A trip to the City of David

An update about the start of the new semester and my class schedule will come soon; we're three weeks into the semester and my schedule just got finalized today. However, this semester promises many more class-sponsored tourism than I got last semester due to one class: Jerusalem's Architectural History. We had our first field trip today, a visit to the City of David. Possible little known fact: the Old City of Jerusalem today is nowhere near on the same land as the Really Old City of Jerusalem, aka the city that King David built. The only overlap is really the Temple Mount--everything else is outside the current walls.

Another possibly little known fact: Jerusalem architecture is ugly. There's this way of building one house on top of another because that's how you build on the side of a mountain--okay, I get that. But why does everything have to be so blocky? It's just ugly, and it's all over Israel. Really, why? The below photo is of Sirwan, an Arab neighborhood across the valley from the City of David, but it's just one example.

These particular houses obviously weren't there in biblical times, but they were still built one on top of the other--thus how King David saw Batsheva bathing. However, what was there was Warren's Shaft, (probably) the passage through which David and Yoav originally invaded Jeursalem back when it was a Canaanite city. We got to go down there:

Of course, the metal stairs weren't there originally, but it was still pretty cool. We also went through Hezekiah's Tunnel, which involved lots of water and a soaking wet skirt. I couldn't take video in there because I needed my batteries for my flashlight, but I stole someone else's video off Youtube:

This class includes four field trips like this. Today was First Temple Period Jerusalem, next week is Second Temple Period, and in the future we have post-Christianity and Islam Jerusalem and Modern Jerusalem. Pretty cool. Hopefully by the end of the semester things will stop looking like one piece of Jerusalem stone after another... which is really all I can tell of Jerusalem right now.