O' Little Town of Bethlehem

Christmas seemed to pass as quickly as it came. I'm used to the Christmas season seeming to begin just a little earlier every year, with stores and restaurants playing their Christmas music and pulling out their decorations immediately after Thanksgiving, if not before. A Rotarian I go to church with, Omar, took me to a Christian town outside of Amman, FuHeis. They have an annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony followed by carols. We missed the lighting ceremony, but came back another day to walk around more to look at the Christmas lights. While the neighborhoods back home are often decorated more 'extravagantly' it was a very nice way to get into the Christmas spirit.

My Christmas celebration however, was truly unforgettable. I ended up going to Bethlehem a few days before Christmas by myself, and came back to Amman for a Christmas dinner/party Christmas evening. I stayed at a hostel which is part of a the Dheisha Palestinian refugee camp operated by the UN: the Ibdaa Cultural Center. For approximately $15 a night during Christmas in Bethlehem, it was definitely worth it.

My first full day in the Holy Land I went to tour Jerusalem. While I probably could have went sight seeing more efficiently with a guide, I had an amazing time simply walking around and stumbling upon biblical sites. A man on the bus helped me find the right gate to get off at (the Jaffa Gate or in Arabic "Bab al-Khalil") and asked a nearby shop owner he knew to help point me in the right directions to various sites. I first walked part of the Vio Dolorosa, or the path Jesus walked while carrying the cross and then I went to the birthplace of the Virgin Mary. As I was on my way to find the Church of the Holy Sepulchre I ran into two people I met at the border crossing and ended up having some tea with them. Afterward they pointed me in the right direction and I visited the church which was also "Golgotha" or the Mount of Calvary where Jesus was crucified, and is also believed to be where he was buried. After leaving the church I ended up walking to the Mount of Olives to visit the Garden of Gethsemane, the Tomb of the Virgin Mary and a place where Jesus went to weep over Jerusalem. The hill was quite a trek after a full day of walking and being in the cold, but it was rather spiritual. On my way back to Bethlehem I tried to go to a few places in Jerusalem to see about getting an entry ticket into the Midnight Mass...all places were out since they were giving them away for the past several weeks or even months. The tickets are free, but due to the limited number of space and the large number of pilgrims trying to get in, it was a long shot. Later that night I went to the Church of the Nativity (where Jesus was born, and where they have the midnight mass broadcast worldwide) to see if the parish office could spare one extra ticket. After asking around I was told to find "William" to ask him. He told me to come back tomorrow morning to see what he could do.

My taxi ride back was probably the worst experience of the entire trip (save for maybe the hassle at the Israeli border). I should have known better, having lived in the Middle East for a while now, but the price the taxi driver originally asked for was out of this world: 600 shekels. I knew this was way too much, although I was uncertain by how much since he did take me to and waited at a few different places in Jerusalem to check for tickets...after spending a while talking to him about how unbelievable that was, I told him 200 and no more...he was still insistent and so I paid him 240 and left. That was still 3x the amount I found out I should have paid him. As one can do in Amman and a lot of places in the Middle East, I should have said "let's go talk to the cop to see what he thinks the right price is". Since tourism is a huge part of the economy, the Governments look down on greedy cab drivers that rip tourists off.

I went to find William the next day and my hard work paid off: William gave me a ticket for the Midnight Mass. Since it was Christmas Eve and figured it would get busy, I decided to stick around Bethlehem. I walked around the Nativity Square, bought a few souvenirs and changed into my suit for the mass. I spent a good portion of the day in the Church of the Nativity praying. Eventually everyone was cleared out of the church as they prepared it for the massive amounts of people, news cameras and security. Outside I met up with a nice older couple from California and we had some drinks at a restaurant as I waited for my friend Houston to arrive, since he had planned to come to Bethlehem for Christmas as well. Strangely enough and perfect timing on my part, I had left to go check out the growing crowd outside, and ran into Houston who had just arrived! We had dinner and hung out for a while until I worked my way over to the Church. Fortunately someone suggested I to try to convince the guards to let me in the front gate, where I was, so I avoided a major line/crowd and got in with ease.

The Mass was enjoyable and a nice experience, but not your typical Midnight Mass. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, attended (an tradition I learned Yasir Arafat started and Abbas continues) so everyone was anxiously awaiting his (late) entrance and were focused on his (early) departure. Visiting Diplomats and VIPs took up most of the seats, and mot of us regular attendees stood the entire time...which was over 2 hours. The mass was in Latin and on occasion parts were said in a variety of languages. It was certainly not a Christmas Mass I will ever forget.

The trip was truly amazing to walk around so many of the holy sites and at times, completely unexpectedly, I was filled with a rushing sensation of emotion and almost burst into tears. I will post pictures on this blog, but was actually so caught up in my experience I didn't take as many as I would have liked. I would highly recommend visiting Jerusalem and Bethlehem to anyone.

For those traveling to Jerusalem and then to Bethlehem here is what I experienced:

The trip would only take an hour, or less, but with Security check-points, crossing the border, waiting for buses, it took me over 7 hours. I left to the Northern Bus Station in Amman to catch a service Taxi to the Allenby Bridge border crossing (Jissr Malik Hussein in Arabic). There you pay the 5 JD exit fee and if you want to travel to any other Arab countries other than Jordan and Egypt, tell them to stamp a separate piece of paper. You then take a bus they have (the only transportation option) through the "no-mans-land" to the Israeli border control (with one check point in between). From there you get off the bus and give your bags up to be checked and briefly have them check your passport. Then you proceed through a metal detector, followed by some other detector that blows puffs of air at you and takes scans, I assume is to detect chemicals (when they saw my American passport they said "goodbye" and I didn't have to go through it at that point). Then you wait in a very slow line to have the Israeli border guards (oddly, all of which are young, attractive girls that look abnormally serious) stamp your passport. The difficulty for me and several others was the fact that we traveled to Syria. I was given a form to fill out which basically asked why am I in the Middle East, where have I been, why am I coming to Israel etc., and told to wait. After 30 minutes a girl came up to me to ask me the questions on the form, wrote a few notes and asked me to wait a little more. Eventually a different security person gave us our passports and told us to go back to the window to get our stamps. Then you proceed to yet another line to have your passports checked...when I gave mine and she asked if I was traveling alone, she told me to sit down and wait again. After a while a security guard came to take us through the "blower" machine. Finally, we go through one last line to have our passports looked at and received a "border crossing ticket". Once through the Israeli border you buy a ticket and get on a bus to Jerusalem, to the end stop which is at a major bus station. To get to Bethlehem you can take the 21 Bus, which its final stop called "Bab al-Zkaak" where you can catch a service taxi to your destination.