To the Northern Coast

Tuesday January 28th - Outside of Nazareth

Yesterday I was given the choice of staying in the north as per my itinerary, or traveling back to Tel Aviv, which was about 2 hours drive from where we finished the day at the sea of Galilee.  I asked the guide if it mattered, he said no.  I asked if it changed the amount of time for me in the car, he said, yes.  So I said, I would rather stay in the north, hoping to get to sleep in a bit more and not have to spend so long in the mini van.  The effect was not as much as I had hoped, my pick up time was still 7:45 and I still had almost an hour in a minivan on my way to first stop Caesarea.  The difference was, I was the only passenger in my minivan and the driver didn't speak English.  I guess, even though hours in the car were less for me, total car hours on the road was more.  Oh well.

The back of the theater with a random collection of statues.

 My group was already at the entrance to Caesarea when I got there, but the guide said they had only been there a few minutes.  I was joining a group that already had 6 members who had driven up from Tel Aviv, a mother/son combo from Brazil but living in Israel, a father/daughter combo from China, a law student from Brazil who studied in London and a retired woman from England who is visiting her ex-mother in law outside of Tel Aviv.  Caesarea was an important town from Harod's time until about the 4th century.  Harod had his palace there and it was the commercial center for the Roman empire in the region.  It was the most important port of the time and had ~20,000 inhabitants around 0AD.  It had an impressive theater, palace and hippodrome so that the Roman's could be entertained even during the winter when the port wasn't really accessible due to weather.  The theater is still used today as a venue for concerts and performances.

The theater, still in pretty good shape, and still used as a concert venue.

This is the reconstruction of where the palace used to be.  The columns were looted, I mean recycled, for other purposes, and the private part of the palace is now underwater as the sea level has risen ~2m in the last 2000 years.

This is 20% of the original pier (the rest having sunk into the sea).  Oddly enough, this much is preserved because the Crusaders in the 12th century restored it in order to use it as a pier.  It is weird to me to think of one ancient people restoring another ancient people's work.  It is a modern bias of mine that thinks only modern people can preserve/restore the past.

This block says that Pontius Pilot was governor  her at the time of Emperor Tiberius in the 1st century AD.

This is the seating at the end of the hippodrome, where the expensive seats were.  As the horses turned the sharp corner you were more likely to see collisions, wipe outs and blood. Which goes so show that nothing has changed - now people go to see car races instead of horse races, but they still watch for the crashes.  

The expensive seats were also very handy to the toilets, which our guide was demonstrating.

The aquaduct (but I dont remember which period it was from) that brought water from the outlying hills into the city. 

This is just a small part of Mt. Carmel (of Isaiah/burnt offering fame).  It is the longest, flattest mountain I have ever seen.

This is the view of Haifa from the top of the Bahai gardens, which we were not allowed to go into.

Haifa is the third largest city in Israel and it is full of industry.  Our guide said people go to Jerusalem to pray, to Tel Aviv to dance and to Haifa to work.  We could see oil refineries, grain silos, a huge port and other industry in town.  Of course it is hard to get the sense of a city from a seat in a tour bus, but it seemed like a good city to me.  The main drag was once a German colony which was bought from the Germans after WWII but still makes for a quaint down town area.  The gardens can be seen from much of town and they lend it a beauty and calmness that other cities don't have.  I am going to have to take a serious look at American cities when I get home, but I cant think of such high density housing in a city of this size, less than 300,000.  Maybe this is the effect of Istanbul, but 300,000 doesn't seem big anymore.

A better view of the gardens, or at least the top half of the gardens.

This is the view from the bottom looking up.

The Bahai faith was an attempt to unify the three monotheistic religions under a banner of peace.  wikipedia Sounds good to me, but I guess they haven't gotten too far.  

We drove up the coast from Haifa to Acre or Akko.  Akko was an ancient city, but small when the Crusaders showed up in the 11th century.  They thought it was the Biblical city Acre (but they were probably wrong) so they set up camp there and built it into a much bigger city with huge halls and courtyards.

These are the walls at Acre/Akko.  I don't know why the picture is vertically stretched.

The halls of the Knights (Templar or Hospitilier) are very well preserved  because the Mamlukes, who defeated and repelled the Crusaders filled the whole place in with sand before building on top.  

More toilets.  The Crusaders built them, learning from the Muslims who had retained the technology even while the rest of Europe had 'forgotten' what the Ancient Romans knew about indoor plumbing.  They took the idea with them back to Europe and improved the lives of everyone.

