilet paper and soap were restocked. So we had to ask for that once.

We finished our evening by finding a falafel place just a block away that we really liked. We ended up going back there for every dinner for the rest of our stay. We got their falafel, shawarma, kebabs, and schnitzel all a couple of times. All very delicious. My favorites were the falafel and schnitzel and Rebecca always loaded up on a lot of side vegetables (I think the eggplant was her favorite).