Day 3 (July 4) - A free day in Jerusalem

We owe a big thank you to The Presbyterian Church in Canada Youth in Mission participants who attended the Sabeel conference last year. They arrived the day that the conference started, functioned in a haze of jet lag for the first little bit and suggested that future attendees arrive the day before. This year, the PCC graciously sent us a day early so we had a bit of time to adjust (read: sleep). 

St. Andrew's Jerusalem

It also meant, though, that Janelle and I had a bit of free time in Jerusalem. Woot! First on our list: St. Andrew’s Jerusalem. Basically a little piece of Scotland set down near Jerusalem’s Old City. It also has a guest house and a lovely craft shop selling items made by Palestinian women. Quite cool.

frozen chocolate milk :)

Actually, to be completely honest, the first thing on our list was a bus tour of Jerusalem. But, despite directions from a helpful merchant in the Old City, we got a bit lost trying to find the bus stop and ended up missing the bus. So the walk to St. Andrew’s – and a stop for a cold drink at a nearby coffee shop – were good time fillers until the next bus was scheduled to come :).

the cool suspension bridge

And we did make it – the second time. It was neat to see the general lay out of the city and to get a glimpse of some of the landmarks – the Knesset (for the parliamentary nerds out there), the technological centre of the city, the walls and gates of the Old City, Yad Vashem (designed by Israeli-Canadian-American architect Moshe Safdie – who also designed Canada’s National Art Gallery), and a very cool suspension bridge for Jerusalem’s relatively new light rail system. (Take heart, Ottawans – some day!!) Unfortunately, we didn’t have a chance to go inside the Knesset or Yad Vashem or to ride the light rail… they are on the list for next time. But, during the bus tour’s lunch break, we visited bathrooms inside a grocery store that took the prize for worst bathrooms of the trip. So there was that.

The bus tour was also an interesting first glimpse at the competing histories of the city – the tour guide describing former villages as “abandoned,” and a lot of neighbourhoods being built up and/or populated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We would hear other versions of these events later in our trip.

We met up with the Sabeel group for dinner that evening. Many countries represented, many reasons for making this trip to the Holy Land. The ice breaker was Pin the Tail on the Donkey (to go along with the conference’s theme: Challenging oppression on a donkey: Christ, resistance, and creative discipleship). We then broke into four separate groups that would serve as daily debriefing groups for the rest of the trip. I admit that games are not my favourite way to spend an evening (but I still participated!), so the ice cream we had during our debriefing group was much appreciated. Ice cream > games.