Lebanon
In Beirut we stayed with one of Alex's friends there from the Human Rights Watch, Nadim. An incredibly nice guy who let us stay with him and showed us around all of the crazy night life of Beirut.
The view from Nadim's balcony.
Downtown Beirut with the mosque in the background and protest tents in the foreground. These tents have been there for months now in an open-ended protest against the government led by Fouad Sinoara and wants it to resign.
And tents in front of the church. Apparently there is some kind of habit in Beirut that there should be as many mosques as churches...
A frightening-looking Hezbollah supporter in front of his tent.
This building was apparently one of the main scenes in the 1975 civil war, and factions fought eachother between one floor and the other in here... Not much seems to have happened with it since then.
The corniche, one of the nicest parts of Beirut.
This area is sealed off, it was between these two buildings that cabinet minister Gemayal was assasinated (I think at least, correct me if I'm wrong).
The weird balloon they send up in the air once in a while for conspicuos reasons.
Nadim lives in Gemeyzeh, which is a Christian area that has recently became the place to be in Beirut. These crosses are everwhere on the walls here.
Tony, Nadim and me in an NGO fundraiser we went to.
Seems like an NGO is the thing to work for! They even had an open bar!! :-D
Later on we headed out to go bar hopping. And yes, the rumor is true, Lebanese women are STUNNING!
The bluriest photo I've ever taken with a friend of Alex, Nadim and of course the stunning Alex herself hehehe.. :-)
Since Alex wanted to do some work while we were there we went to this civil peace protest where people applauded for 10 minutes and then put their hand prints of the black cloth in the background.
I had to support the cause of course.
These tanks were a common sight on the streets of Beirut, kind of weird to see when you're originally from Sweden, the most peaceful and civilized country in the whole wide world. :-P
The last afternoon we went to this old kind of coffee shop by the sea for some coffee and this traditional Lebanese drink whose name has escaped me..
It was time to head out after some nights of intense partying and we hired a cab to take us first to Baalbek, the main archeological sight in Lebanon and then all the way across the border to our hotel in Damascus. Along the way we saw a lot of bombed bridges and roads from the war with Israel last year.
View over the Bekaa Valley.
Me in front of the entrance to Baalbek.
The setting was pretty cool with the snow-draped mountains in the background.
Alex in the far admiring the scenary.
The temple of Bacchus I believe this was, incredibly well preserved.
Interior of the temple.
Random stone with figures on the way out.
The nice cab driver threw in this in the trip at no cost too. THE BIGGEST STONE IN THE WORLD! How about that? :-D
Syria
The border crossing to Syria was a piece of cake thanks to our driver who knew how to grease the right people and a few hours later we arrived at our hotel, early enough even to be able to do some more sightseeing the same day.
This is a photo from the souq in the old city of Damascus, very nice place, very nice prices, MUCH nicer people than in Cairo's Khan El-Khalili. :-)
Birds flying around over the Ummayad mosque in the Old City. It started out as a roman temple but was since then owned, rebuilt and influenced by Christians, Ottomans and Arabs alike.
A real sheikh with a big beard.
The shrine which supposedly holds the head of St. John the Baptist.
A lot of quite impressive gold frescoes were there too.
These sunscreens that people have in their cars of leading Syrian and Hezbollah people are just hilarious.. How could anyone take these guys seriously?? :-P
The morning of our second day in Syria we went to a fishy office to pick up some visas for the UN monitored demilitarized zone in the Golan Heights between Syria and Israel and particularly to the now abandoned city of Quneitra, which had an unfortunate position right where the frontline between the two went and therefore went back and forth between Israeli and Syrian possession in the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars.
The remains of the hospital in Quneitra, "destructed by Zionists and changed it to firing target".
The interior really did look like a war zone.
This is the view from the roof of the hospital, pretty depressing to see all these houses that have been flattened and where people once used to live...
Alex walking around among the bullet holes.
The inside of the church in Quneitra.
Another one of the bulldozed houses leaving only the roof on display.
The rest of the Golan Heights in Israel behind barb wire...
Back in Damascus (this is just a random street there) after our eye-opening Quneitra visit, we tracked down one of the few places where you could find beer, it was called Karnak and accompanied by several (well-deserved) warnings for being a sleezy place in my out-of-date Lonely Planet. But boy, was that an interesting place, never seen so many strange people in the same room before. Especially the Ethiopian business man (when asked what kind of business the mysterious reply was a smirky smile and a "you know, all business is good in Syria") and his Russian friend who he was drinking vodka with. They had like no common language so he spoke in English and the other guy answered in Russian. Add a couple of hand gestures and a decent amount of body language and it was "mish mushkeela", no problem.
