The MHT 8, Part III: Beleaguered In Bethlehem

In the final paragraph of my September 30th second installment of The MHT 8, I promised to share a small sampling of "the bad" and "the ugly" regarding our recent pilgrimage to the Holy Lands.  The good far outnumbered the bad, and accordingly, I have chosen merely three items to describe in that category.  The first two can be classified as annoying; the third was disheartening.  I've decided to save "the ugly" for a subsequent, fourth post.

The Layover. The first irritant of our adventure was the layover in Charles De Gaulle Airport outside of Paris.  After taking off on Friday from MSP at 5:28 p.m. CDT, we had arrived at De Gaulle at 8:06 Saturday morning, Paris time, which was 1:06 a.m. body (Minneapolis) time.  We had been in the air seven hours and thirty-eight minutes.  How would we kill the six hour interval until taking off for Amman later that afternoon?  If the layover was, say, eight or ten hours, we could have taken a train into the city for a couple of hours before returning to the airport.  But six hours?  Too short a time to take a chance on leaving the confines of De Gaulle.  Then, to our collective dismay, the layover was extended from six hours, which was bad enough, to seven and a-half hours.  Sigh.

The pre-trip buzz was that De Gaulle was a good airport for travelers with long layovers, similar to MSP.  I'm not sure who gave us that false hope, but they were dead wrong.  We were stuck in terminal 2E, which seemed to be isolated from the rest of the airport.  This being Saturday morning, the place was almost deserted.  If what you were looking for was perfume, cosmetics or cigarettes, no problem.  There must have been eight stores and kiosks selling those products.  But what we really craved was a comfortable place to sit, preferably inside a bar or restaurant.  We eventually found an area, hidden behind an almost unmarked wall, which functioned as a makeshift bar, selling wrapped day-old sandwiches and bottles of Heineken out of a deli case.  As we sat on hard plastic chairs sipping our brew around tiny tables, we were too tired to go exploring on foot in an effort to discover a passageway to a different, more welcoming section of De Gaulle (if, indeed, there was one to be found).  We also wondered why Magi Travel routed us this way.  Did we save a few bucks by putting up with this interminable layover?  Those were dollars we gladly would have paid for better routing.  We were not happy campers when we eventually boarded the Air France flight to Amman.

The Inbal.  Magi Travel has a reputation for booking its clients in first class hotels. The Crowne Plaza in Amman, during our short single overnight stay, seemed nice enough, and as I wrote in my September 30th post, the Scots Hotel in Tiberius was phenomenal.  Then we spent the final four nights -- five if you count our getaway night -- at the Inbal Hotel in Jerusalem.  While not as posh as the Scots, the Inbal  upheld Magi's reputation, but with one major exception.  The service in and near the bar and commons areas was, for all intents and purposes, non-existent.

Picture a group of twenty-nine people who have been up since dawn and have spent most of their day either on a bus or on foot visiting designated points of interest.  It is now the hour before (or after) dinner, and their fondest desire is to sit down, relax, enjoy each other's company and recount the splendid things they've witnessed while they quaff an adult beverage.  It all sounds good, but soon after the large group congregates a few feet from the hotel bar, they realize that no one is going to take drink orders.  So a few unlucky ones go up to the bar, where they are ignored by the staff.  Finally, when it dawns on the staff that their guests would like to order drinks, they act as if they have never taken a drink order before.  And these are the hotel bartenders!  Then they can't find the correct bottle or a clean glass.  Finally when they attempt to "ring up the order," they can't find the right button on their register's keypad, so they wait for their colleague to finish what she's doing and then ask that person for instruction.  They rarely have change in the cash drawer.  If you didn't really need a drink before you arrived, you certainly did by the time you were eventually handed your glass.

This routine repeated itself every night we were there.  When we congregated in the lounge or on the nearby patio, moving chairs and heavy tables around so we could sit together, no staff member ever came to assist or to serve us.  We were invisible to them, notwithstanding our numbers.  Almost every time we wanted to order something, we had to belly up to the bar and go through the aggravating routine all over again.

When I returned home I did some research regarding the Inbal, and was shocked to find that, on some sites, it is rated a five star hotel.  Apparently those reviewers are teetotalers!

Astonishing Poverty.  I remember reading a Twin Cities Reader (predecessor to City Pages) review of the former restaurant, Aquavit, located years ago on the ground floor of the IDS Building in downtown Minneapolis.  The critic's comment that stayed with me was something like this:  "It is very hard to enjoy your nine dollar dessert at Aquavit when you happen to glance out the window next to your table and see someone shivering in the cold begging for bus money."  More than once on our trip, that recollection came to me.