They believe that this was the dining room since it has the fanciest pillars.  You can rent out this hall for a party or a wedding.  

This was the secret passage way below the dining hall.  The last of the Crusaders probably escaped this way, taking all of their gold when the city fell to the Mamlukes.

Lunch: falafel, pita, pickled vegetables (the red thing is a mini eggplant pickled in beet juice) tasty hummus and more mint lemonade.  

 After lunch we went to the other side of town where the 'Templar's Tunnel' was.  Our guide says this is really misnamed since they now believe that it was built by one of the groups of Italians who lived in the city perhaps the Pisan's or the Genoese at about the same time.  The groups of Italians were competing with each other as merchants and getting thing from your warehouse to the port was a dangerous prospect.  These were not really secret tunnels as private roads.  They were rediscovered only ~10 years ago when someone had trouble with their plumbing and the plumber found a chamber under the house that lead to the tunnel.  Unfortunately, when the archaeologists were excavating they opened a spring and now the tunnel is constantly flooded and the water has to be pumped out.

Lighting and boardwak was added later. 

I will miss fruit/juicing stands when I return to California

Maybe it has to do with the three languages thing on every sign, but this is the first country I have visited where the internationally accepted red octagon doesn't say stop in one language or another.  

More aqueduct.  I thought this shot was cool with the city behind it.  If only the clouds had cooperated a little better.  

 We drove north from Akko along the coast to the very northern part of Israel at the Lebanese border to a place called Rosh Hanikra to visit the limestone grottos created by the waves pounding on the rock.  

 We took a cable car down the hill to sea level.  On the way we could see the buoys that demarcate the border between Israel and Lebanon.  This prompted a debate about how this word is pronounced.  Our Israeli guide said 'booey' but was corrected by an English woman who said it should be 'boy' just the same as girl and boy.  I thought he was right, but rather than contradicting her directly, I said that in American English it would be 'booey'.  She thought that was ridiculous and proceeded to say that she was clearly right because the language was English and she was from England and therefore she has last word on all things English.  Wikipedia does say that we are both right in our respective countries, but since the word comes from the French and the American pronunciation is closer to that, I will claim ultimate victory!

At the bottom of the cliff we walked through a limestone (studded with flint) tunnel which had been created by the waves, but enlarged for tourists.  The waves were pounding into the rock and up through the grottoes.  The sound inside the tunnels was loud and crashing.  The power evidenced was amazing.   

In case the video doesn't work, you can imagine from this picture.

I hope this video link works, even though it doesn't do the sensation justice, it is a taste of what it was like.  

I was surprised to see flint in limestone.  I thought that limestone was sedimentary (which it is) but that flint was volcanic in origin (which it isn't).  I asked the guide if he knew about the geology and he did.  I was really impressed with him, he gave the whole tour in English and Portuguese  dealt with a somewhat irritating English woman and could answer my geology questions!  He said that under certain conditions, flint pockets can form in the middle of lime stone.  The lime stone is from calcium carbonate, but where there is silica as well, and the pressure is high enough you can get layers of flint.  Kim bilir?  

We drove back south on the east side of Mt. Carmel to avoid Haifa traffic, but we still did catch a lot of slow going.  It took about two hours to get to Tel Aviv, where I switched buses and headed to Jerusalem.

Two notes that are neither here nor there:

1) Blogger has added a spell check.  This is a major up grade and I am grateful.  (You probably are too if you have been reading this blog for long.) But the spell check still needs some improvement.  You have to get very, very close to the word you want for it to recognize it.  Often it will give just one suggestion which isn't what I was looking for.  I wish I had kept notes on this as some of the suggestions were funny if frustrating.

2) A gripe about my tour company.  Other than the transfers between cities and airports, I could probably have arranged this all myself.  Of course I didn't know that when I made the reservations, but I am realizing that the tour company I have booked with is not actually taking me on any tours, they are booking tours through other companies, so I am paying twice.  I can accept this as a convenience charge and insurance against things going wrong, but what is frustrating to me is that I only get my relevant details piecemeal and at the last minute.  Perhaps this is an opportunity to practice patience and let go of my need to be in control of the situation, but somebody needs to be in control.  Did I tell the story about the driver at the airport?

