From the Davidson’s Center, we wound our way through the Arab quarter and market (a rabbit warren of streets filled with stall after stall of tee shirts, jewelry, chess sets, dried fruit, herbs, etc), to the Christian quarter and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Along the way, we noted several of the actual positions of the Stations of the Cross. Within the church itself, are several more stations, including the position where Jesus was crucified, laid down when removed from the cross, and buried.

Mosaic

Mosaic

Now we’d been here before, but Chris wanted to return, so we did. With him, he brought three crosses, one his father owns, one his aunt owns, and one his mom owns (I think all hang above their respective beds). There’s not a blessing per se, but people take their crosses and touch them to the stations and that’s what Chris did (oh, and luckily Moshe knows the man controlling access to burial section so he got Chris in quickly). Chris also prayed in the chapel while we were there.

Oh, I have to say too, that Moshe did a thorough tour of the inside of this church; we were in there for probably an hour. But one of the many cool things we saw was the burial place of the two thieves crucified on either side of Jesus, something that helps to confirm the location of Jesus’s burial.

After leaving the church, and navigating the market again, we emerged outside the walls to the old city and walked back to the van. At this point, we were supposed to visit the Mahane Yehuda market but my group was spent, between the lack of sleep and cold, damp weather, I feared they’d get sick, so we headed back to the hotel instead.

Baba

Chris went to lie down and the girls and I went to hang in the lobby. We spoke to the young man at the front desk about restaurant recommendation and he suggested Baba, in the German Colony, for some Israeli food. He made a reservation for us and after rousing Chris, we headed over there.

It’s not a far walk from our hotel, maybe 15 minutes, but it is cold and misty rain, so we walk quickly (of course we all forgot our umbrellas). The German Colony looks like a young, hip place with lots of restaurants. We find Baba easy enough and are seated right away. It’s nothing fancy but has a decent menu (like twenty different kinds of hummus toppings) and it’s warm, so we’re happy.

We order some hummus with minced lamb for the table (the pita bread is hot, thick and excellent by the way), and Chris and I order the spicy Moroccan sausage, Becky the Baba wings (a cross between sweet and spicy) and Sammi, well, they were out of chicken nuggets, so she just had the garlic flat bread (think garlic naan) and an order of French fries. That and some beer and I’ll have to see if I have the bill somewhere but we had good filling food for not so much money.

Lucky for us, the rain stopped just as we needed to walk back to the hotel. We had Thursday off, so we didn’t arrange any wake up calls to let everyone catch up on their sleep.

Ooh, almost forgot. Wednesday night we had been scheduled to see the light show at the Tower of David (just inside the old city by the Jaffa gate) but the rain made them cancel it. We did not try to reschedule.