Janna's Jerusalem Journies: Bethlehem!

We took a day trip to Bethlehem with Veronica and Dan, our fellow Mosse friends. We were to leave in the morning and meet up with George and Shannon, some of Dan and Veronica's friends from church, who live there.

This all sounded so easy and simple to me. Bethlehem is no more than a 30 to 40 minute drive away, and we'd be hanging out with a local who could point us in the right directions.

I guess I was spoiled in Germany with the efficiency of the Deutsche Bahn, and all the other train systems. You can get to pretty much any city, town or village with the Deutsche Bahn. And then if the town isn't big enough for it's own rail system, they have a good solid and reliable bus system. It just doesn't work that way here. At all.

We were at the bus stop waiting for the #21 bus where we would catch it and take it to the check point. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, so we had to do a passport check to cross over. From there we would take a different bus into Bethlehem and then take a taxi to the Church of the Nativity where we planned to meet George. This all sounded good in theory. However, if the bus driver looks at you and then drives off, then what do you do? Well, chase the bus of course. We managed to catch up with the bus at the stop light and banged on the door. He wouldn't open it. Lovely. We all wondered what we were gonna do, and then Skye saw a 21h. We thought this was actually the right bus, and got on it, glad we hadn't gotten on the first 21.

We took this bus to the last stop, but....it wasn't the chekpoint! We were the last ones on the bus and the driver (who was actually nice for once!) asked us where we were going and told us we were on the wrong bus. He explained that we could just walk to the next stop and take that bus to the checkpoint, or just walk straight to the checkpoint because it would only be about a 10 minute walk. So we decided to just do that.

We were off. We walked. And walked. And walked. And walked until we came to the wall and a souvenir shop which we thought looked promising. We called George and he told us we were at the Rachel's Tomb entrance, which was in Bethlehem but you couldn't get to the rest of Bethlehem from there. Soooooo we had to walk alllll the way back.

We got back, got on the right bus and it took us straight into Bethlehem. The West Bank is Palestine, so it was all Arabs. Jewish people are not allowed in at all. The culture was similar but still noticeably different. We got out and began searching for a taxi to get us to the Church of the Nativity. This wasn't hard at all as quite a few people were offering to drive us. George said not to pay more than 20 shekels for the ride, but we couldn't get lower than 30 (almost 8$ total, so 2$ per person).

I think most of us were convinced that we wouldn't ever make it to the Church of the nativity alive. I was certain either we would die, or we would kill someone else. I've NEVER been on a more terrifying taxi ride in my life. The streets of Bethlehem are narrow, and it's extremely hilly. This guy just floored it everywhere he went. We even drove down a main market street with tons of vendors and pedestrians, and he still did not slow down. It was like a roller coaster but without the comfort of knowing it was safe.

We made it there in one piece without killing or injuring anyone! Hooray! While we waited for George, tons of people kept asking if we wanted tours and tried to get us to do a tour while we waited for him. They were quite persistent. The doors of the church have a cool history that Dan told us about. You can see the outline of 2 bigger doors (see picture below). The biggest door was the original door, but it was falling apart, so the Crusaders filled in in a bit and made the middle doorway. Then the Ottoman Empire came in and made it very tiny because people would bring their carts inside and loot the church, so they made the door small so carts wouldn't fit through. Interesting!

George arrived and we headed inside. It looked like Catholicism puked on the site. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE that Catholics make things so beautiful and ornate. I think it's fantastic. But I can't think of a better way to describe it. It was similar to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in that it was extremely ornate rather than focusing on the "actual spot" where the events took place. But the actual spot is down below in a cave in an altar. It's called the Grotto of the Nativity and there is a 14 point star representing the 14 generations before Jesus. It's supposedly the exact spot where Jesus was born. A few feet away there is another altar and this is supposedly the site where Mary laid Jesus in the manger.

St Jerome had lived on the site, so we checked out his statue and St Catherine's church and went out to find a taxi to the Field of the Shepherds. There are two. One is where the Catholics believed the angel appeared to the shepherds, and the other is where the Greeks believed the angel appeared. We first checked out the Greek one. We were going to see it and then head to George and Shannon's apartment. Well, George was on a scooter, and the rest of us were in a taxi (oh, and btw, the taxi driver happened to be the same one from before!) and we were supposed to meet at the Greek field. It was basically a church and an underground shrine that St Helena built when she was there. Oh, that's another thing I should mention--Skye and I seem to be following St Helena (Constantine's mother), she was who brought the Holy Shirt to Trier, and she has done all these things around Jerusalem! We're looking at the field, and meanwhile, George's scooter broke down so he didn't get to join us, so that sucked.

