We started our first full day in Jerusalem with a tour of the Western Wall tunnel. The Western Wall we are all familiar with is just a small portion of the entire wall. The rest is under continual excavation. The "tunnel" that has resulted is a more a series of chambers and empty cisterns, with a few narrow tunnels (designed for short people) connecting them. Our guide was a lively women from New York with a big voice. That big voice was necessary in these tunnels. You can see Benjamin above at the start of our tour. Along the way, we saw a massive stone that had been moved in place to "glue" the base of the wall. It was 35 feet long and weighed 570 tons (that's over 100 elephants, people!). In fact, it's the third largest stone in the world. The mastermind behind this wall was King Herod. Not a nice man, but a great builder. He had slaves chisel the stone fronts so that they had a distinct beveled edge. This is called "Herodian" stone, though it is not visible on the outdoor section of the wall. As we continued our walk, our feet touched stone pavers that were 2,000 years old and at the spot closest to the destroyed temple, devout Jewish women come at all hours to pray, seated in white plastic chairs.
Note to future visitors: you may only see the tunnel as part of a guided tour, and must make reservations a month in advance.
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