Deadlines and Dorm Rooms: Hiking in Herodium

This past weekend we visited Herodium, one of Herod’s palaces a little south of Jerusalem. We started out bright and early, since we had to get back before everything closed for the Sabbath. We rented a car to get there, which ended up being a hassle – credit cards weren’t working, we didn’t have the right identification, and etc. Luckily, between the three of us, we got it figured out and were soon on our way.

The second problem came when we realized we hadn’t all brought passports; we didn’t think there would be any checkpoints along the road, but we ran into one. Going in wasn’t a problem; it was getting back into Israel and Jerusalem later that we were worried about. We made it to the ruins without further complications.

I always enjoy a good hike around ruins, and this was no exception. We saw the ruins of the courtyard, the bathhouse, the guest quarters, and the artificial mountain Herod had built to commemorate himself. The site also contains tunnels from later periods; the fortress was used during the Bar Kokhba revolt, as well as being made into a monastery during the Byzantine period.

We went through the ruins fairly quickly, then started back to town with the car (we had to return it by 2:30). However, when we attempted to leave, we discovered a problem. As a security mechanism, cars in Israel have a keypad, and you have to punch in the code to start the car. When we’d rented the car, the rental employee had started it, and we discovered that they’d given us the wrong code.

We figured this out fairly quickly by calling them, but by this time the car had locked us out for a certain amount of time, and so we found ourselves temporarily stranded in the West Bank. While waiting until we could try to enter the code again, we met a nice Palestinian taxi driver who chatted with us awhile and then helped us figure out the right sequence to start the car, and finally we were on our way back.

However, we were still not fully equipped with passports to get back into Israel. Not everyone is stopped at the checkpoints; the Palestinian buses are always stopped, but as Americans in a rented Israeli car, we were hoping we wouldn’t have any trouble. With the help of a friendly, innocent-looking tourist wave from the one of us who was driving, we were allowed through with no trouble and made it back on time.

Once we made it back, however, we encountered a few problems, mainly because we’d only had the car for a few hours and had only gone 30 or so kilometers. The rental company employees couldn’t figure out if we wanted to take the car out again or not. We assured them we really had only rented the car to drive to Herodium and back (after our fiasco with the key code, we weren’t stopping again) and were finally able to finish our adventure, which we considered relatively smooth compared to a few of our trips.

After this we went shopping in the Old City, in the Jewish quarter this time. Because it was almost the Sabbath, fruit was very ripe and very cheap, which meant I enjoyed myself immensely and ended up carrying a kilo of strawberries, several peaches and half a watermelon back to campus with me.

The rest of the week has gone fairly smoothly as well; things are winding down. My study abroad program hosted a luncheon to get feedback from the eight of us, who turned out to have been the inaugural class. We had lasagna. And tonight four of us got together to have Mexican food (we had a Texan, a Californian Latino, and a Latin American Studies major). So I haven’t eaten much Israeli food lately. Then again, Israel is largely an immigrant nation; part of its attraction is having so many people from so many different places.

I know everyone else is finishing school, but I still have a few more weeks left. I’ll let you know what the plan is soon – until then, a belated happy Mother’s Day* and I hope you all have a wonderful week!

*Mothers Day? Mother’s Day? Mothers’ Day? Not sure – the internet consensus seems to be “Mother’s.”

Pictures:

I did actually have shawarma on the way back from Herodium. It was like a shawarma subway sandwich, which was weird but tasted great.

This is just a photo of flowers from the botanical garden. They're blooming now and caught my eye.

These are Herodium:

I should mention that due to the contrast caused by the tunnels and the sun, my camera automatically switched a lot of these photos to the sunset setting, which means they're kind of soft and glowing when they don't really need to be.