Daniel Abroad...

Day 24 - Goodby Jordan, Goodbye Israel

2010-01-20T11:37:00.000-08:00

I love the Israeli airport security personnel! It’s true, I had great experiences with just about everyone that I ran into today. But before I get to that I’ll give some impressions of Jordan and Israel.

Jordan…Jordan is full of really, really nice people, which is kind of like saying that a girl has a great personality. Just about everyone in Jordan was incredibly friendly and accommodating, almost no one spoke English, but everyone was friendly. The Marriot was incredible, everyone there was amazingly friendly and helpful. At breakfast yesterday when one of the guys there found out that we were driving to Petra he ran off to pack us up some fruit, some pastries and some water from breakfast to take with us to have for lunch as we drove. Almost everyone there was like that, the went above and beyond to help us.

That being said I thought that Jordan would be more western and more cosmopolitan than it was. Jordan was a lot more like Egypt than Dubai, and I didn’t expect that. There were a lot of really poor people a lot of Bedouins shepherding goats and living in tents, a lot of people selling vegetable from makeshift stands next to the highway.

Traffic in Jordan was not fun, I was glad Dad was driving. People seem to consider lanes more as suggestions than as rules there. I saw more than one car drive down the freeway (two lane) centered over the dotted line. It would be hard to make the street signs more confusing and still have a system to them. Some of the signs I never figured out. I saw signs on the freeway that simply had an “x” on them. I saw others that just had a “!”. Sometimes the “!” signs would be coupled with another sign so that it would say something like “camel!” or “two people holding hands!” I started to take a picture of one once, but I stopped when I realized it said “military checkpoint!” (military folks typically don’t like it when you take pictures of checkpoints).

Jerash (Gerassa) was really cool. Mount Nebo was cool. I think that the place where Jacob wrestled God would have been awesome if we could have gotten there. Petra was a bit of a disappointment, I had heard that it was so incredibly amazing that I expected to be blown away and I wasn’t. I sure my reaction has something to do with the seven hours round trip driving that we did as well as the fact that the entrance fee was literally five times as much as anywhere else we went.

Even with the really nice people, Jordan still felt like a place where everything kind of depends on who you know. There didn’t seem to be a set way of doing things, everything kind of had an Egyptian, “my friend, let’s sit down and talk” feel to it. (But the people were way less pushy and more genuine than people in Egypt.) Jordan is the kind of place where a lot of stuff just doesn’t make sense to people from the west.

Israel…Israel is a place where things do make sense. It is a country that was born out of the holocaust, it is a country where 40 years ago (20 years after the holocaust) all of its neighboring countries prepared to simultaneously attack it in order to “push Israel into the sea.” Since then they had suicide bombers walk into restaurants and cafes and kill innocent people. People in the cities bordering Lebanon used to sleep in bomb shelters because they never knew when Hezbollah would launch the next rockets into their town.

In light of all this, the security stuff in Israel makes sense. They are especially careful with everyone who has been to a country they are not on friendly terms with. (there is official peace with Jordan, but relations are not great. I have a Jordanian road map that has the west bank and half of Jerusalem within the borders of Jordan.) I don’t like how things are with the Palestinians, but I’m not sure what Israel could do differently and still protect its citizens. I’m actually amazed at their passion for this land and their willingness to face all kinds of danger to keep it.

That being said, Israel is not a good country towards Christians. Christian tourists are one thing but Christians living here are another. It is illegal to proselytize to people 18 and under, and there is an actually anti-missionary organization that is trying to make it illegal to proselytize at all. The anti-missionary group has deep ties with the state department and works to make it very difficult for Christians to get visas to live and work in Israel. Our teacher in Israel, Todd, is back in the states working on a PhD because he was deported from Israel. In fact the people at the church we visited said that the number one thing that we could pray for was that people could get and keep their visas. Life is even more difficult for Jewish Christians in Israel. A Jewish Christian cannot emigrate to Israel, and if a Jew in Israel converts to Christianity there is a good chance that their Rabbi will denounce them which typically results divorce with their spouse and shunning from everyone else.

