7/30/2015 A visit to the Holy Land Travelogue

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Travel Rivr Blog A Visit To The Holy Land

A Visit To The Holy Land

Turk Hawa Yollari

The Turkish Airlines (THY) plane was perhaps one of the oldest I have ever flown in. We were four of us, traveling to Israel for a weeklong series of meetings onfuture products and current issues. I spent a large part of the early morning next day looking out of the window as we flew over Black Sea and then overArmenia, entering Turkey from the east, on route to Istanbul. The Caucasian mountains are rugged and still covered with some snow. I wanted to see if I couldspot the great Mt Ararat, on which Noah is said to have breached his Ark after the Deluge, but could not make it out, though we must have flown nearly over it.Turkeys southern beach resorts like Antalya (Anatolia, in several Agatha Christie stories) are famous and the pictures in the inflight magazine showed that. Lotsof lakes in the midlands of Turkey, though not much greenery.

Turkey is making a major effort to be part of the European Union and it shows: Istanbul airport is spanking bright and polished and perhaps new. The wholeairport has a metalandlight European look to it, except for a nice (and more natural part) where they have those gaudy blue (Robin blue colour) tiles on the floorunder a vast glass dome. It was wonderful to arrive there, where Europe and Asia seem to meet. I saw the Bosphorus River from the air and saw the big oiltankers from the Black Sea entering the Mediterranean and vice versa.

Food was expensive at the airport and the airport hotel, where we wanted to have a quick bath, charged some $40/hour. We felt very clean after just listening tothe rate. The music there was interesting too. I heard, in the food court there, a fair bit of Turkish music. I am certain that I heard a song in Keeravani, and not atall badly sung. More on that later. We sat through the 6 hours, staring out over the Mediterranean. They refused to give us a temporary visa to see Istanbul;looks like Indians are not very popular there. So much, I thought, for the legacy of the Khilafat movement during Gandhian times. I wonder what they would havedone to me if I had had the insensitivity to have carried out my plan to read TE Lawrences autobiography (Seven Pillars of Wisdom) during the trip. But there areprobably a lot of illegal Indian immigrants here so Indians may not in general be popular here. Or maybe they compete against us in the global SW business.There are some great technical universities here at Ankara (Bilkent Univ). Some good technical papers from people from there.

Just how tight security is to travel to Israel was borne swiftly on us, even at Istanbul airport. I wanted to experience the whole thing without any dilution so wasalways first in any queue, if I could manage. So I was asked about why and how and wherefore of my trip. I had to show my invitation letter, justify my need totravel show my hotel booking in Israel. And since I was traveling to meet colleagues whom I knew and who knew me, I was carrying no visiting cards! I wasgiven a look of some disbelief and only when I suggested opening up my laptop and showing a few mails that it seemed OK. Even so the security staff memberhad to go over and meet his supervisor, a tartarlike lady, who came over and gave me a onceover. At the gate to board the flight, ALL metal objects had to bedeposited in the tray; I had to take of my belt, somewhat perilous given that my clothes are all loose for me these days. And there was a guy who had to walkout and walk in again after a small piece of foil (it must have been) kept triggering the metal detector. They let him in and then walked over to the dustbin tocheck the piece of foil he threw out!!

Shalom Bombay

Tel Aviv is like a perhaps cleaner version of Mumbai. The airport looks very elegant and well arranged, but it showed that it was undoubtedly Israel; the walls

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were thick and built to withstand anything. The colours were all pastel shades to hide the obvious greys. Promptly, we four were stopped on the way toImmigration and questioned. All the staff there looked absurdly young, some of the girls looked like school children. But something in the very nonchalance withwhich they carried themselves suggested a very fighting fit security force. I always thought battle fatigues were supposed to be illfitting. They werent; perhapsthe girls, since they would have to live in those fatigues day in and day out, had converted them also into a fashion statement. The carbines they slung socarelessly, however, were anything but fashion accessories.

