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.
