{"id":376,"date":"2015-09-28T14:24:27","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T19:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/?p=376"},"modified":"2015-09-28T15:02:36","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T20:02:36","slug":"bad-day-according-to-chris-pg-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/?p=376","title":{"rendered":"Bad Day according to Chris (PG-13)"},"content":{"rendered":"

WARNING:\u00a0 do not let your children read this.<\/strong>\u00a0 This is Chris telling it how it really was.<\/p>\n

OK, so yesterday was so freaking bad that I had to stuff my desire to quit and “just keep swimming….”\u00a0 What was an edgy but exciting challenge for me was emotionally devastating for the girls, and since it is my job to not only take care of them, but make them FEEL taken care of, it was a really really bad failure of a day.<\/p>\n

The truth is, for me, I was fine.\u00a0 I enjoy the adventure, the new experiences, and although ultra-conservative pilgrim-Quaker-Lincoln looking people creep me out when they gather in an angry herd, I really did not feel like anyone was going to hurt us at any time.<\/p>\n

Getting into the old city was quite an adventure.\u00a0 Turns out, it’s not normally like it was last night.\u00a0 Last night and today were the most holy days of the year, pretty much and the arabas and Jews seem to hate each other, except when there’s a common goal, like taking the money of the tourists!\u00a0 Let me rephrase that.\u00a0 The Arabs seem to hate the Jews, and the Jews don’t seem to like anyone…. anyway, I digress.\u00a0 If I had a breaking point, it would be when I realized that I was not going to be able to continue driving up the steep, narrow alley that I took the car up while trying to escape the children of the corn.\u00a0 Fortunately, I was able to back the car out, and get it out of their gathering without getting stoned.<\/p>\n

Upon arrival at the Dung gate,\u00a0 (at the Old City where our room is) I had a nice chat with an Israeli gate guard who was from Michigan.\u00a0 Nice guy.\u00a0 Turns out they have our really old M-16s, not even the A-2’s that I used in my USMC training.\u00a0 We basically walked into and through the wailing wall area with all our stuff on the way to our room, and had to press through an angry mob and convince the Jewish military guys to let us get to our hostel.\u00a0 Our bedroom has an exterior door which remains locked, but is literally 10 feet from the Chain Gate, which only Muslims can use.\u00a0 There were angry scuffles outside our door for a good part of the night, fortunately, I brought ear plugs for all, so I put the fam to bed and headed out for a tour with two British guys, Andy and Christopher, who were kind enough to take me around and explain things to me.\u00a0 We got Kabobs outside the Damascus gate, walked past the New Gate, stopped at an ATM, and eventually got over to the Dung Gate *about 2 miles later) so I could get the rest of the stuff we needed out of the car.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the guards would not let me into the wailing wall area with my pillows and bags, they simply told me to go around, with no explanation of how that would work.\u00a0 I “accidentally” found the quickest way back to the room and was in bed by 1am.<\/p>\n

I felt victory.\u00a0 I got over my apprehension, got my bearings, and managed to piss off a lot of people in the process without knowing it… mostly my wife and kids, who finally stopped crying mid morning today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WARNING:\u00a0 do not let your children read this.\u00a0 This is Chris telling it how it really was. OK, so yesterday was so freaking bad that I had to stuff my desire to quit and “just keep swimming….”\u00a0 What was an edgy but exciting challenge for me was emotionally devastating for the girls, and since it … Continue reading Bad Day according to Chris (PG-13)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":383,"href":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions\/383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israel.naef.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}