There were a couple of beaming cab drivers waiting for us with large placards bearing our names. The cabs were Skoda Octavias and over our stay, I saw a lotof Hyundai Accents, Getzs and other Indian cars so it never felt like I was far from home. Even the odours were not completely different. Perhaps the colourswere the only thing different: shades of white, cream and stopping just short of ochre. Our destination was the town of Herzlia, north of Tel Aviv, where a gooddeal of technology related work gets done and which is also one of the more expensive places in Israel, as we found out. The hotel rooms all had balconieslooking out over the Mediterranean. Since we were booked in at business travellers, we had access to the Business Lounge, where some snacks and Internetaccess was free. We spent the first evening at a seafront bar and restaurant and I had my first taste of Mediterranean food. It is said to be the best diet on theplanet. There is a good mix of grain, salad, fruits (dry and otherwise) and milk products. We ate kouskous with gravy, a Moroccan dish, which is like a dryUpma with an Eggplant sambarrasam to go with it. It was not a good course for me, but I was told by my more experienced friends that it was badly cooked. Ibinged therefore on the falafel, which is like some soft flattish bondas (or patis). One takes a pittabread, which is a round flat chapattilike bread that onebreaks open at the diameter, to reveal that each half has a purselike pocket inside. The falafel are stuffed into the pocket and one then applies Humus andKheena, which are cheese and herbs based chutney like preparations. Delicious!!

Meetings, meetings and dinners

The week that followed was quite mad. We had intense meetings with a whole lot of colleagues. I had had to in between head for the lab where there someproblem under debug and had to assist. But they took care of us very well. The lunch was of course a working lunch, but dinner was always all of us, some 20of us, at a beach side hotel /restaurant. These places are curious. The idea is to spend as much time there as possible and these guys know how to have agood time. Order your food and they serve it in about an hour or so. I was wilting with sleep the second day; it was 1 AM our time!! But it was wonderful to meetagain the colleagues who had visited us in India some years ago and whom we had taken to Bannerghatta Park to see tigers and who had sung a Hebrew songin front of the zebra cage! A lot of Yiddish words are used in English (like Chutzpah and Schlep) but I was able to tell one of my new Israeli colleagues what hisHebrew name Raz meant! However when I tried to translate his second name (Bareket; I thought it was a form of Barkat, which is Arabic/Persian for abundance)I was clearly wrong and received my comeuppance. (It had to do with baara as in 12, so there was some consolation!) There was also a secretary in the officethere, who was really very friendly and had helped make all our hotel reservations. The coffee machine had Hebrew instructions and I could not make out whatto do. So she came over and made some for me, made sure I had sugar and milk and that it was foamed up and hot. Perhaps one instance where shebrew.She really felt like a very friendly akka there.

Most people are strongly focused on physical wellbeing. Everybody jogs or worksout. The guys in the office were built like wrestlers and on the beach therewere a lot of elderly people jogging in the early morning and in the late evening, whenever we cared to take a walk. I hardly saw any fat person. The culture isthat of the West; we saw several obvious examples. We were of course mentally prepared, but had to burst out laughing when one waitress, leaning low over ourtable, said we could have anything we wanted when we asked what we could have to drink. I think she understood our laughter and laughed also; to be sure,nothing in the way she said that suggested anything but a desire to see that we Indian guests were well served with food and drink. Everybody was very friendlyand a lot of people told us they had visited India. It appears that once they finish their compulsory military duty, they briefly want to escape the rigours of thatlife, to where they can be completely free, cheap. Where else but India, I thought? One of the waitresses told us that she had visited Goa and spent time on thebeach there. (Why she had to go to India to a beach, when she lives right next to one beat me, though) I seem to be, ah, dwelling on waitresses a lot, but onlybecause they are a very vocal lot and always engaged in conversation wherever we went to eat. And again the music: the song I heard, perhaps a currentHebrew hit, was definitely a Mayamalavagoula / Bhairav. Very well sung too, with some good prayogams and gamakas. The voice was also very good. Andthen the next song was similar to Shuddha Dhanyasi / Dhani. It felt marvelous. I felt like Carnatic with beats and they were not very intrusive, though they wereobviously there.

O, Jerusalem!

Friday is a holiday there and we had two options. One of our colleagues suggested that we go out in a boat with him into the sea, but we decided that we woulddo that next time since he has a small daughter we would keep him from and headed for Jerusalem instead. The bus trip took us south via Tel Aviv and theneast. The road to the historic city is itself a patch of history. Our guide, Shraga, told us of Biblical incidents that were supposed to have taken at this place orthat. We first went to the East side of the Holy City, on top of the Mt of Olives, near the precincts of the Hebrew University. There we saw the desert route thatlead east to Jericho, apparently treacherous because one loses ones way very easily there. The westward view from the Mt of Olives is wonderful and I have aposter on my desk to remind me of it. All the famous monuments: Church of Mary Magdalene, the Church of Agony ( ?) and then the disputed Holy of Holiesand the walls of the Old City: it is a wonderful view. The hill slope before us was covered with graves that dated back centuries.

