Traveling Companions

Here's my group:

We all trickled into the country slowly because we arrived from different countries. Only seven of us were Americans. The rest were Europeans and there were two Australians. 

We broke off into smaller tighter groups that helped each other throughout the trip, but it was a good lot in general.

Here are Hina (left) and Fatimah (right) who were my friends from Maryland that I traveled with. I roomed with Fatimah and the three of us probably had all of our meals together. We were each other's core group:

Good travel buddies, I recommend.

Back in DC, before we separated:

Here's a couple of cool people I met:

Sidra

If you look closely, Sidra and I are never very far apart in pictures. We actually joined up in the Istanbul airport where we had flown in from the US and she had flown in from Hong Kong.

 

Here we are waiting in the line for security in Israel. Sidra got pulled for interrogation. The rest of us made it through alright.

Sidra is very cool. She is studying under Haji Noor Deen who is a Muslim Chinese calligrapher. (https://www.hajinoordeen.com/) I have attended seminars by him and I own art by him. He is an Arabic calligrapher who developed a  script that looks like it is Chinese characters but reads Arabic. I have seen some of his rarest work which he says the inspiration come to him very rarely for: if you read it from right to left, it is Arabic but if you read it up and down it is Chinese. He says he has yet to make such a piece that also means the same thing read in both directions.

Anyway, that is a tangent. She is studying under him and she was a good person to be next to when we'd view the art inside the mosques. She was the one that pointed out to me that the fruit in the mosque mosaics were fruit that are mentioned in the Quran as being found in the gardens of Heaven.

Helen

Helen grew up going to a convent school. She decided early in childhood to become a nun and was preparing to take her vows when she...became Muslim. I spoke to her very briefly once but I had so many questions. What must have it been like for her as a former Catholic to be in Jerusalem and see the Via Dolorosa? Also, I wanted to hear about the religious pivot. Alas, I never found out, but she was such a sweet person.

Abu Eesa

Ehab was our Jerusalem guide, but Abu Eesa (or AE as we called him) was our British guide that had organized everything. He's also an informal expert and on the day that we did Mount of Olives, AE was our guide instead of Ehab.

His roommate sent a picture of him ironing a shawarma to heat it up in the group chat. I expressed my horror. He claims to have washed the iron afterwards. 

He was also lovely. He personally made sure everyone got through security and made their buses and flights. His called the Americans "dizzy fish" and I do have to indignantly say that it was not me who earned us that reputation. 

The Scots

AE said of the Scots, "loud as a Klaxon, the children and the Scots are not allowed into the next church." 

"What's a Klaxon?" blared a Scot.

This crowd also got pulled for interrogation entering the country. Delighted to have such personal access to an expert, they interrogated their interrogation officer about weather, food, exchanging money.  You never saw an interrogation so speedy.

One night, I was headed back to my hotel when I found this group wandering around looking for burgers. I suppose they thought they'd just accidentally run into a burger shop. It turns out, I was the only one with Google Maps and the phone coverage to use it, so I guided them to the next closest thing: a kabob stall. They almost didn't bite, but I convinced them to. It was after midnight, in a foreign country, but they hadn't noticed.

They were sweet girls. 

Special mention to the bromance:

Despite my worries, it turned out to be a good group to travel with.