Day 1: to the north

I was picked up at 7:15 by Menache (sp?) in a mini van and we soon had ~10 folks from various other hotels nearby.  The couple that got on next and sat behind me were speaking Turkish, and it was kind of fun to try to understand what they were saying.  Oddly comforting actually.  Not that I could understand enough for it even to be considered rude, but I was working on what I could say to them when we got to a mini bus convention and they got out and on to bus 2 which was going somewhere else today.  Oh well.  

We drove north to Nazareth and visited the church of the Annunciation.  It is actually the fourth church on the original site of Mary's house when she got the news that she was going to have a baby.  Apparently, she lived in a cave (as did most folks in the small town), and at least part of the cave is still there.  The original church (and the two that came after it) were destroyed. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_the_Annunciation)  The current church on the site was built in the 1960s.  Down stairs is a chapel, which is a big open space with the ruins of the first church there along with stairs leading down into the cave.  The ceiling there is open to the church above where services are held.  There was a smalls service going on while we were there and it was nice to have the singing accompany our visit.  The other thing I really liked about this church were the mosaics on the walls from a bunch of different countries that had supported the building of the church.  They each sent in or aranged to have made a representation of Mary.  These are the pictures I perhaps miss the most from my memory card debacle this evening, so I am borrowing other's pictures. 

The front of the church.  Photo from: http://travelthemiddleeast.com/2012/05/solo-female-middle-east-road-trip-2/

This is the contribution from Japan.
(photo from wikicommons) 

This is from Canada.
(Flikr: striderv) 

Not the service we saw, but it shows the entrance to the cave on the bottom floor.  (Photo from wikicommons) 

The church of St. Joseph was being renovated so we didn't get to see that anyway.  It is supposedly where the young family came back to after they enrolled in Bethlehem for the census(?) and again after the exile in Egypt when Harod was killing all the kids under 2.  (http://www.nazarethinfo.org/show_item.asp?levelId=63476)

We drove by the church at Kana, but didn't even stop and it was on the right side of the bus, while I was on the left, so again i didn't have a picture to lose there.  

Our next stop as at Capernaum, where Jesus's ministry started taking off.  According to our guide, Capernaum was the big city, where Nazareth might have been 400-500 people, Capernaum was more like 4-5000*.  (wikipedia says 1500: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capernaum).  We saw the ruins of the octagonal church and a synagogue that was in hiding as a church after Constantine converted the Romans and made it illegal to be anything but Christian.  This was near the hill where the sermon on the mount was given and there is some speculation that the octagonal church gave one wall for each of the beatitudes.  

The text of St. Matthew runs as follows: (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02371a.htm)

• Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Verse 3)
• Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land. (Verse 4)
• Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted. (Verse 5)
• Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill. (Verse 6)
• Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. (Verse 7)
• Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God. (Verse 8)
• Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. (Verse 9)
• Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Verse 10)

The building that was there apparently looked like a church in order to not be shut down, but there were secret ways of knowing that it was really a synagogue.  One being a picture carved into the stone work which 'shows' a cart which may have contained an ark replica that could be wheeled out during services.

*Important note:  Except where I am directly quoting somebody or some written source, all history has gone through my leaky/faulty brain, mulled around in there for anywhere from hours (in the case of this post) or weeks (in the case of some others) and shouldn't be taken as actually true.  I wont write anything I know to be false (unless it enhances the story) but I am sure much of the history (especially the details) are at least slightly wrong through no fault of the original sources.

I did learn some interesting things regarding temples and synagogues and the diaspora at this site, not all of which I really understand.  Apparently, you don't need synagogues if you have a temple, but the second one was destroyed by the Romans in the 4th century.  At this point the Jews were kicked out of the area by the now Christian Romans and they dispersed through Europe and started making synagogues as remembrances of the temple.  (The original ark was lost at this time too, btw) I don't think there was ever more than one temple at a time, however, but I guess you didn't have to go to the temple all that often, and could do your Torah learning and prayers on a smaller scale.  I am sure I will learn more about this during this trip, but if anyone reading this can help clarify, I would be interested in understanding better.  

From there we went to lunch, which I did take pictures of.  There was a salad bar with hummus (a bit heavy on the tahini for my taste, but creamy with big chunks of nahut, which was a nice touch) and many types of pickled salads which were tasty and a vicious looking fish which was also pretty good.  The fish was supposedly the Fish of St. Peter, the same type he was fishing for when Jesus suggested he put down his nets in favor of bigger things.  