As for my time here today…my battery is running low and I’ve got the wrong adapter with me (Jordan uses the British plug, I forgot to change it back to the European plug that Israel uses.) The people in Israel today were awesome. I went to the transit desk after I arrived from Jordan, and they decided that the easiest thing for me to do was to exit like I was leaving the country, grab my bags and then check in like I just got the airport. Then the transit desk guy walked me down to baggage claim (taking me through the staff passport line, which was super fast) and warning me to expect some questioning from security because I was coming from Jordan. We even talked about LA a little bit (he’s been to Disneyland, he thought the one in Paris was a little more authentic looking.) Then the security girls were really nice, one even gave me bubble wrap when she was looking through my luggage to wrap my starbucks mugs in (after she tested them to make sure they weren’t bombs). And when I got to the ticket desk I found out that I had a window seat! I was positive I would have a middle seat. I even called El-Al yesterday morning to try to get a window seat and the lady on line told me that there wasn’t any left. So when I got my window seat…best surprise ever.

It’s funny how expectations can change experiences. Today I expected to be seriously questioned, have my bags searched, and have everything I am carrying tested for bomb residue. In knew that it wasn’t anything personal, the people here would just be trying to keep everyone safe. So when all of that stuff happened, I was ready for it and had a really good time with it.

I’m almost out of juice here so I think it’s about time I sign off. Thanks taking the time to read about what has been three of the best weeks of my life. I had an amazing time in Israel and a great time with Dad. I’m sure this blog was boring at times and for that I apologize, blame lack of sleep and my limited writing abilities for that, the trip itself has been amazing.

Until next time…Shalom.

Day 23 - Petra

2010-01-19T12:29:00.000-08:00

(Dad and I in Petra)

Petra, Petra Petra…Petra was…cool. I’ll be honest, there is definitely a “once you’ve seen one giant temple facade cut into the rock, you’ve seen them all” effect at Petra. The things are cool, and the canyon that you walk through to get there is cool, but a lot of them look pretty much the same. What’s impressive about the place is its sheer size. Petra is really, really big. There were a couple of times when we thought that w had seen everything and then we walked around a corner, or looked over a hill and saw that the city stretched out a lot farther than we thought it did.

(part of the entrance canyon)

(The treasury, in indiana jones, this is where the holy grail was. It might still be there, we weren't allowed inside.)

Most of the facades have been worn down by erosion, so they weren’t as impressive as they used to be, but the stone that they were cut into was pretty incredible looking. It was layered in a way that made it look like cool wood grain. (or marble, but I don't think it was marble)

(The inside of one of the biggest royal tombs. You can see how cool the rock is here.)

If you are into hikes Petra is a cool place to go, it looks like there were a bunch of different places that you could hike around and see different stuff. We went up to see the monastery, which is at the far western end of the city. We had to climb 800 steps to get up there, but if there is anything that the last three weeks has prepared me for, it is hiking up stairs.

(The monastery, look close and you can see a person standing right at the base of the doorway.)

The monastery was cool, it looked a lot like the treasury, but you could go inside of it. (you couldn’t get inside of the treasury) These facades are so big and impressive but the insides are pretty small. I think that most of the facades were tombs, I guess that you don’t need to a very big inside if all it is going to be is a tomb. It was a little weird to be at a city like that and see all the places where they buried people, but not be able to see where the people themselves actually lived. There is only one standing building that is left in Petra, it is part of what may have been the main temple there, no houses or any other buildings are left.

Petra was all that we did today, it took us three and a half hours to get down there and three and a half to get back, and I’m pretty wiped out. We had good weather today, which was nice, Petra would have been awful yesterday in the rain, and tomorrow it’s supposed to snow down there.

Tomorrow I head back to the US (although it will be a long, long trip) and dad heads back to Bahrain. I’ll try to post one more time from the airport in Israel, assuming that I have my computer. (you never know with el-al)

So until then, thanks for reading.

