How about some photos?

I went with my mom, who was travelling on business but managed to arrange an extra week over spring break my senior year at NYU. This was 1998, about a year or two before the outbreak of the second intifada.

I wish I'd kept a better journal (I think there is a book with some notes, but it's packed away), but instead just took a crapload of pictures. I remember going outside to have a cigarette and getting locked out of the rectory, and spending a long, sleepless night out in the garden, looking east over the skyline to Al Aqsa.

There's a fantastic Armenian restaurant right around the corner from the fortress (enter the fortress gate, hang a right, it's a couple of blocks up a slight incline, restaurant on the left and down a flight of stairs). There was also an expatriate bar past the souk, closer to the Via Dolorosa that I remember getting tossed on Maccabe beers in. Sadly, we'd gotten there the weekend just following Purim, so I had no godly excuse for getting slammed (though I think I'm forgiven, since the DJ at the bar was spinning stuff like Will Smith's "Gettin' Jiggy With It).

Other highlights included a trip through the West Bank, running into moron Texan fundamentalists from our plane in the muslim quarter, crazy raver-kids celebrating Shabbat with drum circles and hashish in Tel Aviv, lunch at a restaurant run by a kibbutz, buying a hookah in Jaffa and finally finding a restaurant that wasn't kosher (I'm a goyim -- meat and cheese gives me awesome super-powers).
 

They seem to be more Russian and other foreign nationals than Israeli.