After lunch we went to the church built on the hill where the miracle of the loaves and fishes was said to occur.  On the way there I swapped my memory cards and so this is where I start to have my own pictures! The church is called the church of the heptagon (yeah for two geometrical figures in the same day) this time named for the seven springs.  It is also a fairly new church built on the site of an older church, built on the site of an even older church.  Menache told us that if he says a church was destroyed, it was the Muslims that did it so we didn't need to ask every time he said a church was destroyed.  My guess is this is a simplification...

The church of the heptagon, was not actually heptagon shaped.

The rock under the alter is really the top of the hill the church was built on, where the feeding of the 5000 was said to have taken place.

I am a sucker for a mosaic of a peacock.

These fish spouts are for Ann, cause they are cool.

 Regardless of what had happened there, there was no bread and no fish (to eat), it is a good thing we went there after lunch.

On our way to the south end of the Sea of Galilee we passed the town of Magda or Magdala, which means tower.  It was the home town of Mary Magdalene and it is currently in the process of excavation.  

The excavation site for the town of Magdala.

Our final stop for the day was at the Baptismal site on the Jordan River.  I don't think this is the baptismal site, but a convenient location.  Meneshe had an interesting perspective on the baptism of Jesus, where ever it may have taken place.  Of course, Jews are not baptized, so what was probably happening was that John was assisting people with the ritual cleaning of folks before they went to the temple and he offered to help Jesus with that as well.  It turned into baptism only later.  Anyway, it makes sense to me.  

The story was told in more than 20 languages, including Hawaiian pidgin, but not Turkish.

Not ready for full immersion, I did dip a toe.

This French speaking group took the process very seriously, singing, dancing, praying ...

and eventually dipping.

Tonight I am staying at a hotel near Nazareth.  It is basically on the side of the freeway, across the street from a gas station, a resturant and a grocery store.  I had hopes for the grocery store because with the big lunch I had earlier, some fruit or crackers would be all I needed for this evening, but it was closed when I went exploring before 5 this afternoon.  There seems to be a school or an apartment complex down the road, but not interesting and on the other side of the freeway is agriculture.  So I stayed in, watched a couple of movies (yeah for English language TV!), lost my pictures (boo!) and wrote this blog while listening to crazy thunder.  (The rain has slowed, but earlier the wind was blowing it sideways.  I hope it has blown all the way away by tomorrow!)

Now to post this and get ready for bed.  Thanks for reading. 

Exchange rate

I could have/should have looked up the exchange rate for dollars to shekels or lira to shekels, but I didn't.  I did get some money out of the ATM at the airport and the choices were 100, 300, 400, 500, 600, 800, or there abouts, which was my first clue.  Ok, there are probably more than one shekel in a dollar, but if the smallest amount offered at  an American ATM is $20, does that mean there is a 5 to 1 exchange rate?  I got 500 out and was none the wiser.

The taxi (which is its own crazy story) was paid for, but when we got in (a Toyota Prius) the meter started at 25sk.  Taxis in Istanbul start at 2.5TL, or about $1.50, but I know that Istanbul taxis are known to be cheap.  Does this mean that there are more than 10 shekels in a dollar?  The hotel is also paid for, and there are no posted prices, so that is no help.

Erin and Ethan were here in October and gave the the card of an Italian restaurant they highly recommended.  If there had been a restaurant in the hotel, I probably would have chickened out and eaten there, but there isn't, so I asked for directions to the address on the card.  It wasn't far away and so I took the map and headed out into the wild.

Amazing gnocchi, and on the salad, the mint and pumpkin seeds were very nice additions.  The red canister on the top?  My own personal Parmesan cheese grater! 

I had a market salad, Parmesan gnocchi  a mint lemonade and vanilla pana cotta with caramel sauce and it came to 103sk.  It was excellent, and if the exchange rate was closer to 10:1 a really good deal, but it seemed like a pretty nice place, so maybe the rate was closer to 3:1 and my meal was ~$30.  (http://pappas.rest-e.co.il/)

Leaving the restaurant I walked through a covered market as the proprietors were packing up for the night.  There were some prices on their wares, specifically underwears, 5 sk each or 3 for 10.  I don't usually buy my undergarments on the street, so I am not familiar with the going rate.