Day 22 - Jerash and some off the beaten path exploration

2010-01-18T11:53:00.000-08:00

(Gerassa)

When we went to bed last night, we were in the middle of a pretty serious thunderstorm and when we woke up this morning, it was still raining. That is good news for the people in Israel (it was raining over there too) and the people here in Jordan. Our waiter at the steakhouse we ate at tonight (I won’t tease you by telling you how good it was) told us that it has been the biggest storm they've had in three years.

Since it was raining we decided not to make the long drive down to Petra today (it will take about three hours to get there). Instead we decided to do what we were planning on doing on Tuesday, head up to Jerash (ancient Gerassa) and then try to find the place where Jacob wrestled with God.

(a much better sign for Gerassa than the actual one)

We got a little bit turned around on our way up to Jerash (highway detour = 1 hour of being completely lost.) Jordan isn’t the most friendly place for non-Arabic speakers (or readers) to drive. We had a map, but while the road numbers are in English numbers on the map, the numbers are rarely in English on the signs. We made it out to Jerash eventually, but it took longer than it could have if we knew where we were going or if roads were consistenly marked. When we finally made there we were wondering how we were going to be able to find the archeological site. We had a hard enough time finding the modern city where everyone lived, how were we going to find the ancient one? Fortunately it is gigantic and the main road runs right next to it. Which is good because the sign for the parking lot and ticket office said, “Crafts center parking.” And then in small letters, “(archeological site)”. I think the craft center was the gift shop.

Gerassa was a really cool site, it was huge. Dad had never seen a Roman city before, and this one was a great one to start with. He said he thought it was as cool as the pyramids in Egypt. It took us three hours to walk through the site. It had two theaters, a hippodrome (for horseracing), temples to Zeus and to Artemis (which were later turned into churches) and some great, great roads. It is funny with all that cool stuff that is still there, it is the roads and the sewage systems of these Roman cities that I think are the most incredible. There were circular stones in the road that I think were kind of like ancient manhole covers (or maybe drains). You could see a few feet of empty space under the street through some cracks and the water still drained into them pretty well. I’m amazed that the stones of the streets haven’t collapsed into sewer yet.

(One of the super awesome streets. Lots of pictures of Gerassa, I know, but give me a break, this was the only dry part of the day.)

After we left Jerash we tried to make it down to ancient Succoth and Penuel and Mahanaim. Bill Shlegel at Ibex (the group we went through in Israel) gave me directions at his house the other night. He said that from the Dead Sea, you take the road that runs alongside the Jordan River north to a city called Dayr Allah, which is where the ancient city Succoth was and where the Jabbok river runs into the Jordan. Up the Jabbok from Dayr Allah are the two tell’s of Penuel and Mahanaim. Where the Jabbok river cuts through the mountains is probably the pass that Jacob took when he came back into the promised land. Mahanaim is the place where Jacob wrestled with God, and somewhere between Penuel and Succoth is where Esau intercepted Jacob before he made it back into the promised land.

Dad and I decided that we would try to make it to Dayr Allah from Jerash, so we would have to cut through the mountains and drop down into the Jordan rift valley north of Dayr Allah then head into the city from the north side. That sound like a simple scenario, but without highway numbers it was more on the exciting side. It took us through a pretty mountainous hilly area of Jordan and through a lot of small towns where I’m pretty sure tourists never go.

So we drove through these small (and pretty poor) towns listening to the Rolling stones and Grand Funk Railroad, trying to matchup anything we saw written in English with stuff on our map. Somehow we made it down to just north of Dayr Allah without incident, rain and sometimes really thick fog not withstanding.

