Monday 9/6 Israeli Museum

Like the day before, we were only up and about late in the morning. I think we were just catching up a bit of sleep. It was the first day of Shavuot so unfortunately a lot of things were closed, including Yad Vashem which we had wanted to do. We decided on the Israel Museum. It was a fair distance away from Jaffa Gate and to our dismay we discovered the buses weren´t working on Jewish festivals. We went for a cab, and it wasn´t all too expensive.

The museum was quite cool. We started off at the most important bit of the museum, which was the Shrine of the Book, housing the dead sea scrolls. The building was a weird white dome-like structure being sprayed with water, I think for cooling purposes.

Inside we saw stuff like the Isiah scrolls, and lots of info about the fundamentalist religious sect that made some of them, or they buried them or some such. To be honest, it was a tad boring. The scrolls themselves were quite interesting though.

There was a number of sculptures out in the garden, that were quite cool.

We saw the giant, 1:50 scale model of the old city as it was at the time of the second temple. Very impressive, and absolutely huge even at that scale.

Finally, we went in to see the modern Israeli art exhibition, which had a lot of very cool, creative and powerful pieces on display.

On our way out we got ice cream (finally!). I had a white Magnum, arguably the greatest ice cream in existence. It´s seriously been years since I´ve had one. It had been two weeks though since Emma and I had wanted an ice cream, all through Egypt and yet we didn´t get any.

From outside the museum we could see the Kinesset, the Israeli parliament building. It was apparently closed most of the time but even if it wasn´t, we didn't feel a great need to see it. So, I just took some pics from there of the outside of the building.

After that we caught another cab and headed back to the hostel. I went out to the street and bought us a corn on the cob from a street vendor. Yum.