Back from the other world

Israel Travel Diary: Jerusalem. First day.

We arrive at Tel Aviv airport prepared for the worst. We know they will tear our lives apart and comb through them in search of a trace, a suspicion, a shred of evidence that casts a shadow of undesirability over us.

We arrive at the customs counters in pure essential sixties style, even before having collected Iaia's big backpack, already intimidated by what will happen to us. We look at those in front of us and try to pick up on their difficulties, the weak points of their answers to the pressing questions of the border police. But nothing, we can barely intercept anything, kept at a safe distance.

At our turn we step forward, greet politely and hand over our passports.

We smile.

The very young agent, flanked by another apparently more experienced one, looks at our photos and our faces. Again and again. She spells out our names and then looks at us again. She asks us for what reason we are entering Israel, how long we will stay, where we will go and whether we travel alone or in a group. Meanwhile the two flip through the pages of our passports several times. Then they leave us there and walk away, come back, flip through the pages of the passports again, look us in the face and we smile. What do you do? Do you tell them not to stamp it? And brave heart replies "if we offend them it's over for us". And the entry stamps dive onto the passports. We made it, we're in, without even having been locked in some security room and stripped with a probe running through our intestines.

Here we are at arrivals. We withdraw our first 1000 shekels from the ATM and leave the airport, under the sky of Israel.

Two girls, one Spanish and the other Argentinian, an Italian businessman, a family of grumbling Russians and a distinguished Israeli gentleman who gives us a little introduction to the city leave with us on the sherut for Jerusalem: 58.40 shekels a head, a fixed fare printed inside the vehicle, which on arrival indisputably become 60.

The driver drops us on Nablus street, Damascus Gate area, right in front of the bus station from which buses leave for the Palestinian territories. Our hotel is on Salah-ad-din street. We take Iaia's big backpack, the trolley and the crossbody bag, say goodbye to the Hispanic girls who have their hotel in the old city and set off toward the Damascus Gate to get our bearings better.

We walk along a long sequence of market stalls along the sidewalk literally slaloming through the crowd. At the Damascus Gate we skirt the walls of the old city along the Suleyman and then go back up on Salah-ad-din to the Hotel Capitol, in the midst of the slightly decadent charm of lush East Jerusalem.

Having left our bags, we set off again. From Herod's Gate, a rather secluded access compared to the great Damascus Gate, we enter the old city, on the side of the Muslim quarter. We come across children playing soccer, elderly people walking wearily and rather indolent vendors who are not at all pushy. We move without a precise direction, following what we like in the labyrinth of the old city, until the sudden appearance of the golden dome of the Dome of the Rock.

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Israel Travel Diary: Jerusalem, second day.

The alarm rings early, but not too early, after all yesterday was rather tiring. We get dressed and go down to the breakfast hall. It seems the locusts have passed through. The room is half-empty but there isn't an untouched table. Before us a group of Orthodox Romanian pilgrims passed by led by a pope with a long tawny beard whom we saw wandering the corridors with his following of small and very quick little nuns. In a minute the very kind dining staff set a table near the buffet. The breakfast is rich, more savory than sweet, lots of greens and vegetables, yogurt, fresh cheeses, a few slices of cake, toast bread and jam. No brioches, but what there is puts us in an excellent mood for the long day ahead of us.

Back in the old city, this time entering through the monumental Damascus Gate. Here we stop for a few photos and go in, moving a bit blindly through the maze of alleys. Despite the abundant breakfast we let ourselves be seduced by the delicious sweets of the shops of the long covered market of the Cardo, until the light coming from a side street leads us into a street populated by cats but very few humans.

We continue in this landscape so different from the swarming alleys of the Arab quarter, gradually realizing, from the clothes and faces of East Africa, that we have entered Coptic territory. At the umpteenth turn here are the first souvenir shops of a street that leads us into the sunlit courtyard of the Monastery of the Ethiopian Church.

Here we join a group of Italians and enter through a narrow, low door into the ancient Ethiopian church, where a priest listens to the readings of his pupil. Continuing on, we arrive at another chapel, equally ancient and evocative, and then outside again, mysteriously landed on the parvis of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre.

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