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During a tour of the Old City of Jerusalem, we got taken to the Western Wall (aka Wailing Wall) and the surrounding area.

I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It is built on the site where Jesus Christ was supposedly buried.

The Stone of the Anointing

A tomb

The supposed tomb of Jesus Christ

The Greek Orthodox Catholicon

The imovable ladder.

The ladder hasn't been moved in over a hundred years

Here are some photos I found kicking around on my hard drive that I’d forgotten to upload to the web.

Vicki Argyle in an alcove at Davids Castle in Jerusalem, Israel

Vikas and Stephanie at the Heidelburg Castle in Germany

Vicki Argyle on a strange wooden seat at the Speyer transport museum in Germany

Vicki Argyle outside the Heidelburg castle's walls

I’m not going to go into the details here, but we almost got kidnapped on entering Palestine. After that, I wasn’t particularly interested in taking out my camera to take photos. Thankfully Vicki Argyle took some photos of our visit. Since things were a little stressed during our trip, we didn’t do anything beyond taking a taxi to Bethlehem, visiting the Church of Nativity and getting taken to an overpriced souvenir shop where we had to buy some crappy products (taxi drivers must take tourists to a souvenir shop apparently).

Inside of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem.

 The Church of Nativity is quite run down, but spectacular none the less. It is supposedly the birth place of Jesus Christ, although it is highly doubtful that this is the correct spot as there are no records of exactly where he was born.

If you look carefully at the bottom of the doorway, you can also see where the slab of stone has been worn away during the past 1400+ years of foot traffic.

I wasn’t allowed into the church with shorts on (apparently that is impolite), so our taxi driver arranged for me to wear a strange skirt thing around my waist.

You need to step up to go through the doorway I am standing in front of, but despite that I was still taller than the height of the door. This is because the church was built in 565 AD when humans tended to be a lot shorter than they are now.

Someone complained that I don’t post enough photos of people! The reason I don’t normally post photos of people is because I’m not very good at taking them and I often never get around to asking permission. To keep my readers happy, here are some photos from Israel containing real live human beings

This is one of the few photos I took of people while in Israel. Vicki Argyle is on the left and Gemma Christian is on the right.

Vicki Argyle and I on top of Davids Castle in the Old City of Jerusalem.

One of numerous ugly photos of me taken by Vicki.

We visited the Tower of David in the Old City of Jerusalem. The tower is named after David, the former King of Israel (from David and Goliath fame). It was built around 200 BCE, but has been successively replaced/built on over the years.

The following are more parallel 3D images.

To view the 3D photos, look through the page and merge the two images into one.

When I found out I was going to Jerusalem I emailed my online friend Miriam Schwab for advice about what to do and see in the area (Miriam lives in Jerusalem). She gave us heaps of advice and invited us to join her family for a traditional Jewish dinner during the Shabatt (Jewish sabbath).

Miriam and her children. Thanks to Victoria Argyle for the photo.

After arriving in Jerusalem, we made our way on foot (in 35°C heat!) to Miriams place. It hadn’t dawned on me that we wouldn’t be able to contact Miriam due to Jews not being allowed to use electrical devices on the Shabatt and I hadn’t bothered getting particularly accurate directions on how to find her place. All we had we her address, but only a teeny tourist map to find her on. We asked the locals for directions, but only a few seemed to know the housing area she lived in. A few suggested we walked up a hill, in the opposite direction to where we should have been going, to a Mosque on the top of the Mount of Olives. We found out later that the locals simply didn’t want us finding her housing complex as they are unhappy that there is a single Jewish housing complex in an otherwise entirely arab area of Jerusalem.

Two hours after we left the hotel, we were eventually met by an abrupt confrontation with guards armed with machine guns outside Miriams place. Once we convinced them that we were indeed supposed to be there, we were served a scrumptious meal of middle eastern style food It was great to see an inside view of a typical Israeli family. The concept of having armed guards outside my house is certainly a very foreign concept though!

A panoramic image from Miriam’s place. On the right is Miriam and slightly to her left is Vicki. In the background you can see the wall seperating Palestine from the rest of Israel and you can faintly see the mountains of Jordan in the distance.

Photo of the wall seperating Palestine from the rest of the Israel as seen from Miriam’s place.

View of the mountains of Jordan as seen from Miriam’s place