Exploring the Old

Another trip sponsored by OSP was a tour of the Old City of Beer Sheva before our second of many Pub Nights in the Old City/Downtown area. Of course the "old city" in Beer Sheva is nothing like the Old City of Jerusalem, but is still pretty awesome by it's own merit. The city is named after the wells of Abraham spread throughout the Negev area, and as Beer Sheva was the sight of the seventh well, it was named after it! (Be'er meaning well, and sheva meaning seven). Unfortunately the well is being restored right now and so we couldn't see it, but we still got to see the rest of Beer Sheva.

This pedestrian street is a section of the first street in Beer Sheva that has obviously been blocked off to cars and turned into an entirely pedestrian road. It is lined with shops, restaurants, cafes, and every Friday they have street fairs with art, clothing, crafts, homemade things, etc. Seems pretty similar to First Fridays on Sante Fe, or any other Sawdust Festival type place, and I can't wait to go as soon as weekend trips with OSP are done.

On the tour, we also saw buildings from the Ottoman Period that were repossessed during the British Mandate, and still used as part of the Israeli community. The first building we saw was a police station during the British Mandate, and shocker, it's still being used as a police station! We also saw a statue of Allenby that was originally supposed to be in the middle of a beautiful garden, until people realized that you can't grow and maintain a beautiful garden in the middle of the desert. But perhaps the most interesting spot on the tour was the one building in the Old City of Beer Sheva that was not aligned with the rest of the buildings. It was a mosque, and therefore had to be built facing Mecca. However, during the beginnings of the state of Israel, many of the Jews in Beer Sheva feared retaliation from the Arab community that they essentially kicked out of the city during the War of Independence (1948), and so the Muslim community was forbidden from worshipping in the Mosque. Currently the mosque is a museum, but also serves as an interesting piece of history surrounding the Israeli-Arab conflict.

The final spot on our tour was a place I had already seen before, the cemetery for British and Australian soldiers who died in Israel in World War I. The cemetery was pretty well maintained, and definitely beautiful, especially because we were there right as the sun was setting behind it, making for some great photos.

Now that our tour was basically over (yep, the Old City is pretty small) we went to a Tapas Bar before heading back to the dorms and watching a meteor shower. We couldn't see the stars too well but we got to see one or two really big, beautiful meteors going clear across the sky.