Israel Trip: December-January 2014-2015
As it was getting dark we entered the Christian quarter and made our way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, believed to be built on the site where Jesus was crucified and buried. We entered the church just behind a large group of Ethiopian Orthodox tourists, who kept elbowing each other and saying "Baby, baby!" and shoving me (and Samantha, now awake and eating her lollipop) through into the front of the group to get into each grotto and prayer chapel first. Each kid lit a candle in the upstairs chapel for Great-Grandma Helena, who as a devout Catholic really would have been touched by this, and after seeing the first-century tombs down a passageway, we stumbled into the last ten minutes of a daily mass marking the stations of the cross. We found ourselves in a small modern chapel at the back of the church, with Benedictine monks (a surprisingly diverse crew, with black and Asian faces in the mix, and a lot of smiles for Marcus) singing in the room behind us, and Marcus sitting on the steps dividing the two chapels, while people who seemed to know a lot more about what was going on than we did actually followed along with the order of worship. As luck would have it, the closing hymn was "Gloria in Excelcis Deo," to the tune of "Angels We Have Heard on High," so we were able to sing along to that, and then things (thankfully) ended.
From there we hung out a bit by Jaffa Gate and then in the mall, killing a little bit of time until our dinner reservation at The Eucalyptus, a modern-style Israeli restaurant very close to both the Old City and our hotel. I had told them it was Robert's birthday, and though it was a nice restaurant (candlelight, very quiet and elegant) they were fairly child-friendly. Robert and I ordered the mid-priced set menu with a sampling of their different dishes--first bread and salads/dips, then a trio of soups, then cold appetizers (ah, eggplant, I had eaten you daily in Israel and never tired of you yet--here, with feta and pomegranate seeds, you did not disappoint), then hot appetizers (goose springrolls, stuffed figs. . . yum), then three main courses (upside down chicken and rice in a clay pot, braised lamb with a baked flatbread sealing the casserole lid, and sliced roasted duck), then a plate of desserts (more malebi, some house-made ice cream, and a deep dark chocolate pudding Samantha adored), complete with a candle for Robert. They said we had to order something for each child, so we got a side of french fries and of rice. Samantha did indeed devour the rice, but Marcus pretty much ate from our meal, loving the lamb and chicken and one of the soups. The chef came over to check on everyone, and Marcus interrogated him about a broken light fixture (champagne cork the night before, he explained). We were all together in a pretty place, with delicious interesting food and (for this meal, at least) amazingly well-behaved children, so I think overall it was a nice birthday dinner for Robert.
Tuesday morning we had a reservation for an archaeological project at 10:00, so after the hotel breakfast (we'd loved the hotel breakfasts everywhere we went--this one was particularly nice with a great fish bar), we took a taxi into the City of David to go to the Temple Mount Sifting Project.
The taxi driver gave us a hard time about going into an Arab area (though the sifting project is clearly Jewish/Israeli run--indeed, an entire troop of IDF soldiers came in at noon for lunch and, seemingly, a field trip day to help sift), and charged us more than he should have for a five-minute ride, but that was fine. One of the archaeology students gave us a little orientation, explaining what an archaeological nightmare the site was--with ancient layers of history all mixed-up and deposited in a dump--and how they'd been working for ten years and had finished a bit more than half of the sifting required.
We were instructed to look for "special stones" (flint, mother of pearl), metal, pottery, glass, mosaic stones, and bones, and we set to work.
Both kids loved this, though Samantha wanted to say that everything was a "special stone," and would occasionally randomly dump her finds back into the rubble, so whenever Robert (working with her) found anything remotely interesting he would hastily hand it to me and Marcus. Marcus was great at this, both at the washing of the rubble (playing with water? He was in) and at the sorting and spotting, and together we found the rim of a cup from the first temple era, an ancient nail (we weren't sure of the period, but the head archaeologist, who Marcus was told to bring it to, pronounced it "Lovely!" and set it aside), a nice glass mosaic tile, and lots of other bits of pottery and flint, etc. The two hours flew by, and we all had trouble stopping. The kids got little certificates of participation, and the guide wrote their names in Hebrew on them, which was very interesting to Marcus.
It was a windy day, and getting chillier. It was indeed unseasonably cold for Jerusalem, and they were predicting snow for the next day, so everyone in the city was panicking. We took a taxi from the sifting project straight to the Biblical Zoo, where apparently everyone was so worried about the weather that, apart from a group of schoolkids on a field trip we saw only when we were about to leave, we saw literally ten other people the whole afternoon at the entire (not small) zoo.
The bears, elephants, lions, and giraffes weren't outside because of the weather, but we saw lots of other animals, including hippos and rhinos, zebras, oryx, and lots of different birds. One blue bird in the tropical bird house seemed attracted to everything blue, including my shoes. There was also a great, unique playground which sadly it was too chilly for the kids to enjoy too much; an interactive prairie dog exhibit; and a giant Noah's Ark with a surreal (entirely in Hebrew) cartoon of Noah, a snake, and a computer trying to protect endangered species.
From the zoo we took another taxi to the Mehane Yehuda shuk, which was very much like an extra clean, bright, tourist-friendly version of the other shuks we'd been in. We bought some baklava for me, a meringue tower for Robert, and some gummy worms for Marcus as a special treat, and we sampled different flavors of tahini and baklava. We ate at a kubbeh restaurant a few blocks away from the market, choosing rice and beans for me and Samantha, chicken noodle soup and a mushroom kibbe appetizer for Marcus, and the "red" kubbeh soup for Robert, and then we walked back to the hotel in a bit of a drizzle.
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Created: 1/11/15. Last Modified: 1/11/15.