This year we decided to spend the holiday in Israel. We have a lot of Israeli friends in London, including some of our best friends, and hearing them talk about their country got us excited. We decided to rent a car and spend 10 days driving around the country, starting in Tel Aviv, going north to Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee, going south to the Dead Sea and then driving west to Jerusalem before heading back to the airport in Tel Aviv.
Before diving in to our trip, I’ve found that many people don’t know much about Israel, including myself. So here are a few facts about the country:
Population: 7.5m
Size: 8,500 square miles (about the size of New Jersey)
Borders: Lebanon to the north, Syria to northeast, Jordon to east, Egypt to southwest
Ethnic groups: 75% Jewish, 21% Arab, 4% minority groups
Languages: Hebrew, Arabic (with English widely spoken and written on nearly all road signs)
Currency: New Israeli Shekel; 1 USD = 3.8 NIS
Tel Aviv is known for nightlife, good restaurants and nice beaches. Not a bad place to start. Our hotel was one block off the beach, and we drove from the airport to our hotel with ease (thanks to our trusty GPS). The next morning we stopped in a cafe across the street from our hotel and quickly figured out why Israelis are so particular about their coffee. It was excellent. In fact, over the following two weeks nearly all the coffee I drank was excellent. The Israelis are known to have a coffee culture, and now I know why.
We met up with friends later that day and they took us for a tour of the city. Our evening started at a cosy wine bar that only serves champagne/sparkling wine. After a few bottles we went to a brewery for a taste of the local beer before heading to dinner at a restaurant called ‘The Place of Meat’ (how can that be bad?). The next day we met some other friends for brunch on the Tel Aviv Port, which is on the northern side of the city. It’s a modern boardwalk on the beach with shops, restaurants and cafes, and it was packed with people enjoying the sun on the final day of the weekend.
That afternoon we drove north to our friend’s family’s house. They live in a kibbutz. Many people have no idea what this means, so I’ll take a stab at explaining it. A kibbutz is a type of community in Israel. It’s a neighbourhood that supports the collective best interest of the people who live there. The people who live in the kibbutz receive income and housing not based on how much they earn but based on how much they need to support their family and how much the kibbutz has to offer. Traditionally a kibbutz earned money through farming and agriculture, but today some kibbutz communities also earn money through manufacturing. This means some are wealthier than others, and the level of wealth translates directly the overall living standard of the people who live in the community. The kibbutz we stayed at had farming and agriculture in addition to two manufacturing plants, one of which manufactured high-tech equipment for the military and hospitals. As a result, the community was very nice – a brand new Olympic size swimming pool, tennis courts, playground, restaurant and art museum (where we took a personal tour, and it was amazing).
This is the view we had from our room at our friend’s house:
On our last night at the kibbutz we heard on the local news that the Israeli Army would be flying test missions with their fighter jets in the area. We heard them flying, went outside and saw one jet fly really low overhead, and since it was dark the jet’s after burners lit up the sky as it flew into the distance. Very cool.
Changing gear a bit, Israel has many important Christian sites (and important sites for many other religions too). In Nazareth, where one of our friends grew up, we saw the site where Mary lived, and where Gabriel visited her to tell her she would give birth to Jesus (Church of the Annunciation). We made a day trip to the Sea of Galilee, where we saw the site where Jesus was baptized by John, where Jesus gave the sermon on the mound and where Jesus fed thousands of people with fish and bread. Jerusalem has many more religious sites, but that’s later in our trip. First, the Dead Sea.
The Dead Sea is a big lake in the middle of a desert (Jordan is on the east and Israel and the West Bank are on the west). Its shores are 1,385 feet below sea level, the lowest elevation on earth’s surface on dry land. The water in the Dead Sea is 8.6 times more salty than the ocean, which means it’s really easy to float. The water feels different too, it feels oily. I was excited to have a float. Little did I know how difficult it would be to NOT float – keeping your body upright is not easy. Unfortunately we didn’t take any pictures of us floating, but you would have seen us lying on our back motionless, head flat on the water, soaking up the sun.
The other must-do activity during a trip to the Dead Sea is seeing the Masada, an ancient town on the top of an isolated plateau where Harod the Great lived between 37 and 31 BCE. There are two ways to get to the Masada, 1) on a cable car that takes about 2 minutes to get from the base to the top of the mountain, or 2) an hour hike up the side of the mountain, on a trail called the Snake Trail. Of course we chose #2, and we decided to start our hike at 5am in order to see the sunrise over the Dead Sea from the top. It was the right choice, and the sunrise was epic.
After two days of relaxing at the Dead Sea, we were off to Jerusalem. After an hour and a half drive we arrived in the Israeli capital – the traffic was bad, but the city’s skyline was littered with historical buildings, and as we drove along the wall of the Old City I knew it was going to learn a lot over the next couple days.
We arrived in Jerusalem on Christmas Eve, and we found a Christian Christmas Eve service at the Jerusalem International YMCA right next door to our hotel. The service had standing room only, and it reminded us of the services we grew up with back home. Afterwards we went across the street to the King David Hotel, a Jerusalem landmark. On the floor of the hotel’s lobby are names and signatures of many of the hotel’s famous guests, including six U.S. presidents, five British prime ministers and numerous movie stars. It was a perfect place for having a drink and snack before going to sleep.
The next day we took a tour of Jerusalem in a bus with a local guide. In the morning we went to one of the most memorable places of our trip, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and Israel’s official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It was an eye-opening experience in a number of ways. In the afternoon we walked through the Old City of Jerusalem. One highlight was the traditional location of where Jesus was crucified, prepared and buried in the cave. I say ‘traditional’ because there is no way to prove the exact location, but this is the place where Christians from all over the world come to visit and remember Christ.
It was Friday, and as the sun went down the Jewish Shabbat began. Around that time we were visiting the Wailing Wall, an important Jewish religious site in the Old City of Jerusalem, and inside the gated area we no longer were allowed to use our cameras. Before visiting I didn’t fully understand how much the city complies with the Shabbat. On the Shabbat no work is allowed to be done (in fact, I learned there are 39 prohibited activity categories), and we saw this first hand at the restaurant for dinner. The menu was entirely cold food. I ordered a simple sandwich that came with fries, but when my meal arrived I had crisps on the side (can’t use a stove). It was interesting to us, who come from a country that separates religion and state, to see how intertwined the two are still today in Jerusalem.
We drove back to Tel Aviv the following day, visited the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (which had a lot of modern art by local artists) and flew back to London. We had a great trip, and I hope more people now can understand how much Israel has to offer visitors!
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