We found a nice, but touristy place, for a beer and some good food as well.
Our third day we headed to Palmyra, or Tadmor as it is known as in Arabic (the name supposedly stems from the palm trees in the area). It is an ancient city on the trade routes between Iran and the Mediterranean, and the present remains were mostly developed by the Romans in the first century AD although the city is known to have existed already a couple of thousand years before that. Anyway we ran into this cute puppy there that we fell in love with and that fell in love with us too and followed us around for quite a while. :-)
This is the temple of Bel.
Some odd formation inside the temple.
The ruins of Palmyra. All of these are in the open, with free access except for the Amphitheater (which isn't worth seeing anyway if you've ever seen another one).
View of the temple from the entrance way.
A large part of Palmyra is made up of a colonaded street which contrary to normal Roman perfection in not completely straight but changes direction in the middle. This is said to be a proof of the unusual development of the city over the years. In the photo you can see another shot of the entrance to this street.
You can imagine how impressive it must have looked when it was still an inhabitated city..
The tetrapylon with its fake looking columns. Come on, guys, couldn't you at least have given it a bit of a rough surface to make it fit with the rest??? :-)
Some tombs in the distant..
In the evening Alex couldn't stand being on vacation anymore and hence decided to work again (workoholic warning). So we went to the French cultural centre to check out a photo exhibition and I took a picture of this photo that I liked. I have no idea what the artist does to get that aquarel feel in the photos but I am sure it's a very advanced tenchnique. :-P
Israel
Getting into Israel was easier said than done. After they had found in my backpack a book called "Introduction to Islam" by Sheikh Tantawi and in Alex's "Holy War, Inc." the cute 20-yo security agents decided to question us a little bit more. And when they asked me how on earth I could afford just travelling around like this without having a job and why we hadn't booked a place to stay in Jerusalem they looked even more suspicious and said they would have to do an extra security check on us, "it will take a long time". Great! So me and Alex were stuck waiting in the 10 meter space between the security check and immigration for 4 hours before we got through. Fortunately we managed to get a guy to get us some food and a couple of beers. I guess that convinced them we were not newly converted muslims out to bomb them and they let us in. Hooray!! Check out the hilarious article Alex wrote on the subject here.
This is downtown Jerusalem in one of the markets. In Israel you see 20-yo something soldiers running around with huge guns everywhere, it looks pretty ridiculous actually to see a short young girl carrying a rifle that is longer than her legs and therefore drags it on the ground all the time. :-P
But for sure Israel was a lot cleaner and quiter than a lot of the other places around, even if Lebanon actually wasn't far behind. But the worst is still Cairo, if you've managed to live there anywhere else is a piece of cake I think. ;-)
The Old City of Jerusalem, with the Swedish Christian Study Centre being the first thing you see when you enter the gate, as well as a lot of African pilgrims.
This is in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, according to tradition built on the place where Jesus was crucified and buried. This is the Tomb of Christ.
Pilgrims touching the stone of anionting, where Jesus' body is believed to have been prepared for burial. It is also the 13th station of the cross.
Spices inside the market of the Old City.
After the church we headed to the Temple Mount or Haram Ash-Sharif as it is called in Arabic. This is the Wailing Wall, or Western Wall, sacred by Jews as it is the last remaining wall from the Second Temple and the closest place accessible to Jews to the holiest place in their religion. The second temple was the reconstruction of the first Jewish temple of Jerusalem or Solomon's Temple, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. The second temple was then raised in 515 BC and with the exception of the Western Wall destroyed along with most of Jerusalem when the Romans crushed the Great Jewish Revolt around 70 CE.
African woman praying by the wall.
Me touching the wall. This photo was taken right before I was approached by a woman telling me this was the women's section. Hehehe, I had sort of noticed before that in the other section there were only people with kippahs and cleverly assumed it was the sections for Jews. But of course it was only for men! I can't believe I didn't notice my mistake when I went inside though... Oh well! :-D
Woman reading the Torah.
This is the excavation site close to the Temple Mount which has been a source of discontent for muslims around the world in the last months.