Eventually we made it down the Jordan and then to south to Dayr Allah. Dayr Allah was another place that doesn’t see tourists, the roads were full of people selling vegatables (there are hundreds and hundreds of greenhouses and gardens in this part of Jordan. After some driving back and forth (and crossing through a military checkpoint a couple of times,) we found the Jabbok river and started to work our way up towards where the two tells are. There wasn’t an easy road back there, we just kind of pointed ourselves east and tried to keep the gap in the hills (caused by the river) in front of us. We drove back far enough that I think I saw the first of the two tells about a quarter mile in front of us, then we hit another military checkpoint. There are a ton of military checkpoints in Jordan, I bet in our two days here we have driven through 20 military checkpoints, and in almost all of them when they see that we are white guys driving a rental car they wave us through. Here they did not. They asked us where we were going. Not many people here speak English, including the guys at the military checkpoints, so when they asked neither of us where quite sure how to say, “we are trying to find the unexcavated tels of Mahanaim and Penuel.” Dad looked at me and I looked at the guard and said, “we are looking for two archeological tells…” The soldier continued to look at me so I kept talking, “…they are like hills that ancient cities are buried under…” At that point the soldier said, “passports please” and asked us to pull of the side of the road. Apparently I gave him the wrong answer.

The soldiers had us pull our car over and open the trunk. He looked at our passports, looked through our trunk and our car and then asked us again where we were trying to go. At this point we decided that better be dumb tourists so we took our road map and asked them how to get to the Dead Sea. They gave us back our passports and pointed us back down the road that we came from. At that point the military guys became pretty friendly, dad told them the eight words that he knows in Arabic and they enjoyed that. One of the guys introduced himself to us, Faraz, and then they waved us goodbye. I think that ultimately they were trying to help us, they just didn’t see any possible reason that tourists would want to go down the road that we were trying to go down. Or maybe they were keeping us from trying to blow up the dam that was further upriver. Either way, we weren't able to make it up to the tells. So we went back down to Dayr Allah then headed back south to our hotel at the dead sea.

And that was it for today. There is still a pretty serious storm going on outside. Hopefully it rains hard all night and then clears up tomorrow, but even if it doesn't we'll be headed down to Petra in the morning.

Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day 21 - Mt. Nebo and the Dead Sea Marriot

2010-01-17T20:47:00.000-08:00

(The pool at our hotel)

(sunset over the dead sea)

Here is my post from last night. I actually fell asleep before I could get it posted. It's a short post, yesterday was pretty light (which was nice). We're off to Petra here pretty quickly, which should be a fun day.Well I finally made it to Jordan. While I understand the security stuff in Israel, it was nice to make it through visa and customs stuff in less than fifteen minutes.

When I bought my visa, the guy told me to go over and line up in line one. Who was line one for? VIP’s and Investors. Sometimes the American passport is really nice.

Dad got there to pick me up right as I walked through, so the timing was perfect.

The hotel was about 45 minutes from the airport but we made a little detour on our way to go see Mt. Nebo. Mt. Nebo was the place where God took Moses to look out over the promised land before he died, and then where he was buried. It was a little hazy today so we couldn’t quite see all the way across the Jordan rift valley, but we could see a good portion of the rift valley and Dad was really excited to see Jericho.

(The view from the top of Mt. Nebo, I'm guessing it was a little bit clearer when Moses was up here.)

After that we were going to go look at the Bethany beyond the Jordan site that some people think that Jesus was baptized in, but there is really no way of knowing exactly where that spot was. We actually drove up there, but the whole thing felt too much like a Egyptian tourist trap (even though we were in Jordan). A guy came up to us and told us that we had to take a shuttle to the site, that we couldn’t walk. He told us that he would be our guide, that the tour would take an hour and that the next shuttle would be there to get us in half an hour. The prospect of spending the next hour and a half at the mercy of our self appointed tour guide pretty much decided it for us so we turned around and left.

Then it was on to the Marriot at the Dead Sea. Once we got here our day pretty much ended. I won’t bore you with the details, but it mostly involved really good food, naps and sitting out on the patio looking at the sunset and then lightning storm (it actually rained a little bit.) Tomorrow we are headed off to Petra, which will take up pretty much the whole day (it’s a pretty long drive). Until then, thanks for reading.

Day 21 - Ben Guryion Airport

2010-01-16T20:28:00.000-08:00

Life is full of lessons. That sounds familiar to type so I wonder if I have mentioned it before. The lesson that I learned today is why you are supposed to get to the airport three hours early for an international flight.

