We began Day Nine by heading directly to the Old City of Jerusalem, which is enclosed by a defensive wall built by the Ottoman Empire during the 1500s. The Old City is divided into four uneven sections: the Jewish Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the Muslim Quarter and the Christian Quarter. We entered the Jewish Quarter via the  Dung Gate, located along the southwestern side of the Old City, to visit the Jerusalem Archaeological Park and Davidson Center where we saw an informative video on the history of Jerusalem. Afterwards, we walked the southwestern corner of the Temple Mount before proceeding over to the Western Wall Tunnel (Rabbinical Tunnel). This tunnel runs underneath the exposed Western Wall  section of the Temple Mount and offers visitors an idea of how the Temple Mount and the Second Temple were constructed more than 2,000 years ago from large blocks of quarried rock. We traversed the length of the tunnel, exiting in the Muslim Quarter next to the First Station of the Cross. We followed  a section of Via Dolorosa, the same path that Jesus was forced to walk  before he was crucified, and returned to the Jewish Quarter to visit the Western Wall. After our visit to the Old City, a group of us took an excursion into the West Bank to visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. Our tour guide could not accompany us, so our bus driver ferried us across the border wall into Bethlehem (controlled by the Palestinian Authority) where we were met by a young Palestinian Christian guide who took us first to a local restaurant for lunch and then led us on a tour of the Church of the Nativity. That evening our group had dinner in a restaurant inside the trendy German Colony section not far from our hotel.

Day Two in Jerusalem