And this is the wooden walkway to enter the Temple Mount that they want to replace with a more modern one.
This sign is posted as you enter, I had no idea before this that Jews are not supposed to enter the temple mount as it is considered walking on top of a sacred place.
Another view of the Wall from the walkway.
This was unfortunately the best shot I could get of the Al-Aqsa mosque (it means something like "the remote mosque"), one of the first mosques in the world. Irritatingly enough only muslims were allowed inside, at least the day I was there, so I have no idea what the interior looks like. According to the Holy Quran Prophet Mohammad undertook his "night journey" riding on the mysterious winged animal al-Buraq from the sacred mosque in Mecca to Al-Aqsa. Then he ascended to heaven along with the angel Gabriel and received the commandments as well as the five daily prayers before returning to Earth again.
This is me in front of the dome of the rock, for Christians and Jews this rock was where Abraham was told to sacrifice his son Isaac, whereas muslims believe it was his other son Ishmael who was the one to be sacrified. Ishmael is by the way considered as the father of the Arab people. It was also from here that Prophet Mohammad went to heaven.
Only muslims were allowed to enter here as well unfortunately. :-(
Detail from the back of the dome.
This is a photo of the site taken from close to the second station of the cross on Via Dolorosa.
After having been to the Old City we took a cab to go to Ramallah on the West Bank which is now sealed off from Israel by the crazy wall they are building. It is hard to know what to think of it, on one hand it is an obvious provocation and constant source of irritation for the Palestinians, not to mention the quite close and not so flattering analogy with another wall in another country in another time, on the other hand it has at least so far dramatically reduced the number of suicide bombings as compared to before it existed. I guess the way I see it is that it is an effective short-term solution but which risks creating much worse long-term problems than there would have been without it.. For sure it is not going to do much to ensure a lasting peace nor to achieve better relations with Israel's neighbors...
I didn't really feel like taking photos inside the checkpoint as the soldiers there were quite aggressive. It was easy getting into Ramallah but on the way out you had to pass through gates with metal detectors and turnstiles remotely operated by soldiers from the IDF sitting locked inside behind bomb-proof windows and only letting a couple of people though at a time. I can see it must be incredibly frustrating having to go through that every day, and the Palestinians that were waiting there with us got very irritated not only with the Israelis but also with eachother and it really felt like being treated like animals... Quite a useful experience I think. Anyway I managed to take this photo from the microbus of one of the surveillance towers at the check point.
This is the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah seen from the outside.
Some rumble from earlier operations by the IDF around it.
Quite a ridiculous building this one, I can't believe how anyone can expect this place to be able to control anything.
Arafat's grave inside the compound.
These are the barracks that are President Abbas headquarters. Not quite as sophisticated as one would expect.
The street scene in Ramallah.
The next day before heading to Tel Aviv Alex got into her work mode again and we visited some art galleries and I shot a photo of this painting that I liked.
Some protesters in a square in Tel Aviv protesting that the Pride Parade was not allowed to take place there. Apparently they meet every Friday in the same place to protest.
Alex knew some Swedes studying in Tel Aviv (she knows everyone it seems), and they nicely enough invited us to stay in their place for a couple of nights. Here Ruben (to the left) is doing the dishes while his older brother David is preparing us coffee.
David said he often heard from people that they could see he was Jewish and when I didn't believe him he made this hilarious face and suddenly it was all clear, hahaha... I made him take my shekels and pose with them too... Shit, this photo cracks me up every time I watch it!! ;-D
A typical street of Tel Aviv, there is not really much to see there as the city is not very old but it has a very vibrant night life and a beautiful beach on the mediterranean..
Me and Alex relaxed with a beer in one of the cafes downtown on our last afternoon in Israel...
Then we went down to the sea...
Who knows what it was up in the sky that this little guy was looking at?
Another beer in the last rays of the sun felt absolutely necessary when we found this neat little bar with great music on the shore front..
Ahhh what a way to end the trip! The next day we were just sitting in buses the whole time, from Tel Aviv to Eilat to Taba to Cairo.. But it was well worth it for all the experiences. And wouldn't you be darned, but it actually felt like coming home when we crossed into Egypt again, people were nice and crazy at the same time and you could understand what they were saying (at least a bit). Sigh, it almost makes me sad when I think about that I only have a few weeks left in Egypt now... :-)
1 comment:
Beautiful beautiful:)
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