Sunday's trip to the old city

We had to write this for an assignment as our response to our tour of the old city. Read it if you want... or don't I don''t care haha.

Sunday’s trip into the old city was both interesting and informative. We began by simply discussing the geography around the city, the valleys and hills, and how it made the atmosphere of Jerusalem. What first caught my attention was the dialogue concerning the wall. The different parts to each piece of stone (I have them written down but I’m not sure off the top of my head the exact names) with it’s outline and center, and the way Herod smoothed the center of his stones to give the walls a more wealthy and polished look. After that we went to the Jaffa gate and talked about the guys, Koder and Kitchner, who mapped out the distances and elevations with poles and chains, and saw their mark on the ground. We also mentioned the L shaped gates made by Suleiman the Magnificent which kept battering rams from getting to the gates, and how the wall had to be torn down to let in the important German guy’s impressive precession. After winding all thought the Old City, we finally made it though to the Damascus gate. This gate was wider and more impressive than Joffa gate, since Suleiman thought the north was more important. We then talked about the falsity of the Garden tomb, and looked at Solomon’s cave (which is supposedly where Solomon got the rock for the Temple (although this cannot be proven since there are no remnants of the temple to compare the rocks with). From there we made our way in the Gate of Flowers to the Lion’s gate (or Steven’s gate, since Steven was supposedly dragged out this gate to be stoned… although we learned that this is also false considering the fact that the gate would not have been there at the time of Steven). This gate is called the Lion s gate due to the lions carved into it (Suleiman the Magnificent had a dream about lions and had them carved into the gate to turn his fear from his dream into protection for his city). This gate looks to the Mount of Olives, which you fair teacher, explained as a place where Jesus must have gone through great conflict at staying to due God’s will rather than escaping easily into the wilderness beyond the mount. From this spot we spent a good amount of time at the pool of Bethseda. Here we talked about how the gospel of John’s validity was challenged because at first this pool appeared to be have only five covered colonnades. After another group of archeologists came in for one final look, and dug under an old Byzantine church, they found another pool split by a 5^th covered colonnade from the first, making John’s gospel completely accurate. We then talked about the pools on the other side of the site which were devoted to the Roman Goddess of healing (Attis I believe). It was probably by this pool that the lame man was sitting. He was probably afraid to get into the pool because it was so deep and in his condition if he was not healed he would certainly drown. After talking much more about these pools and exploring them thoroughly, we went into an old crusader church which some French monks traded some land to I believe turkey for, and sang some sweet songs. Inside the acoustics were awesome. From there we walked the via del la rosa (which also isn’t the same as it would have been in Christ’s day, and took the cardio (main roman road through the city) to the western wall (the closest spot to the original temple, and the closest the Jewish people are willing to go to where the original holy of holies was for fear of stepping in such a holy place. We got to go down to the wall (if our heads were covered) and see all the prayers that people had placed into the wall. From there we went and saw the remains of an original Roman road, and a mosaic map of Jerusalem, and then took a walk back to school.

cheers