Wednesday 9 April

This morning the bus took us to the top of the Mount of Olives which looks across the Kedron Valley to the lower part of the city, and we walked down the hill to the Garden of Gethsemane where the bus picked us up again.  We got out near St Stephen's Gate and went in to the Bethesda Pool. St Ann's church is there too and it has the best acoustics of all buildings in Jerusalem so we stood in a circle and sang 2 songs. By the time we'd finished we had quite an enthusiastic audience. Then we started on the Via Dolorosa and the 14 stations of the cross which led us across the old city to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where we stopped for lunch.
We went inside the church,  and Gady showed us all the best places. He said that he had studied its architecture for one year. The first proper church was built in C4 by Helena the mother of Constantine. We went from the quarry that was originally on the site of Calvary,  and a C1 family tomb, to the rocks that were on top of the hill. There was only a short queue to go down into the "holy sepulchre" - a wait of only about 1 hr, but only 2 chose to join it.
We all split up then, and we wandered around the old city and came out at New Gate. From there we walked for quite a while in the new part of town - plazas, small shops, people- could have been one of any number of cities in Europe. We passed the King David Hotel and opposite is the YMCA which has a bell tower with a viewing platform, so we did. By then we'd just about completed a circle so we bought ice creams to get some small change, and caught the light rail back to the hotel.