I hate to say it, but I did exactly what I was warned not to do the first day I arrived in Israel. Although this is my first time studying abroad in the country, I have been here twice before. Even if you’ve never been, I’m sure you’ve heard the warnings: “Be safe, stay away from the West Bank and Arab areas especially at night, and make sure you know where you are going.” Unfortunately, I’ve already made these mistakes. Here’s the story.

Running on less than five hours of sleep for the past 48 hours, I was absolutely delirious getting off my flight. After several complications, I eventually made it to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem just in time before registration closed. After meeting up with two other friends I knew back home, we headed out into the city to explore.

One of the places we traveled to was the Old City, which was the original city during Biblical times that is surrounded by stone walls with only a few entrances. The area is highly confusing with narrow streets and alleys running in multiple directions. In other words, it’s easy to get lost. There are also four sections of the Old City: the Jewish, Christian, Armenian and Muslim quarters.

The first mistake we made was entering the Old City through the Muslim quarters. It was already late at night and we intended not to go too far in, so we could trace back our steps. However, several minutes later, we got lost. We kept on running into dead ends and couldn’t find a way out of the Old City, let alone the Muslim quarters.

It was obvious we were not Arabs, and because of this, we received many stares. At one point, we run into four young men who start bothering us. My friend Eitan studied in Jordan this past summer, so he spoke a little Arabic. He conversed with them for a short period but they didn’t seem exactly friendly.

We walked by them several times as we kept on running into dead ends and had to go back to the same spot. As we passed them for the last time, Eitan could hear them swearing at us and telling our group to come back. Earlier I had seen one of the young men holding a heavy, large stone. When we turned our backs to them and started walking away, the young man threw the stone in our direction. Where it hit seemed fairly close, but obviously none of us looked back to check.

After being lost for at least a half hour, Eitan remembered he had an iPhone and we looked up our location on GPS. We were smack dab in the middle of the Old City, which was in the Muslim quarter. Apparently we never left the Arab area the whole time.

After getting out of the Old City, Eitan starts laughing and tells us he was surprised we made it out alive. Apparently, stabbings of foreigners are very common in that area. We nervously laughed it off and headed back to campus.

The next day during orientation, the speaker spent the majority of the session warning students not to go into the Arab areas. He even showed a map of the Old City and reddened the Muslim quarter. My two friends and I looked at each other and laughed. “Oops, already did that.”

What I learned my first day in Jerusalem: the term stone throwers is legit. If my encounter the first day was this exciting, who knows what awaits me these next four months in Israel. שלום