We then went right across the city to the Yad Vashem (memory of names) which is the Holocaust Museum. This is a campus containing a museum devoted tothe Second World War and its Jewish victims. The first building we went into there is the memorial to Children who perished in the war. It is erected by anAmerican couple in the memory of their son Uziel. The inside is hushed and dark, with some low and mournful dirgelike music in the background. A voice readsout, one after another, the names of the children who died; it takes 8 months for the list to repeat. The walls are made of glass and there are hundreds andhundreds of candlelights looking out, like the bright eyes of so many children. Some of us were near tears. It is very touching to hear the names and I looked tohear the name Anne Frank; I heard some very similar ones, some heartbreakingly young at 2 or 3 years. There are other buildings that have lamps and nameson a dark floor: Treblinka, Auschwitz, BergenBelsen and so on. The best part of the museum is a huge long triangular corridor (the walls are sloping and touchin the middle to form a singleline ceiling), which has individual small museums leading off the main course. One winds ones way through these and this iswhere the information hits you: what Hitler was and how he came to power and what happened at the concentration camps. There are real artifacts from there:piles of discarded footwear, wallets, and even the wrought iron entrance gate from Auschwitz concentration camp and the very wagons into which the prisoners

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had to load the mud they had to dig in cold freezing weather; videos of individuals and people who survived; letters and identification cards, other personaleffects. One is struck by the huge amount of effort at gathering and portraying information; it is intense and personalized history. What bothered me is thatthere seemed no attempt to forgive. It seemed like a wound that is kept raw by relentlessly scoring it open. Just my opinion of course, maybe I need to see it ina more detailed way again. The end of the corridor is a relief; it opens into a huge open hillside with a lovely scenic view, symbolizing hope. We had lost allsense of time inside and were the last of our bus troupe to make it back to the bus and Shraga was very angry, more so because we looked anything butpenitent.

After a quick lunch (from where I called and startled my friend Sharath in Bangalore from my newlyroaming mobile), we entered the Dormitium on Mt Zion. Hereis where Mary apparently ascended to the Heavens. We then entered the Old City proper and walked along the roads through the Jewish, the Armenian and thenthe Arab quarter. The Arab quarter could have easily been the inside of Ahmedabad, the fort area. I felt completely as if I had been there before. Even the shopslooked very similar and only the oddly shaped loaves of bread told me it was different. Shraga had a book which showed the very spots we stood at as theywere during the Crusades and it was wonderful to realize that the stones we stood on were centuries old. We stood in the very room where the Last Supper wassupposed to have been held; startling to realize that on the south wall of that Room (nearest to Mecca) is a Mosque. Just another example of the immenseimportance Jerusalem has to atleast three different religions and the interpenetrating nature of the significance of the monuments.

We then went to the Western wall of the Old City, the so called Wailing Wall. This is a small portion of Wall that is nearest to the nowdisputed Holy of Holies(which is today a Mosque, I gathered) A lot of blackclad Jews were taking turns at the Wall. The prayers are intense, with each of the men rocking to and froand even hugging the Wall. There is a separate section for women. People pray and leave chits in the crevices in the wall, which are gathered and buried on theMt of Olives, I understand, so that they are conveyed to the Gods. In these modern times, once can send an email to a Wailing Wall internet address and theprintout of that mail is religiously buried along with the others, I gathered. (One could call that ewail). Anyway, I went up to the Wall, taking up a small paper capthat I had to compulsory wear and took my turn at the Wall. I deliberately bethought myself (hows that for a Biblical phrase of my own?) of atleast one friendeach religion that I knew and prayed for each of them as a representative of their respective religions. (Yes, I am not religious in the typical sense, but I domake exceptions on occasion). I was very glad to find that I had Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Jews and nonbelievers (Kafirs?) as well in my list.One of the cotravellers on our bus had been very pleased when I had asked Santiago? when he had told me that he was from Chile, and he just had to have aphoto with his Indian friend at the site of the Wailing Wall.

