Sunday 13th June: walking the walls

Sunday seemed like a good day to go wall walking, so after morning mass in the Armenian Catholic church down the road (actually at the third station of the cross...lots of directions here are given by locating the stations, eg turn left at Station 5...which is a giggle when you first hear it!). The Armenian mass was in latin, which was a novelty for me, but the readings and the homily were in English, so it was quite lovely and I didn't feel too out of it. All of this makes me realise the importance of including others in everything we do: we were the foreigners there, but the priest made it his business to make us welcome, even to the point of giving his homily in English, when it wasn't his language. He did a great job, incidentally, and gave a very beautiful homily about our need to seek, and grant forgiveness to each other. AND he shook the hand of every single person in the Church, which also was a nice touch (and made possible by the fact that there weren't too many of us!)

The ramparts walk on the walls of Jerusalem has to be done in two parts, as the section around the Temple mount has been closed for security reasons. We chose to do the Northern Section, which took us from Jaffa Gate around to the east and back in through Lion Gate, which is the gate closest to Ecce Homo and the Via Dolorosa. We took about 2 hours to do it, as one of the girls had a sore foot and needed to go pretty slowly. It was very hot, the limestone is quite unforgiving in the heat and manages to reflect most of the light and heat right back at you, so it was a warm walk and we drank lots of water. It was a great way to view the city though, the old city was mainly roofs and domes, with the occasional back yard and school (one on top of the roofs, with basketball court and soccer oval!!) but it gave a great view of the outlying new city, and a bit more of a sense of the direction of everything. Enjoyed it very much, but would rather have done it on a cooler day or at a cooler time (which around here is really before 8 or after 6, when the walls are closed!)