Jerusalem

I’ve arrived at my hotel in Jerusalem, exhausted as one tends to be after a ten-hour flight featuring many screaming babies. It’s of course difficult to achieve really deep insights on a brief trip, but one thing travel does help you do is recognize things that should have been obvious but are nonetheless easy to overlook. For example, I found myself shocked in the passport control line at Ben Gurion Airport by the enormous quantity of Christians on the line. In my mind, Israel is a place that Jews and people interested in politics visit—but there I was face to face with an enormous group of elderly Italians with crucifixes around their neck.

It makes perfect sense, of course, when you think about it for a minute. But in general I hadn’t.