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Well, yesterday we were quite busy. We went to Bethlehem first thing in the morning. We took a bus to the infamous wall and then walked through and then took a cab the 2 km (mile and a half) into town because we are lazy and it’s HOT. 40 degrees (100F).

The Church of the Nativity was pretty empty.  There was an Armenian mass being held downstairs in the Grotto of the Nativity (a silver star marks the spot where Christ is believed to have been born) when we first arrived. The singing was incredible even though we obviously couldn’t understand anything.  There are trap doors in the floor that open to allow you to see the original Roman mosaics.

We also wandered through the attached St. Catherine’s Church – which is the church from which you’ve seen Midnight Mass broadcast on Christmas Eve. Very pretty. Again there was one other person in there. Apparently before the first Intifada they had 5,000 visitors a day. Now they’re lucky if they have 5 tour buses…sigh.

We had talked to the guy at our hotel and he warned us against going to Hebron telling us that an Israeli soldier had just shot a kid to death accidentally (apparently the kid had a toy gun and they thought it was real). So we weren’t sure what to do. It would be frustrating to be so close and not go. We talked to a Peruvian/Canadian woman with whom we shared the taxi into Bethlehem and she said she’d been to Ramallah and it was totally fine. And then we asked the Palestinian police officers standing outside the church and they said we should go and it’s safe and that they’d like us to have a good impression of the Palestinian people. 

So, following their directions we walked through town (very clean and pleasant) and took a sherut (shared mini-bus) to Hebron. No problems about the fares, either. They charged us exactly what the police officer had said they would.  (Very inexpensive).  The way to Hebron was GORGEOUS. Beautiful terraced fields full of olive trees.

When we got there we were lost cause the guide book had NO info. So with our two words of Arabic we asked a taxi driver how to get to the mosque. Expecting him to tell us a price, he suggested (IN ENGLISH!) that we could walk and it’s only 15 min.

We walked through a very busy market (lots of people welcoming us, even those selling meat and things we obviously wouldn’t buy) and felt very comfortable. There were women and children everywhere. We also saw UN aid trucks and supplies being delivered. So it is getting there. When you get to the mosque/synagogue there’s a checkpoint.

The mosque side was still closed for prayers (you can hear the call – it’s not hard to know when it is). So we wanted to start with the synagogue. But it wasn’t obvious how to get there. Wendy asked the Israeli soldier how to get there and he told her to just go around.  It was a deserted street, and she must have looked worried, so he told her "Everything’s okay. Don’t be afraid. It’s safe. Just walk around." Apparently that’s what 6 years of Hebrew school allow you to do. Have these conversations…

We walked around the corner and there were more soldiers and it was perfectly safe (the biggest danger we could see was from the guy trying really hard to sell us some postcards). We went inside and visited the tombs of Jacob, Leah, Abraham and Sarah. The synagogue is simple and there were a surprising number of people praying given the complete lack of tourists we saw in the city. When we were finished we wanted to go into the mosque to see where Rebecca and Isaac are buried. 

A few years ago a crazy Jewish guy started shooting and killed a bunch of people and wounded some 200 more in the mosque, so now officially Jews are no longer allowed in. So we start walking towards the mosque and an Israeli soldier (different one than the one we talked to at first) stops us and asks where we’re from. So we say Canada, and he says "Christians?" and we said – "yes". He waved us over to security and they radioed up to the mosque and we had to wait 5 min for prayers to be over and then we were allowed in. Quite an experience.  Wendy never thought she’d lie to a Jew about not being Jewish so that he didn’t keep her from going somewhere. The craziest part of the whole thing? They take your word for it, and then barely searched our bag at security. 

Once inside we visited the tombs and noticed that they have bullet proof glass hanging over the tombs of Abraham and Sarah because you can actually see them from both sides (there are also bars over the windows). The sherut back to Bethlehem told us about a better bus that went right back to Jerusalem (with a quick stop at the wall to get our papers checked).

We went shopping at the Cardo briefly and then went on to our pre-arranged tour of the Western Wall Tunnels. They’ve excavated underneath the city to reveal the original wall is still there. It was an incredible tour – at one point you are walking on the road they walked to get up to the Temple Mount more than 2,000 years ago.