Symbol of Rome

Today we were driven from the hotel to the old city to walk along thd Via Dolorosa, the way of Christ on the day of crucifixion carrying the cross bar! There are fourteen stations of the cross, some of them biblical!

These lions are all along one of the tunnels on the main route to the old city! King David is represented by a lion, as is the church and the city!

Brain fried this evening so will update this tomorrow!

Update just got lost! Suffice to say there were lots of churches and vast numbers of pilgrim groups and the chaos and mayhem of street hawkers ending at the church of the holy sepulchre! The place of Christ’s crucifixion and burial in one huge basilica with various chapels built inside! Heaving with people and noise! We were given free time after that in the old city! We had been blessed by good weather till that point when it started to rain!

Four of us ladies toddled off to eat the lunch we had taken from the hotel breakfast provision in a quietism place then went in the hunt for a loo! Christine had been looking for incense for Norwich cathedral and had found one before so we returned there! Then we went exploring off thd main shopping street and found an amazingly beautiful and serene space with a photographic exhibition of desert places and a whole series of archaeological sites to be seen! It used to be the German and Russian embassy!

Then we found an amazing spice shop which appeared in the ottolenghi book of of cooking in Jerusalem! Bought cinnamon there and the others bought saffron!

Then we returned to the main drag and we’re enticed into a jewellery shop by a chap asking us if we could let him know how to spell clearance! The rest is history. I actually bought a Jerusalem cross necklace which Viv had bartered down from 300 shekels to 150 shekels! A blip for another day. I was left with no money at all! Such is life!