Our taxi driver was extremely persistent and kept offering to take us to Herodium. We weren't exactly sure what this was but at first we were pretty against it because it just seemed like guy wanted money. Well, he did just want money, however, he was offering us a pretty good deal, about 10$ a person to drive us from the field to Herodium, then to the Monastery and back to George's apartment. It was an even better deal than we thought once we finished because these were pretty far away from everything and there is no public transportation to them at all.

The Herodium is where King Herod built his palace and where he was buried. It's a volcano like structure up really high with ruins. You can see for miles and miles in every direction! So that was pretty awesome! It's so hilly, and so...brown. It's just rocks and dirt and white stone cities. It was a pretty view though. To get back to the bottom we went through a bunch of tunnels with extremely steep stairs.

The Monastery was really pretty. It was out in the middle of no where though. We even drove through some steep cliffs and extremely impoverished areas to get there. The kids in the neighborhoods shouted WOW at us a lot, and some even threw bottles at our taxi.

The Monastery was built basically in amongst cliffs it was beautiful and had some crazy views. The boys got to go in, but...no girls allowed. I was enraged with this at first because I have been on edge and hyper sensitive about the gender inequality here, mostly with the conservative Jews. But then I remembered it was a Monastery, it's all monks and they don't allow woman in for temptation reasons.

Our increasingly awesome taxi driver, Osami, picked us up at the bottom so we wouldn't have to climb the big steps back up and drove us back to George's apartment. However, he decided it was necessary for us to see the Catholic's Field of the Shepherd while we were there and didn't charge us any extra to show us. It was also pretty cool, it seemed more like a field than the other one that was just some cave thing.

We hung out with George and Shannon at their apartment the rest of the afternoon. They fed us well and we had a nice time getting to know them and coveting their two huge fully furnished living rooms. (Skye and I can't even get our landlord to bring us a tiny couch!)

We were all pretty exhausted and were dreading the uncertainty of getting home. Luckily George and Shannon have a taxi driver that they always use that would only charge us 15 shekels to take us to the checkpoint. He was supposed to arrive in about 30 minutes but didn't make it for a little over an hour. As soon as he got there he jumped out of the car apologizing over and over. We got into the car, and the first thing he did was stick a small American flag to the windshield, he shouted, I LOVE AMERICA and asked he he could turn on his music. He blasted the volume and we rocked out to none other than highlights from the Democratic National Convention. hahaha! He even "sang" along. We saw a car broken down and he stopped and shouted to the guys, "I love Obama, Obama is the best! I love America!!!!!! I love America". Turns out it was his friends, haha! Next he asked if he could stop to get gas and it would be be so fast. As soon as he got gas, he asked if he could stop and do his evening prayer because he had missed it. So he pulled over and we waited with his music still on. Next up was the Titanic Theme by Celine Dion! hahaha. As soon as he got back he said, "oh! You chose titanic!" Much to the boys' dismay he started the song over, turned it up louder and proceeded to blast the washer fluid and turn on the wipers and said, "look now we're in the ocean! it's so romantic! We're on the Titanic!" Next song in the lineup, Eminem! Sort of had to do with male genitalia. He told us about how his grandpa played this song to his grandma and how he was so romantic. Oh boy! Moving right along to some random techno song none of us had ever heard, followed by Aqua's "I'm a Barbie Girl". He also taught us some of his newly invented words, "fudge-packery" (which he at one point yelled to a cop directing traffic) and "shit-cago". This guy was quite the character!!!! In the end, he got us to the checkpoint safely and when he dropped us off he said it was his gift to us and didn't make us pay him anything. Free entertainment!

We went through the pathetic checkpoint that was actually more like a maze and they didn't even look at our passports, and caught a small overcrowded Arabic bus back to Jerusalem.

We ended the night eating Israeli kebab at a cute place on Dan and Veronica's street. I'd say it was a successful and productive day!