Jerusalem with Hallucinations

The first day I land in Athens I meet Trey and we go with his family to the Acropolis and to a restaurant nearby. Tourism has dropped off because of the economic turmoil Greece, and we see almost no other foreigners. We are the only people in the restaurant, and the waiter takes to feeding Trey's kids and wife by hand.

We have sandles made by "The Poet Sandelmaker of Athens". That evening we meet up with Josh, another guy visiting from the states, and go to an impromptu party at an apartment in Athens. Didn't get much sleep that night because of the jet lag.

Josh and I leave early the next day and rent a car for an adventurous day of driving around Greece, about 6 hours of driving time. Napflio has an ancient fortress on the top of a high hill. We could drive up, but we decide to hike up instead. In Corinth have trouble finding ancient Corinth so we stop in a coffee bar and ask "How do we get to ancient Corinth?" Hmm, the barista says: "Ancient Corinth? Oh, it's not easy." This, mind you, is the biggest tourist attraction in Corinth. "You have to go to the third road, then turn left. But I can't remember the name of the road. Then you should ask again, because you'll have trouble finding it."

We drive to the southern tip of the Attica peninsula to go to the Temple of Poseidon. It's hard to see how there were enough people living here to be able to build such a large temple here, but I guess the importance of the sea to ancient Greeks made them eager to build a temple to appease the mighty Poseidon.

We drive from Poseidon's temple to the Athens airport for a 2am flight to Tel Aviv, Israel. Why is the flight at 2am? What crazy Greek bureaucrat decided to have a flight at 2am? You can't even say it's a red-eye flight, it's less than two hours long. And after it takes off, when you start to doze and think you may get an hour or so sleep, they turn the bright lights on, wake everyone up, and serve breakfast. At 2:45am. The breakfast is better than any meal I've gotten on a US-based airline in a decade, and it's on a two hour flight at 2:40am. Why did they wake me for this?

Ok, the meal was good. And I was hungry. Maybe I'll forgive them for this. Even the bread roll that accompanies the breakfast is better than any roll I've gotten in the US. The Greeks may have a contagiously moribund economy and surrealistic airline flight schedules, but they serve great food. Even on an airplane at 2am.

After the food the girl sitting in front of me taps on the seat to talk, so I climb over the seat in front of me to talk to her. (Forgive me for garishly climbing over the seat: I couldn't walk around because there was a large Greek man sleeping next to me.) Her name is Jenna and she's an Economic Development / Art major with a Spanish minor at THE Ohio State University and is an ENTJ on the Myers-Briggs personality test. You learn weird things about people when you're locked in an airplane together at 3am and neither one of your has slept in 40 hours.

We arrive in Tel Aviv around 4:30am. The hotels for Jenna and separately for Trey, Josh and me are in Jerusalem, so we share a taxi there. The rooms aren't ready at 5:30am, of course, so we drop our bags at Jenna's hotel. A sign in her hotel says "When Jesus said to love your enemies he probably meant don't kill them."

Why aren't the restaurants open at 5:45am? We walk further and accidentally find ourselves at the Western Wailing Wall of the destroyed second Jewish Temple. Jenna isn't allowed to go to the main western wall but I she writes a prayer on a piece of paper and I shove it into a crack in the wall for her, along with a prayer note for myself.

We continue walking around the Temple Mount, past a large number of graveyards, and through many of the sites that Jesus supposedly walked.

Another guy named Jeff meets us in Jerusalem at 9am. Several of us haven't slept in over 40 hours, we're starting to have slurred speech and minor hallucinations. We need sleep but don't desire it, so Trey negotiates with a taxi driver to take us to Masada and the dead sea. It would have been only 400 sheckles to the dead see, but to go to Masada too is 900 sheckles and will take about 5 hours round trip.

Masada isn't as impressive as I thought it would be. Maybe I'm less impressed because of lack of sleep? We do find the rampart that the Romans built 1800 years ago to lay the seige. The movie version didn't seem plausible that anyone could build such a large ramp, even the Romans. It makes much more sense, it's much more believable when you see the real thing.

The dead sea is pretty cool. Maybe I'm just wacky from lack of sleep. You really are floating largely above the water. It's hard to swim because you float so much. We coat ourselves with mud from the bottom, and Josh and Jenna get much massages from the attendant.

Josh's grandfather has a saying: "Everyone is strange except for me and you. And sometimes I worry about you."