We walked along the road which Jesus took after he was sentenced by the Romans and Pontius Pilate and taken to be crucified. There was a service going onalong the route; at each socalled station on the route, the group of monks and nuns near us stopped and recited prayers in Latin. We stopped where Jesusstumbled each of the three times and was helped up (once by someone called Simon?) and also where Jewish girls came and sang songs for Him. We pausedfor a minute where a young girl had run up and wiped the sweat off Jesus face. She is now referred to as Veronica, because the kerchief she used received theimprint or icon of Christs face on it. I could only marvel at the fact that the syllable ver is also part of the Tamil word Vervai which means sweat. Perhaps thefact that I saw a few smiling Tamil / Malayalam nuns in the group there must have suggested it to me. We finally entered a churchlike area where we saw thespot where Jesus was embalmed as Jews are (Jesus was a Jew and died as a Jew, said Shraga). I wondered at where I was, especially at the fact that I waswearing shoes, possibly because as Hindus we never get quite so physically close with our holy objects. It was like being inside the Garbhagudi of say, theTirupati Venkateshwara temple (on a system of hills, just like Jerusalem!!) and to realize that one is still wearing huntershoes. Jargandi!!

Idu Jaffa Janmada Maitri?

The return trip was planned to be a whiskby of Bethlehem, but we were sadly out of time. On the bus we heard that Jaffa, a small town on Biblical significancewas near southern Tel Aviv and decided to head there. We asked Shraga to drop us off near the Marina. As we got off, tipped Shraga and waved goodbye,guess what he and the driver did: they actually sang Inchikadaana, Inchikadaana, daane ooper daana and called out Raj Kapoor! at us. Unbelievable!! A quickcab got us to Jaffa and then a comedy of errors: we were hungry and told the cabbie to take us to a restaurant. He drove us right through and some 23 kmbeyond Jaffa and dropped us off at a roadside café! Well, we ate and then had to catch another cab back to Jaffa!! Jaffa is quite busy on weekdays but onFriday evening was very quiet. We walked along the beach promenade where a mosque, a synagogue and an Armenian church stood cheekbyjowl. Just tocomplete the whole thing, my friend Shankar and I hummed Gajavadana Beduve! The place was a busy port during Biblical times, as the Bible atlas that Ibought informs me. The view of the lights of Tel Aviv Marina from there was like Marine Drives glittering diamond necklace.

The Spirit of Inquiry

The next morning we were in Tel Aviv airport at 4:00 AM. We had been given special passes by our Israel office, so clearing security was perhaps easier than itmight have been. We were wearing the passes that clearly said, in incorrect Hebrew, that we were focused travelers. They still asked us, on purpose, whetherour office gave us any letter for security. They are really very, very careful. I was carrying a box with me, which was a reference design of ours with ourchips/devices and had to explain in detail what it was, with all those antennas sticking out. I must have had them a bit worried.

I wont dwell on the 10hour wait in Istanbul. We did our shopping for sweets and Turkish delight there, but got thoroughly bored. The one highpoint was when wewent to the nowfamiliar Food Court for grub. Again the music: definitely close to Indian Raga music and I heard Mayamalavagoula again! I could almost havesung Lambodara there and not been noticed!! Completely unlike the Arabic music that some of us may have heard.

Several Alistair Macleans that I have read talk of a fiery drink called variously as Raki or Ouzo. Soldiers and eastern European characters in Macleans areusually inveterate ouzo drinkers. I had mildly wondered what it was like, when I had read the books in my younger days. In Turkey it is called Raki and on theflight back to Delhi, purely in the spirit of inquiry, I decided that the flight was long enough for me to try it out. I had an empty seat next to mine, in case Iactually wanted to lie down. As per my policy of no dilution of experience, I asked for it and asked for it neat i.e. no water or soda or anything. I did ask for ice,so it was on the rocks. Raki is made out of aniseed, what we call saunf. Well, I had three slow and cautious swigs of it and knew I was in trouble immediately. It

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definitely has a lot of authority and was throwing its weight about, inside my system. I felt like lead and had to shake my head several times to clear it. But I didfinish that one glassful and the effect lasted some 4 hours. I had had to get up and navigate to the toilet sometime in between; I managed that manfully andwithout mishap. Later my learned friend laughed at me and told me that I was not cut out for booze, but that Raki has that effect only the first time. Perhaps. Anyway I am done with it and it sure has done with me.

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Kaveriyamma / 9 yrs ago

>>>we walked along the beach promenade where a mosque, a synagogue and an armenian church stood cheekbyjowl. just to complete the whole thing,my friend shankar and i hummed gajavadana beduve! the place was a busy port during biblical times, as the “bible atlas” that i bought informs me. >>>

wow! really?

Smitasamm / 9 yrs ago

a captivating read with a nice rhythm, seriousness and humour. the description of visiting the holocaust museum was very intense, and almost felt likebeing there with the writer, both interesting and tragic. good writing, covering the trip, without leaving any holes, i really liked it and would be inspired to visit thiscountry if only .......

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7/30/2015 A visit to the Holy Land Travelogue

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