Night Wandering

Wandering around Jerusalem at night is something I love to do, almost as much as I enjoy it during the daytime. It does have a different feel to it at night, however.

Tonight, I caught up with a group of Greek tourists (above) who were visiting the city, and walked with them for a little while (they pretty much blocked the al-Zeit Street marketplace, making it tough to pass). One matronly woman asked me where I was from, and as we walked along and visited, she began talking to me in nearly perfect English, with a lovely Irish accent blended with a slight Greek inflection. Apparently her mother was Irish, married a Greek gentleman, and moved there to raise her family. A nice chat. (Again, she wanted to know if I was excited about Obama. All foreigners seem to want to talk politics and the recent inauguration. It once again reminded me how much better many other people of other countries are at appreciaitong and USING a variety of languages, and often, being much more worldly aware than many Americans can be.)

After they went their way, I was left to meander back toward my hotel. If you want to get a sense of the neighborhoods, here are some pictures I snapped along my way back through the center of the city. If the streets weren't as safe as they supposedly are, you would half expect to have someone leaping out from the shadows and jumping you every ten feet. It definitely has an eerie quality to it.

But it is a 4,000+ year old city, and I just wander and imagine all the city has seen in its time. The people, the wars, the battles, the adventure, the stories, the events................

Finally, the Christian Quarter Road comes to an end, and the entrance to St. Mark's Place appears, the street that my guesthouse is on. Yep, that's the entrance to the street, straight ahead in the picture below, with the steps leading up under the arch. I walk up in semi-darkness, take a left at the top, and walk down another block on what seems more like an alleway/pathway than a true street.

Every now and then, I have to stop, click my hiking shoes together, and remind myself that I'm not in Kansas anymore. (Or Minnesota, for that matter.)