Jerusalem

In Jerusalem we stayed with a couchsurfer called Yinon, who turned out to be an absolute legend! He had lived in Israel all his life, worked as a tour guide part time and was just a super interesting guy. We sat and talked for hours every night and he educated us on all things Jewish while we taught him the art of sarcasm and had a lot of laughs.

The company he works for is called New Europe Tours and they do tours of every major European city FOR FREE. Definitely check out their website if you are heading away anywhere soon. We took their tour of the old city of Jerusalem and hit all up the major sites and made friends with some other travellers.

The wailing wall was cool to see; it was split into 2 sections (male & female) and we were all given a Kippa (little jewish hat) to cover our heads. People came to the wall to pray and all the cracks between the stones were completely crammed with prayers written on little tiny bits of paper.

There are a lot of other religious sites to see in Jerusalem. Jews, Christians and Muslims all want a piece of the action and so there is just bus-loads of (mostly American) tour groups with matching hats everywhere you go. As for where Jesus walked around and was killed, no-one is sure of the exact spots and each religion seems to have their own ideas. The whole place just seemed to be a huge mess of different people and cultures, all searching for something.

We did a few other sites, one of which was the Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. It's crazy, no matter how many times you hear about what happened, you still just can't really get over it. The place was amazing.

Food wise, we pretty much lived on Falefel, Hummus and Pitta bread the whole time we were there. For 5 Shekels (£1) you couldn't really say no!