Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Holiday in Israel

With the aid of photos, I hope to recreate my holiday in Israel, as it’s now more than a month since we went and returned.

We were going to the wedding of the daughter of a friend, which is the reason we have taken many of our holidays in recent years. And more power to them. We hope that a) people will continue to get married, b) continue to invite us, and c) hold the wedding somewhere we haven’t yet been (but not too far away.) Up to now, the weddings have taken us to Yorkshire, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden and New York.

The bride – a tour guide - had first given us quite a lot of information, which was extremely helpful, and had also arranged a trip with another tour guide, the day before the wedding, which was to take place on 16th June. We left home on 13th and had a good flight there, in the middle of the day. The bride herself picked us up from the airport, late in the evening. We stayed in a hotel just off King George V Street (a relic of England’s history in Israel) in a pedestrianised road, which also had a little café at the end of it, and this proved useful for sandwiches, pizzas and the like. Many of the Israeli restaurants are dairy only, as meat and milk are not cooked or served together in kosher establishments. Because of the predominance of these dairy places, we had a lot of light meals – unlike at home.

On our first day, we took a taxi to Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust (Entrance shown above.) As I have recently said, the two books I had been reading had been on my mind, anyway, but the exhibits are a grim reminder of the way that Hitler and his armies swept through Europe, destroying the many millions of people he regarded as ‘second class citizens’ as a matter of policy. The exhibits show the outrages committed by the Nazis, from many, many countries – where previously people had had reasonable lives and saw no reason to leave. However, the countries that fell under his control are so numerous – one sometimes needs to remind oneself of that – so when people left one country and fled to another, he soon overpowered that country too. Those who succeeded in getting to the UK and America were lucky (in general). However, there is nothing to say that we could not have been overwhelmed too, had things turned out differently. Thank goodness for that little stretch of water between us and Europe. Without it, things might have been different. We spent about three to four hours there, and then, very tired, both emotionally and physically, we left.

A taxi driver pulled up and we gratefully jumped into the cab and asked to go to our hotel, but our driver wasn’t having it. ‘Why,’ he asked us, ‘do you want to go to your hotel in the middle of the day?’ We replied that we were tired and we hadn’t eaten. ‘I will take you somewhere to eat,’ he said, ‘and then I will take you on a tour of Jerusalem.’ And that’s what we did. The Dome of the Rock - from a distance.The cemetery at the Mount of Olives

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