It is currently 5:54 am in Jerusalem and I just got to my gate. I got here at 4:00 am. I bet I spent a total of 15 minutes waiting in line between walking in the front door and walking here, the rest of the time was spent talking to security people, running my bags through x-ray machines, having my bags checked and tested for explosives, finding out that I have a total weight limit for my luggage (and finding out that I am over it) and paying the overweight fee. The people here were really nice in an Israeli way. They are serious people, but they will smile a little bit if you are friendly and keep talking to them. Sometimes they will even chat back.

At the airport here you have to go through a security check (a person who checks through your passport and talks to you about why you were in Israel, a longer question and answer process for me than at other places.) After that you run all of your bags through an x-ray, then you go through a security check where they look through your bags and compare them to what the x-ray read. I’m not sure if this check is for everyone or just for me. During that time I found out that my cord for my laptop wasn’t able to travel with any of my bags, they put it in a separate box, and because of that box I had an Israeli security person who walked around with me for what I’m sure they thought would be a short trip but it ended up being a rather long one. When I went up and checked in they weighed all of my bags and told me that they were over the total weight limit (the counter lady was nice and knocked off a few extra kilos) and I told me that I had to check one of the bags I was going to carry on (it was too heavy) and that I needed to go pay the extra fee. Since I was going to check a new bag, I had to take that bag back to the security point and they needed to search it more thoroughly and give it a different security “ok”.

Then we went to the line where you pay the overweight fee (which wasn’t that much, $21), which actually had a pretty long line. At that point the guy who was escorting me and carrying the box with my computer cord in it checked his watch and realized that he was supposed to be somewhere else at that point, so he apologized (he was pretty friendly and actually pretty funny). Took me back to the security desk, where I waited a few minutes for someone else to be available to escort me around and carry the box with my computer cord. Lucky for me my new escort ended up being a cute girl who took me back to the “pay for being too heavy” line then over to the ticket counter where I could finally get my boarding pass. Then she walked me over to a big elevator where she waited to put on the box with my computer cord, gave me tips on where not to shop in the mall (unsolicited, I think she was warming up to me) then she sent me on my way.

After that it was just the regular security checks, bag checks, and passport checks until I got here to my gate.

This is a bit of a goodbye to Israel. I’ll be here for about seven hours when I fly back later this week (hopefully that will be enough time to make it through the airport security check and the El-Al security check.) Assuming that my computer cord arrives with me, my next post will be from the Dead Sea Marriot in Jordan. And I promise, that one will include pictures.

Day 20 - Last day in Israel

2010-01-16T19:51:00.000-08:00

Bad internet again last night. Good internet (fast and free) at the airport this morning though. Here is yesterday's post.

I write tonight with a heavier heart than usual. Today was the last day of our trip. A few hours ago I said goodbye to friends new and old and waved goodbye to the bus as it drove away. This has been an absolutely wonderful three weeks, I learned so much, I had a serious amount of fun, and I really enjoyed the people that I was fortunate enough to spend time with.

After the bus drove away Bill, who runs the program here in Israel that we went through, IBEX, invited me and Janette (another “deviator” like me, she is flying out to Greece in the morning) down to his house to sit and chat for a little while before we called it a night. We met his wife and one of their kids, and we met two of their spring semester students who just arrived today. Bill and his wife were incredibly friendly and hospitable, and Bill even gave me directions to see a really cool place in Jordan when I get there (the place where Jacob wrestled with God).

But enough for what went on tonight, I’ll give you the rundown of what our last day in Israel was like. This morning we had two tests, a test on the northern areas that we were in this week (Galilee and the other places up there) and our final, which was a regions and routes final. For the final Todd gave us a passage of scripture and we would look it up and then have to mark what region the event occurred in or what route the people took. I did well on the final and pretty well on the earlier test. I do make dumb mistakes on tests from time to time and I made one on the first test today. The first question was, “Caesarea was built by (blank).” I thought that was a strange question, but I answered it with what I thought the best answer was and put, “slaves.” The actual answer was Herod the Great, which makes a lot more sense than slaves.

