The City of David

We had an OK breakfast at the Prima Royale, which was our hotel, then we walked to Jaffa Gate, to meet our guide for the day. He was very nice and he really knew pretty much everything there is to know about Jerusalem. There are different quarters in they old town of Jerusalem. When we were walking across them, we went first to the Christian Quarter, then to the Armenian Quarter, then to the Jewish Quarter, to go to the Dung Gate. It's a weird name, I know, but that's what it's called... The old town of Jerusalem was really nice. In the Christian Quarter, we saw almost no one, but probably that was because it was early. All the buildings were made out of Jerusalem stone, and so was the pavement. Most everything where we walked was over a thousand years old, and sometimes it was two thousand years old! Except that the Jewish Quarter is almost all new, because it was destroyed by the Jordanians in the war of independence, so there was not too much to see there.

From the Dung Gate, we went to the City of David, outside the Old City walls, which is where a part of the old Jewish city was. First we went to a bunch of excavation sites, where we saw the old Canaanite wall, and where King David and his descendants had also built. Then we walked to this place where there was a really old pool, called the pool of Shiloah, that had steps going into it, because the level of the water always changed, so one of the walls was made of steps so you could get to the water. Then we had to walk all the way back up the hill to the Dung Gate. We were really tired so we were literally staggering up the hill to go back into the Old City and to have lunch.

We had some pretty bad shawarma for lunch. Then we went to the Davidson Center, which is the area around the western and the southern wall of the temple. We saw the remains of the Robinson Arch, and a bunch of original pieces of the wall that had fallen. Then we saw a lot of old houses and their cisterns which I thought were the coolest part of the visit, because there was a tiny staircase leading into the houses and the cisterns, and we you walked through them you go back up into a steep tunnel that takes you into the other side of the wall. Then we walked to another part of the wall.

Then we went to the Kotel, which is the Wailing Wall. We saw a lot of people praying by it. They pray there because it is the closest part of the wall to where the old temple used to stand. Then we went back home.