To Jerusalem

A 5am start is never easy, especially when you know you have to venture out of the world you know and jump deep into a world you don’t. Oddly the darkness is appealing, and the journey to the airport passes in a blink. As I walk through the terminal and towards the gate the crowd is the first thing that begins to feel foreign about this trip; skull-caps and orthodox Jews abound and, knowing that my ultimate destination is Palestine, there is a certain feeling of unease. If someone asks me where I’m headed, do I lie? Do I risk causing offence? Am I just being too paranoid? Perhaps... Still; better to keep quiet and keep my eyes in my book.

The airport security again went smoothly; I’d been warned that customs at Tel Aviv can either be a frustrating nuisance or a comical farce, but really it was neither. The immigration official barely even looked at me as she continued her conversation with the woman next to her and stamped my passport with a stamp that effectively bans me from travelling to Lebanon and Syria. Aside from having to crawl down into the conveyor-belt part of the luggage carousel to retrieve my stuck guitar case nothing was out of the ordinary.

Waiting for the sherut (small shuttle bus) to Jerusalem I get confused as people crowd around me and shout in Hebrew and look like they know what’s going on. Someone who looks like the driver points at me, and I stumble out the words ‘Jaffa Gate’. He disappears and I feel more lost, but before long I’m being shuttled onto the sherut and I take the last seat. I’d seen the girl I sat next to at the bus stop, and she’d had the same problem as me. “Don’t speak much Hebrew?” Of course not. We talk for a little and it turns out she’s teaching English. I ask where; she hesitates and says “Nablus”. Small world, I guess. At least she broke the silence about where we were headed, although later she told me she saw the woman in front of us mouth to her husband, “They’re going to the West Bank!” Maybe I’d been right to keep my eyes in a book.

Still, we ended up in Jerusalem safe, found a nice little hostel in the Old City and found some excellent food. This city is stunningly beautiful; I’m not quite sure what I had imagined. Winding ancient stone alleyways and paving slabs worn smooth; a hustle of people late into the dark and a smell just like the pictures say. The young soldiers with machine guns were a little disconcerting, but they had smiles on their faces. So did I, for that matter; somehow, tomorrow I have to get to Nablus.