After my rocky start to my trip, I spent the next day and a half rather uneventfully alone in Jerusalem. Carrie, Candace, and my dad were coming from Italy on Sunday morning. On Saturday I dressed for church and left a good two hours before the meeting was scheduled to start. I didn’t know exactly where I was going, and figured it might take me a while to wander to my desired destination; the BYU Jerusalem Center where the local branch met.
Eventually I found it, and was still early enough to enjoy the choir of BYU students practice for and upcoming musical number. I was able to give myself a meandering tour of the grounds.
On my way to church (as I was wandering the city, completely lost) I happened to find the Garden Tomb. Afterwards I decided to back track to there to visit what was surely the most holy locale in the country. As I wandered the streets trying to find my way back to it, I came around a corner and was just stopped dead in my tracks as I looked up and saw Golgotha. I immediately recognized it for what it was, though not from any specific picture I could remember. More from Wyatt’s descriptions and stories of his visits here over 13 years ago.
I was both stunned at suddenly seeing such a holy site and perplexed that it was . . . a bus station. It seemed so unfitting of the culmination of the Atonement to be there with an asphalt nightmare of diesel and dust beneath.
I made my way around the block to the garden tomb (which is right next to Golgotha, but around the way).
There everything was so peaceful. It really was as if I stepped into a painting, I knew the place so well from the Mormon artwork that I’ve seen my whole life.
After spending some time there, I returned to my hostel to work on my jet lag (aka, take a nap).
That night I ventured out again to the markets, ate some dinner, looked at the wares for sale – different, yet the same, as every other country I’ve visited. I didn’t return to my hostel until late.
On Sunday my sister, dad, and friend were coming in from Italy. I had been emailing Carrie sporadically to try and coordinate meeting up. Finally it was decided they would come to my hostel as soon as they had checked into their hotel in Tel Aviv.
We met up around noon, and I started walking them through the old city. It is such a maze that we were finding things I hadn’t seen yet. We ate some shwarma. We stopped in at churches. We looked at the shops.
After not too long we were approached by a tour guide named Shlomo offering tours of the Western Wall and the excavated tunnels under the city. He reminded me of “the Tailor” from Fiddler on the Roof (almost everything came back to Fiddler on the Roof while I was in Israel. Why?) We agreed to a tour, and it was very helpful to see the excavations underneath the city to get an idea of what Jerusalem is and has been through the ages. The actual city/streets that Christ would have walked upon are about 60 feet beneath the current city.
After our tour we headed back to Tel Aviv where we checked into a hotel and were ready to start our official Tour of Israel the next day.