Mt. Zion Hotel

• The Cable-Car Museum (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/jerusalem-cable-car.html ) is generally open Sunday through Thursday from 9 to 4 and Friday 9 to 2, but to get to it you must go through the Mt. Zion Hotel.
• The Mt. Zion Hotel is little known and lovely. I have not seen the guest rooms, but the lobby is very pretty, with a good view across the valley to "Mt. Zion."
• To get to the museum, turn left as soon as you enter the hotel's door. Keep walking straight along the corridor and through the restaurant. (If there's a party or reception going on, smile and keep going, with proper avoidance of photographers.) Go straight through the doors to the terrace and down the steps. At your left on the bottom is the locked gate on Hebron Rd. Go up the next steps and across the small patio to the museum.
• Entrance is free.
• The outer room is devoted to the eye clinic that filled the space earlier. Its doctor was husband to the Beit Ticho artist (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/beit-ticho.html ).
• The inner room quietly reminds you not just of ingenuity and courage but also that those Palestinian volunteers to the British army were learning as much from supply sergeants and engineers as rifle-range instructors.
• Go back out through the Mt. Zion Hotel,and consider staying there someday.

Copyright 2008 Jane S. Fox