Now that I am in Tel Aviv I have basically no time anymore to write as life is really busy and I meet friends and friends of friends and experience the vibrant Tel Aviv night life. I hope to write more and update/complete the post tomorrow. Just for all those who were so excited about the pope: The only thing I saw in the end were two black Audi-Limousines driving by really fast.. and I did not even know in which one he was... that was all... quite disappointing even for me, but especially for many local people who did not have the occasion to see him at the mass... some of them could just not believe that these Limousines were all that they could see... I then left immediately afterwards and did not even wait for the afternoon meeting with Netanjahu since probably there was nothing to see either...
More tomorrow the... Now I am off to dinner to Jaffa with Manolo (a Spanish diplomat living here and who was the best man at the wedding of a couple of friends...).
!! UPDATE !!
The long promised continuation of my blog is slightly delayed and apologise for this. As I said, Tel Aviv is so busy that it is difficult to find time to write. You can read a little bit of what I am doing here in the next post.
In the end, I do not really know what to tell more about the day in Nazareth. Since the market was closed again also that day, there was nothing much to do. I walked around and found a little arab café with a large screen transmitting the mass the Pope held in this new “stadion” just outside town and had my breakfast there. I had an omelette with salads, olives, fresh cheese etc. they do not really fancy that much sweet stuff here (unfortunately). Once this event was finished, I went to the square in front of the basilica in order to wait until 12h30, when Benedict was supposed to arrive at the Basilica. The traffic was already blocked completely at 11 and at 11h30, when I crossed the road from the great spot I had found to watch everything, just to buy a bottle of water, the police blocked everything and I was not allowed to cross the street anymore and so I was also separated from the guesthouse and my car. No way to get there without a huge detour… but at least, now I had a place in the shade. People slowly got excited about everything and each time the police in front of us moved or received a phone call, they thought that he would now arrive soon. In the end, he was half an hour late… Already several vans and police cars had driven by before and everybody expected the papamobil. But in the end, the police confirmed that he had already passed and then we deducted that he must have been in one of the two black Audi-limousines, with shaded windows. After this disappointment, I went back to my car and left. I was however blocked in a major traffic jam when leaving Nazareth, because I had to pass by the stadion where the mass had taken place. Despite the fact that the event had already been over for almost two hours, there were still so many people around and trying to find the buses which had brought them here. A complete chaos, or a “BALAGAN” as the Israeli would say… ;-)
All this provoked quite some delay and I wanted still to visit two archaeological sites: Beit She’arim, a necropolis with a labyrinth of catacombs carved in stone with tombs from the period of the second century, when the Jewish Supreme Court was based here and ruled on religious as well as on secular matters. The President of this Court, Rabbi Yehuda NaHassi (the “editor” of the Mishnah – the holy Jewish law) was buried here and thus this site developed in a major necropolis. I then drove to Megiddo, under King Solomon the jewel of the kingdom, with excavations having revealed traces of 20 distinct historical periods from 4000 to 400 before Christ and which is also part of the UNESCO-World Heritage. It is however hard to imagine nowadays the former grandeur of this city. In addition, I did not have much time for it. As the opening hours were wrongly indicated, I arrived at 16h10 only and I was told that the last entry was at 16h00. I could however convince the guy at the reception to let me in anyway, bit he told me that the entry to the water system, one of the attractions there, would close at 16h30 and that I needed to get my car out of the parking at 16h45. This gave me 30 minutes only to visit the place and this is certainly the shortest visit I have ever made of an archaeological site. Burt at least I have seen the major attractions: the city gate, the ruins of the enormous stables and the water system.
Then I headed back to Tel Aviv to give back my car. On the last kilometres before the airport, there was no gas station anymore and I did not want to pay the quite expansive fuel surcharge for the rental company to fill the tank…Once inside the airport, I called the rental company and the guy explained to me where to find a gas station within the (quite enormous site of the airport). In the end I could not find it and found myself back on the motorway, without any possibility to turn round and no exit at all. In the end, I was almost in Tel Aviv centre and still did not have any gas and therefore decided to keep the car until the next morning and to give the car back in the office in the centre, which had unfortunately closed already at 18h00. But then I got lost in Tel Aviv, because the indications are really small and some of them are in Hebrew only. In the end, it took me almost three hours to get to the hotel, get the fuel and park my car somewhere safe and not horribly expensive. When I had to get out of the car to ask for directions for 2 minutes only, the police had started to take my car away (it was already on the truck), when I started running back and shouting. I told the policemen my unfortunate story and, he pitied me and took the car off the truck and did not ask me for any money. (I was later told that it would have been 500 Shekel, which is about 100 Euros..!!!)
WELCOME to TEL AVIV !!!
Pictures of that day at:
http://picasaweb.google.de/muellju/Israel5best?authkey=Gv1sRgCMaGv5W3yKm6dQ&feat=directlink
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