I stayed in the Hotel Hashimi in the Arab quarter of the old city. The hotel was a short walk in from Damascus Gate, shown below and had a great view from their rooftop garden.
The hotel was great: very friendly staff, clean rooms, great breakfast provided, and very reasonable rates. I would recommend it but come prepared that they only take cash as payment. I spent time walking the city walls and shopping in the street markets (although I didn't buy much because I am not a great bargainer). I spent a day outside the old city in West Jerusalem and found a food market and it was fun to check out what they had. I stocked up on food for the Shabbat (more on that later).
Just the age of Jerusalem impressed me (remember I am from Western Canada where non-native history goes back just a couple of hundred years). The layers of history (and physical layers of building) was really impressive to me. The single most impressive sight was the Mosque, Temple of the Rock.
To get to this mosque in the Temple Mount area, there was a fairly serious security checkpoint. In general, Israel is a place with pretty intense security measures. It began in Toronto airport, where the flight to Tel Aviv had an extra security check at the gate. Apparently that is typical for all flights to Israel. At the Technion, there was also a security gate and cars were stopped and their trunks checked. I don't know if it was my Canadian passport or the way I look but I was sent through all these check points with minimal scrutiny.
I had to make my way from Jerusalem to Haifa, the city on the Northern coast where the Technion is located, on Saturday (the Shabbat). The Jews there take their religious day off quite seriously: stores close and buses and trains don't run. Arab busses run in Jerusalem but they all went the wrong way. I made my way with Sherut taxis (shared taxis) which have a whole makeshift system in place to cover the lack of official travel options. It turned out to be much easier than I thought.
The Technion is a pretty impressive place, both the buildings and the level of scientific activity. I thought the computer science building, shown below, was architecturally interesting.
The place has benefitted from donations from around the world. There were a number of Canadian contributions, including this one right outside the room where the lectures were held:
The meeting itself was very good for me, I really enjoyed the other lectures. A young faculty member there, Nir Gavish, was the one that invited me. I had met him when he was a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State working with Keith Promislow, who was another of the speakers. Nir is a bright guy with a good eye for problems to work on. I had brief hopes we might hire him at UBC but there was no suitable opening when he was looking and he and his family seem very happy to be back home. The other organizer was Amy Novick-Cohen who I also knew before the meeting. They put together a great event.
Haifa had some tourist appeal as well. There are long stretches of beach right in the city which we visited one night. It is the centre of the Baha'i faith and this group has some great gardens in the city.
Of course, I wouldn't have centred a new religion in that area. I would have picked somewhere else, where other faiths were a little thinner to the ground. There was a conference excursion to the nearby city of Akko, which also had a very long history, including its use as a Crusader base in the area. Many of the crusader buildings have survived and are being excavated.
It was hard not to notice the systematic oppression of the Arabs. They have less access to education, restricted areas where they can live, and barriers to many careers. It was hard to look on and not feel how unfair this is. Of course, better people than I have tried to find a way forward. A way that would allow the Israeli Jews to begin the process of reconciliation without being blown up. I can't see that there are any easy answers.
