As my mother is only visiting until Sunday, and it's our first time in Israel, we decided to book a tour to Jerusalem, so here are a few notes from today's experience.
7:15am: My mother and I get picked up from the hotel by Rafi, our Israeli tour-guide for the day, and we board his van. The adventure begins!
The van proceeds to pick up all the other tourists from their respective hotels before driving out of Tel Aviv, but before getting onto the highway Rafi decides to make a pit stop, offering one last chance for a bathroom/cigarette break to the group. Everyone takes him up on one of the offers except for myself and a young woman in the van when, out of nowhere, a car pulls up right in front of us and 5 Israeli soldiers jump out, with 2 wearing full bio-hazard suits. They proceed to inspect the car directly beside our van, when I realize that I'm not experiencing my first terror scare, but simply witnessing a basic training operation for these young cadets. Still, it was momentarily breathtaking.
Then, Rafi broke the ice on the highway by using what I've come to realize is a dry sense of humor typical of most Tel Aviv citizens. His first gem of many being after we surpassed an Israeli police car, where he quipped: "You see the gun turret on top of this car? Now do you see the camera next to it? You see, the Israeli police is a fair police: they take a picture of you, and only then they shoot."
We started the tour by visiting Mount Zion, stopping off first at King David's Tomb and then at several other sites, all of which were simply breathtaking and a little overwhelming. Having said that, the most impressive stop up in the morning had to be the Western Wall: it's difficult for me to describe the feeling I sensed as soon as I walked into the large plaza where people line up to approach the wall. I was filled with two kinds of awe: both in respect to the historical significance of what I standing in front of, but dichotomous in their natures. The first was a feeling of human unity, due to the simple fact that everywhere around me I saw people of all faiths and colors coming to visit the same historical site that I came to visit. The second was one of human division: the fact that this wall has been at the center of much conflict between people of different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Because of that second feeling, the whole experience was bittersweet to say the least.
After leaving the Old City and having a nice buffet for lunch, Rafi took the group to Yad Vashem - Israel's official memorial to the Jewish of the Holocaust established by the Knesset in 1953. Unfortunately we were only given an hour and a half to explore the whole thing, and I feel it's the sort of place that I could visit 15 times without having seen everything within it. Luckily I'm going to be able to do just that over the next couple of years, but I felt sorry for my mom and the other people on the van who were visiting for a short term. The whole memorial is incredibly moving, especially because of how well it captures the humanity of those who had to experience the Jewish Holocaust. This effect is achieved partly by presenting collection upon collection, upon collection of personal items, art works, history tableaux, as well as audio, video, and written testimonies of survivors, and clips of Hitler's many speeches addressing his Final Solution. Also, architecturally, the museum is designed so the visitor begins above underground, proceeds to the lowest underground point in the center of the museum, and then slowly walks upwards towards the exit, leading onto a balcony overlooking a stunning view of Jerusalem: with the visitor stepping from a dark corridor into direct sunlight. The obvious metaphor need not be spelled out, but it definitely helped create an overwhelming sensation for me.
Anyways, I'm going to put up pictures of this trip here soon, but it's getting ridiculously late so it'll have to wait until tomorrow. If you can't wait for that, then check out the pictures on facebook.
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