Some pictures from the compound used by Yasser Arafat in Ramallah in Palestine during the Second Intifada. I remember hearing about this at the time, but based on the news at the time, I assumed he was stuck in some sort of hell hole the whole time. But it was actually surprisingly nice on the inside.
Some snaps from my trip to Bethlehem with Brianna.
Brianna and I visited the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
On advice from my old colleague and friend Josh, Brianna and I went to Bahai Garden in Haifa whilst in Israel.
Brianna and I visited the Garden of Gesthemane in Jerusalem.
Earlier this year I travelled with 15 others from Berlin on a hiking excursion to Jordan. Enroute, we travelled through Eilat in Israel before attempting to cross the land border to Jordan. Unfortunately, we were told that the law had changed five days prior and we now required visas to make the border crossing :/
We found some emergency accommodation in Eilat and a day later found out that we didn’t need a visa at all, and could simply buy something called a “Jordan Pass”, which gave us access to a bunch of random attractions within Jordan. Being told we needed to pay to see a bunch of attractions we didn’t want to see, just to get across the border, seemed a tad odd. I can’t imagine Germany asking people travelling from Belgium to buy a ticket for a bunch of amusement parks, just so that someone could go hiking in Sächsischeschweiz.
After some run ins with a taxi on the opposite side of the border, and a brief police investigation of us (ask me in person if you want to know the full story behind this) and we were happily our way for our great Jordanian adventure 🙂
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.
Here are some photos I found kicking around on my hard drive that I’d forgotten to upload to the web.
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).
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.
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.