Our first tour guide was Sammy, a very personable fellow who greeted us at the Amman airport Saturday night, got us to our hotel in time for a late dinner, and then accompanied us on the bus the next morning and afternoon while we visited Mount Nebo and Bethany Beyond The Jordan, where John The Baptist baptized Jesus.  Sammy, a Jordanian, was very proud of his country, and emphasized to us that it's not just Israel (which he often referred to as "the other side") which comprises the Holy Lands.  This was important information, and the more he talked about Jordan's connection to the Bible, the better we could understand why we didn't start the tour in Israel.

Sammy talked almost non-stop, from the time we boarded the bus at the Amman hotel until we re-boarded following the baptism sight.  But then, during the seventy-five minutes or so it took us to drive north to the heavily secured border crossing, he barely said a word.  The reason was evident by observing the crumbling towns we passed through.  What was there to say?  Buildings falling apart, people sitting idly on the edge of the curbless roads, broken and boarded-up windows, stray dogs and cats meandering across the rubble.  The thought occurred to me that Jordan is one of our most important allies in the Middle East, and yet it is clearly a third world country.  One explanation offered by Sammy for the depressing conditions is that, unfortunately, there are no oil deposits under the sands of his country.

Although things did immediately change for the better once we crossed from Jordan into Israel, scenes of abject poverty once again were before us three days later when we entered the occupied West Bank.  I am tempted to use the word "god-forsaken" to describe a large portion of that area.  Miles and miles of endless arid desert, distopian towns where it was hard to find a smiling face, barbed wire fences, guard towers at the corners of long impenetrable walls, garbage in the streets and in the yards, crumbling buildings, falling roofs.  I have been on a number of American Indian reservations, but this was far worse.  Most of all I felt sorry for the kids.  Kicking a soccer ball around on a dirt pitch was the closest thing I saw to happiness.

It is one thing to witness the gloom of the occupied territories through the tour bus window.  It is quite another to encounter it on a personal basis.  This happened a handful of times throughout the week.  We pilgrims would be led into a shop or a restaurant which would be run by Christian friends of our Israeli tour guide, Wally, where we were encouraged to spend our money.  Although there was no real pressure to buy, the atmosphere was such that one felt almost compelled to purchase something, anything, even if for the mere sake of helping the proprietors out.

The most disappointing experience of the entire pilgrimage was witnessing what has become of Bethlehem.  Before our trip, my image of that place conformed to the lyrics of the well-known Christmas carol, O Little Town Of Bethlehem.  The present day city of Bethlehem could not be more opposite.

Forget about pictures of a young couple entering a small village with their donkey, and hoping to find lodging where their child might be born.  Bethlehem today is a large, grimy, bustling city, almost adjacent to Jerusalem.  There is no countryside separating the two cities, no sense of pastoral cleanliness, quaintness or enchanting stargazing.  Those concepts are quickly dispelled when you must pass by a security checkpoint to enter; unlike Jerusalem, Bethlehem is in the West Bank.

Of course the only reason to come to Bethlehem is to visit the Church Of The Blessed Nativity, built over the stable where it's believed Jesus was born.  But our first stop in Bethlehem, once we got past the security gates, was a large gift shop owned and operated by Wally's friends.  All of the men in our group collectively moaned when Wally told us he'd give us an hour -- an hour -- in the store.  That was about fifty minutes longer than any of us needed or wanted.  Upon entering the store, we were immediately handed a medium size basket into which we were supposed to place our selections of statues, crucifixes, jewelry, scarfs, paintings, trinkets, toys, clothing and other assorted items which, had we been in a US shopping mall, we would have ignored without giving it a second thought.  There seemed to be a sales clerk on hand for each one of the twenty-nine of us.  I commented to a friend that it reminded me of my one trip to Nate's Clothing Store in the Minneapolis Warehouse District back in the '80's.  In both instances, the clerks descended upon you as soon as you set foot in the shop, and would not let go of you until you were out the door.  In the Bethlehem store, I ditched my basket as quickly as practically possible, and waited near the door with my other three male counterparts from the MHT 8 while our wives explored the aisles.

Momma Cuandito did end up buying a few items, but the worst was yet to come.  A pack of Palestinian men had gathered outside the store's door, blocking the path to our bus.  They were shoving beads, wood carvings and other religious artifacts in our faces, beseeching us to buy with stories about their families' desperate circumstances.  Our three-word reply, "No thank you," did not work.  A couple of them became belligerent, and I had to wrap my arm around Momma Cuan and get her into the bus.  I used to think the panhandlers on the streets of San Francisco were the most aggressive I'd encountered.  The Palestinians in Bethlehem made those beggars by the bay look meek.  Accosting us on the sidewalk was bad enough.  I don't know what would have happened if they'd climbed aboard the bus.