I sought out something I have more experience with: Magnum bars. (http://www.magnumicecream.com/) I don't know if they exist in California, but they are a highlight of the ice cream world in Istanbul.  I usually buy a 6 pack of mini magnums, but I have been known to buy a full sized one when out and about on a hot day that has included a lot of walking.  I have paid anywhere from 3TL (from a market) to 6 TL (from a museum) for a full sized Magnum, or about $2-4.  At a corner market in Tel Aviv, a magnum costs 14sk.  This brought my mental exchange rate back up to the 5:1 range and dinner was cheap.  I did eventually find an exchange office that had posted exchange rates and the mystery was solved, there are 3.7sk in a dollar.  Dinner was on the expensive side, street underwear is cheap, and a magnum is a good international meter stick.

mmmm magnum

Before heading back to the hotel, I walked along the Mediterranean  , and put my fingers in it. 

Israel, first impressions

Sunday January 27th, Tel Aviv

I am not sure how to break up this blog post.  I could post something short every day, or I could save it all up and post at the end...I have the time tonight to write about my first impressions and maybe put up some pictures, think about some expectations, and then push publish.  My tour starts tomorrow, so I will potentially have more to post tomorrow night (who knows if I will have internet), but maybe I will have actual humans to hang out with, I guess we'll just see how it goes.

First, why did I come?  This was one of only three questions that the passport control person asked me.  (I had been prepared for serious questioning, but maybe that waits for me upon exiting.)  I had originally thought I would go to Antarctica during this semester break, thinking I would never have two weeks off in southern hemisphere summer that wasn't Christmas again.  Sarah Doty talked me out of it saying this was too late to go and the only penguins left I wouldn't want to see.  Ann will say that I couldn't stand the idea that she has been somewhere I haven't, which isn't true, but it did occur to me that this is a long way to come from California and a very short way from Turkey, so it might be a good idea to get it done while I am close.  Of course the reason that Israel is interesting to me at all is that it is full of history.  I have heard the stories from the Bible for my entire life and I can't pass up the chance to see the places they happened.

I have already had a taste of this living in Turkey.  I have seen both the Tigris and Euphrates (albeit at their north east beginnings and just at the tip of the so called fertile crescent).  I have been to Ephesus and seen where Mary supposedly spent her last days as St. Peter preached to the Roman City.  Regarding more recent church history, Constantinople was the seat of the Eastern Church, and Iznik (ancient Nicea) saw important church doctrine established.

There are very political reasons to come or not come to Israel but I am here to focus on the history.

Next week when I cross the border into Jordan, it will be much easier to answer the analogous question: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade!

So what were my expectations?  I usually try not to have expectations, they cloud observation, they lead to disappointment, they take too much effort to come up with in the first place.  All that being said, of course I have expectations.  I expect Israel to be a serious contradiction between the ancient and the modern, perhaps even more striking than Istanbul.  I expect it to be warmer than Istanbul and less crowded.  I expect to see amazing things and connect to history in new ways.  I expect to try new foods and meet new people.

Now that I have been in the country for 4 hours, what are my first impressions?  It is warmer than istanbul (it had just started snowing as I was on the bus to the airport).  I was comfortable in jeans and a fleece walking around after dinner along the sea.  It is also dry.  I will have to buy water tomorrow.  My guide book says that the water is technically drinkable but tastes like chlorine and I can confirm this.

So far all three people I have interacted with have excellent English.  (The taxi driver sent to pick me up, the hotel concierge and the waiter at Pappa's)  I am sure this facility diminishes away from the service industry in touristy places, but there is definitely more English here than in Istanbul.

Tel Aviv is a city.  It isn't the main focus of the Holy Land tourists, people live and work here in ways completely separate from the tourist industry.  The streets are well enough lit and there are some folks walking after dark, enough not to feel unsafe, but nothing like the crowds in istanbul.  There are newish buildings that are run down, paint pealing, big cracks, etc.  I haven't seen any of what I would immediately recognize as an old builiding (more than 100 years old).

I can't read the signs.  I don't know if it mostly the fact that the alphabet is totally foreign to me, or if I have just forgotten how lost I was when I first moved to Turkey, but not even being able to make sounds out of the symbols makes me feel totally lost.  It is true that most signs are also in English,  but it would be a BIG adjustment to live here.

Ok, final first impression.  Ann told me to be on the alert for how the air feels in different places.  Here there is definitely a sea side taste in the air.  It feels dryer to me, but by the sea and warmer, should lead to more humid, so maybe I am just not drinking enough.  It was very cloudy/hazy when we landed and into the evening.  The moon was a big fuzzy blob.  I wonder if there are fires (wood or coal) used for heat near by and that particulate in the air is what I am mistaking for dryness.