Shabbat Shalom(?)

The past few days have been fairly uneventful. I've explored the city some more. Today was interesting, though.

First of all, today was the day to move out of the Pilgrim Guest House and across the courtyard to St. George's College, where I'll be throughout the Palestine of Jesus course that starts on Tuesday. It's really quite nice: a common room with free coffee and tea at all hours, a stocked library with everything I could ask for, and, I know this sounds lazy, an elevator. It just felt odd, not having been in one for weeks.

Most interesting, though, are the dorms of the third floor. Rather than numbers, we have names that correspond to biblical and archaeological sites. As you go down the hall, the names go from north to south and back again. At the 'north' of the hall are Golani and Galilean sites like Banias and Gamla. I'm in the Jordan River room down at that end. The rooms continue down to the other end of the hall where you find Jericho and Bethlehem. Very cool. I'll take pictures when it's light out.

Well, I walked toward the Old City today and decided to take a detour, it being Shabbat. I wanted to see what the usually-hopping Ben Yehuda St. looks like on the sabbath. And let me tell you, it was dead. Out of fifty restaurants, one was open, and it was Chinese (not to worry, I got lunch in the Christian Quarter). Even five out of six ATMs were shut down, and wouldn't you know it, the one in operation was the last one I tried.

The public payphones work, however, and that's where it got interesting. A couple of people were talking on them when up walked this strict Orthodox fellow absolutely wailing that it was Shabbat. He proceeded to scream bloody murder into their receivers; the people paid him no mind, apparently used to it. For me, that was a most interesting experience.

An aside for those of you that were on the tour: the reason we couldn't take pictures on Shabbat wasn't because the clicking of the photo was considered 'work,' per se. It's because activating electronic devices constitutes 'lighting a fire,' which is more specifically forbidden. So, at least that's cleared up.

Anyways, I proceeded from there to Muristan, the market center in the Christian Quarter between the Holy Sepulcher and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. I'd read that the view from the tower is spectacular, so paid the 5NIS (a buck fifty?) to climb to the top, and man, had I read right:
As I said, it's just by the Holy Sepulcher, so it's the best view of that building-strangled church you'll ever get:
You can sort of see the how the church sticks out in the shape of a equal-length cross. Back when it was built under Constantine the Great, it was far larger, shaped like a traditional cross and stretching beyond the right side of the picture down through Muristan. Unfortunately, that structure was destroyed and then rebuilt by the Crusaders, who gave us the less impressive building we see today.

My camera doesn't quite capture it at the height of the Redeemer tower, but the buildings that sprung up around it conform roughly to the shape of the original Constantinian Sepulcher. With some imagination, you can see it very roughly here:
To really imagine it, though, you have to triple the distance between the primary dome and the tree on the right side of the image. And that was the Sepulcher of Constantine.