Day 5 – TUE - 18/9/12 - Israel, Bethlehem
Today we set off to see if we could check out the Nativity Church – a church now located on the site where it is said Jesus was born. We walked to Damascus Gate of the old city and got the local bus to Bethlehem.
Once in Bethlehem we walked through the 'Old Market' to get to Manger Square and the Nativity Church – said site of the infamous birth of Jesus. Again there was a grotto where the Emperor Constantine's mother Helena had built a church over it. The roof of the church was an additional feature added later as a gift from the King of England.
This church was one of the few remaining from when the Arab's invaded. The reason for it still standing was down to the mosaic that features on the outside of the wall of the church. One of the wise-men was depicted in the same clothing as the Arab's that were burning churches, so the legend says that he left it untouched.
In the 'birth grotto' (rather than a stable with a wooden roof structure and some hay on the ground like the Christmas plays = Christmas takes on a different view now) there is a silver star in laid in marble that was a gift from the French King. It is said it indicates the place where Mary gave birth to Jesus.
The second place of note in the grotto is where the original wooden manger originally sat. This was said to be the place where Jesus lay when the wise-men came to offer their gifts. The third shrine in the grotto is said to be the place where the 3 wise-men stood and gifted Jesus with gold, myrrh and frankincense.
Within the ground level part of the church there were 3 sections where 1 was bolted on to the original ground level main building which was St Catherine's – a Catholic section. The other 2 are Armenian and Greek Orthodox – all under 1 roof. St Catherine's is where the televised midnight mass is held on Christmas Eve, with the last pope attending one year during his popeacy.
In the grotto underneath St Catherine's it is said it is where the angel Gabrielle told Mary and Joseph to flee Bethlehem due to King Herad wanting to kill Jesus; this is also the place where Peter hid all the boys as King Herad was killing all the boys in the hope to kill Jesus. It also has another room where Hieronumi translated the bible from latin in the next room.
Our guide was a friendly Palestinian who explained to us that to the political situation he was not able to cross the border daily to work as a tour guide, so he needed to rely on tour buses and tourists making their way to Bethlehem from Jerusalem and the rest of Israel to work.
We also found the local shopkeepers friendly for where we went to lunch and ate just cooked falafel sandwiches with pita, hummus and tabbouleh – yum!! We headed back to the Old Market to the fresh food section and haggled our way to some cheap tomato, cucumber, olives, bread and sweets – it was a feast for dinner too!
From there we got a shared taxi at the bus station to take us to Kubbeh where the Separation Wall between Jerusalem and Bethlehem (West Bank) is. We were in a taxi with 2 Muslim men in the back with Kearnsy, me in the middle section with 2 Muslim women and a boy and then another man and the driver in the front (it was like a stretched sedan, rather than a station wagon). As we were driving along all the passengers pass their money forward in shekel coins to the driver. The driver then shakes the coins to see how much they gave him (as it is a set price for a shared taxi) and the he passes the change if there is any back.
We stopped at the wall and there is a lot of graffiti on the Palestinian side depicting everything from political messages, to art, to posters and even a menu from a close by cafe. It is an 8m high wall, considering the Berlin wall only reaches 4m this gives you some idea about how imposing it is. We were invited into a local man's house who called to us from behind his cyclone fencing to tell us that if we were interested in finding more out about the cause that he would be happy to host us for tea and tell us about it. We politely declined and said we had to get back, as we were walking away
however we also noticed the sign on his fence said 'Palestinian Advocacy for Separation Wall Group' so it would have been a very interesting conversation I would imagine.
Israel is building the wall with fences, trenches, barbed and razor wire, concrete slabs, cameras, sensors and watch towers. Palestinians say the wall is cutting their community, businesses, schools and crops as it follows the “Green Line” which was determined in 1967. Israeli's say they are doing it for their safety, if difficult to tell.
After walking a section of the wall we went to the local kids hospital next to it to wait for a taxi back to the bus station. We got the local bus back to Jerusalem, stopping at a checkpoint from the West Bank and the officers checked passports and bags of Israeli's thoroughly before releasing the bus.
Once back at the hostel we ate some of the delicious sweet pastries (like Baklava) we had bought from Bethlehem and laid around in hammocks for a few hours. To save a nights accommodation we thought it was a great idea to catch the overnight bus from Jerusalem to Eilat in Israel to do the border cross to Aqaba, Jordan. So Kearnsy then popped up to the bus station to pick up the tickets whilst I prepared a salad of tomato, cucumber and a squeeze of lime.
After dinner we headed to the bus station via the tram. At the tram we were greeted by a lady that had accosted Kearnsy earlier who after asking if we spoke English (hers was broken English) then said she was very scared and she didn't know where she was and did we have a mobile phone we could call a number for her on... Hard to be a traveller and not know if it's a scam or not but for the second time that day Kearnsy decided scam, I agreed so we just had to ignore her when the natural thing for us would have been to help her.
At the bus station when the buses pulled in it was a major push and shove with elbows and bags in faces. I decided you can't not join in the spirit and with the words of Jerry calling me a luff luff in the back of my head I got in the scrum too. We were holding tickets written in Hebrew that indicated which one to choose, so after ascertaining which of the 2 buses to get on that were seemingly going the same place we dragged our bags to stow in the undercarriage and we settled in with ear plugs, neck pillows, eye masks and semi-blankets/ jackets in our numbered seats and departed at 23:58 for what we thought would be a 5 hour journey...
