Visiting Jerusalem – Pictures from Gethsemane (Gat Shemanim)

Spent a lovely day in Jerusalem yesterday. I have lots of pictures and stories to share, and not a lot of time, so I think I’ll split this into more than one post.

We traveled with a group of senior citizens from our town, friends of my parents-in-law, in an organized one day tour to Jerusalem. The topic was Christianity in Jerusalem, which turned out to be quite interesting, as Christian culture and history is not something your ordinary Israeli gets to learn at school.

We started our day with the mandatory viewpoint stop. There are several of those, overlooking the Old City, and we stopped at two of them, actually. The first one, at  Mt Scopus was overlooking the Judea Desert and the Dead Sea. Dan was having fun, as you can see -

The next view point was at the top of the Mt of Olives, overlooking the Old City. The guide was talking about the history of the city and how it evolved from the times of David to this day. Touching on things, mainly, as obviously you can’t really tell even a fraction of it in 10-15 minutes.

The kids were getting bored at this point, so we figured a good camel ride was a good way to distract them at 20 shekels:

The camel basically walks around the place for a few minutes, but the getting on and off it is a lot of fun, and as Dan said, “This was as much fun as a ride in Disneyland”.

From there, we walked down, in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, down the winding road to Gethsemane (Gat Shemanim in Hebrew).

The path itself is full of stops, with places where Jesus stopped, kissed someone here, blessed someone else there, and yes, I’m afraid I was not paying a lot of attention to what our guide was telling us at this point, sorry! Was too busy looking after and for Dan.

We did get into a Christian cemetery with a church in the middle of it that, if I got it right, was built on the spot where they cut down the tree to built the Cross from. That’s when we found out IsraeliDad’s attire for the day was inappropriate. He had to cover his legs properly, as apparently knees, even male ones, are out of the question. Thankfully, you have local Palestinians selling just about everything at any point, so we bought him a nice pashmina of sorts which he wrapped around himself, a la a Scottish kilt:

Since Daddy was getting himself a skirt, the kids wanted to buy something too and we got them a little Camel:

It’s not just any camel either. Those little Camel dollies sing when you press their front paw. We had to spent the rest of the trip listening to the psychotic little thing singing “I’m a Barbie Doll in a Barbie World”.

On the way down the path to Gat Shmanim (or in the English version: Gethsemane), we met this picturesque and very friendly old Palestinian with a sweet white donkey. My father-in-law and IsraeliDad chatted with the elderly gentleman, in a mix of Arabic and Hebrew and he told them he’s been delivering oil on the back of his donkey for over 50 years now.

Gat Shemanim itself turned out to be a beautiful little garden of ancient olive trees. It’s amazing, but these trees actually date back to the times of Jesus Christ. According to our guide, the trunks of the trees are not that old, as they have been cut and burnt over the years, but the new trees kept growing from the same roots, so genetically, these specimens are thousands of years old. They look very old too, so the current trunks of some of them are definitely many hundreds of years old. Amazing, but among these very trees, Jesus is said to have spent his last night.

Of course, there is a church there as well. We spent a while there, and then sat outside to wait for the rest of the group. As you can tell, IsraeliDad isn’t used to wearing skirts

At the very bottom of the path, within a couple of yards, we also visited the place where according to tradition, Virgin Mary was buried.

As you can see, there was a LOT of incense burning over there and candles too. Very medieval feeling, as you go down many stairs made of stone down to the tomb. You can pay and get a candle to light there, which Dan really wanted to do, but we didn’t think his faith was strong enough Seriously, we felt it would be disrespectful to let him light a candle and we told him as much. It’s going to be Hannuka candles only for my boys.

As we were standing there, one of the keepers of the place walked over and in a very secular fashion, just put out the candles and took them to be re-sold to the next group of tourists.

Following Dan around, he went through the small door which lead to the tomb itself. It’s a bit weird, as the tomb, ancient enough to look at, has bank notes and coins all over it. I guess donations by believers?

Whew, this is getting to be a long post, and I simply have to leave now. I’ll do another post on the rest of the sightseeing next time.

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