Right of Waterway

While I know that I have to detail all that we did today, I want to take a slight detour and first go through my reflections on the people around us at this morning's activity.

You pathetic bunch of idiots.

There. I feel better.

We started the day with a long walk down to the "City of David" to walk through Hezekiah's tunnels. The actual city of David is outside the walls of the old city of Jerusalem and had a complex aqueduct built to protect the flowing spring water. The directions we got were incomplete, the road markers were wrong and the phone help I solicited didn't get us where we needed to go. So we showed up a few minutes late, in time to hear a Charleton Heston impersonator dubbing English onto a Hebrew 3-D film about the tunnels. Nausea set in, and after an excessive morning walk, it was unwelcome. After the movie, our group worked our way down a whole lotta stairs, pausing whenever we were directly under the sun in order to have our tour guide say the exact same stuff about springs, military sieges and biblical references. It was hard to hear him, but it became more difficult when other groups and individuals started floating by, talking at full volume and blocking the path. You see, this place, with all of its daily visitors, doesn't have a real schedule for tours. Sure, we had a reservation for the 10 AM movie/tour, but family tours, individuals, groups and other sanctioned tours seem to have reserved all the spots between 10:01 and 10:30. I was even asked to serve as the group's "last man" so we could be sure that everyone was included before the tour guide started to bore us, but i had to wait while a personal tourguide had completed talking to his family group because they were also now part of our group.

After a while, we finally made it into the tunnels. The ceilings were VERY low, the walls, VERY narrow and the overall experience, not so much scary as annoying. I was in front of a group of English pre-teens who sang and shouted the whole time so I dealt with this by lying to them often ("hey...there's a steep drop right ahead -- look out!"). Even when we got out of the tunnel, and wanted to leave, the tour guide couldn't just point to the exit so we could make our next appointment. Instead he said that he had "just one more thing" to mention. He must have discussed the meaning of "just one more thing" with my kids...

We made it out and paid for a mini van to drive us back to the starting point so that we could walk to the Dung Gate and to the Square to snag a quick lunch and meet our afternoon guide, Donna. She started us off with a little museum about the First Temple period, and helped the girls write their names in Ancient Hebrew. This, while not a particularly useful skill, went over really well, and this activity and the really cool video we saw in the air conditioned theater was the first time that we truly enjoyed learning stuff about stuff. The afternoon was looking up.

Donna then drove us up to Ammunition Hill and we ran in to catch the last movie of the day -- it was an incredibly powerful and inspiring movie which was connected to a model/lightshow on the floor depicting the events of June 1967 leading up to the capture of Jerusalem. We then went out and split into two "teams" to explore the trenches and get a sense of what the Israelis wdere up against in the battle against the Jordanians. The Israelis won quickly as Maddie, when she was going to get a hiding space, smacked her nose against one of the metal walkways and started bleeding. She has a bump, a mark on her nose, and headache but this has been perfectly reflective of the entire trip. Find something the kids might like and it gets smacked in the face. On the plus side, as we left, the security guard gave us all free ice pops! So we're going back tomorrow to see if I can break a leg.

Our next drive was to Mt. Scopus and then to the Mount of Olives. We saw incredible views, let the girls get a camle ride and watched in horror as our tourguide did a poor job of driving. There was intense traffic on the way back -- both lanes of the road were log jammed and Jerusalem isn't know for "alternate routes.

Our last decisionm of the day was dinner. We were eminently unsuccessful at reaching any agreement, so we ate in 3 separate restaurants, none of us having what each intended at the outset. It was a wonderful conclusion to a wonderful day.