After the tests we bussed into Jerusalem for our last free day in the Old City. We said goodbye to the world’s greatest bus driver, Joel, who has really taken care of us the last few weeks. He interpreted for us whenever we stopped for lunch, he helped us out with all kinds of extra things, he invited us to his house for dinner and he introduced us to his family. Joel, our Bedouin bus driver, was absolutely wonderful.

In the old city my friends Derek and Rebecca and I wandered around and actually got a fair amount done. First we went back to the church of the Holy Sepulcher, to spend a little bit more time taking the place in and thinking about what Jesus did there (that is where he probably died on the cross and rose from the dead.) It was good to spend more time there, it was kind of crowded but it was still good.

After that we went to lunch. We went to the same pizza place that we went to last week; it is in the Christian quarter of the old city and just makes great pizza. I don’t know when I will get a chance to have their Arabic Cheese pizza again (I’m not even sure what kind of cheese they use), so it was good to have it one more time.
After that we climbed to the top of the tower of the Lutheran church. It was another beautiful day, 70 degrees, brilliant blue skies with no clouds, so we had a great view of the city when we got to the top.

After that we did a little bit of shopping (actually the shopping lasted for a while) then Derek and I headed off to get one last look at the western wall, especially on Shabbat (Sabbath). It was still pretty early in the afternoon so it wasn’t very full yet, but as we stood there looking at the western wall and the temple mount we realized that the first night that we were in Jerusalem a bunch of us went over to the western wall and looked out at it from the same place we were looking at it. It was a good bookend to the trip to begin it and to end it by looking at the temple mount. There is so much history, so much passion, and so much tension tied up in the temple mount that in many ways looking at it is like looking at Israel. It reminds you of what this country used to be and what it is now and the different dynamics that have played out here over the millennia.
When we got back to the hotel we packed up, had dinner and then had our departure party. There were many more performances tonight, some that were absolutely amazing, especially a quartet that sang in Korean and English, they were unbelievably good.

After the party the goodbyes began. The first to leave were Todd, our teacher, and the Broscious family (husband, wife and two great boys) who were flying to Dallas. And after they left and the bus arrived it was time for the rest of the goodbyes.
And that was it for today. Tomorrow morning I have a 2:45 am wake up call, and need to be up by the reception desk by 3:15, and at 3:30 there will be a shared ride van (fortunately we’re the last stop) that will pick up Janette and I and take us to the airport. After that I’ll be off to Jordan for a few days to see dad and a few more sights before I head on home.

Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day 19 - travelling back down to Jerusalem

2010-01-15T20:35:00.000-08:00

I've had internet trouble the last few days so I haven't posted anything, but here is what I've typed up. I'm not going to upload any pictures yet, I want to get this stuff posted while my signal is still good.

Well today was our last study day in Israel. After a late start this morning (we didn’t have to leave until 8:30), we headed off to the Jordan river. We came up to a spot that is a kind of commercial spot where people can come and be baptized.

They say that it is near the location that Jesus was baptized, but our teacher Todd is pretty sure that it is too far north for that. I’m sure that the people who run the area that we went to wouldn’t be happy to hear that since they charge three dollars for a small bottle of “holy water” and six for a bigger bottle (the bigger bottle is probably about 8 oz.) The “holy water” is just water from that spot on the Jordan.

The Jordan river looked pretty small. In fact, it didn’t look much bigger than some of the streams that were headwaters of the Jordan. I think that is mainly because the Sea of Galilee is the main freshwater reservoir for Israel, so they take a lot of water out of it and not as much ends up in the Jordan. Although in Biblical times the Jordan wasn’t the most imposing river either. It was never as impressive as the Nile or the Euphrates, but because it runs along a fault line, it runs in a really narrow canyon that in some places are really impassable. So even if it is not imposing, it is still a pretty substantial barrier.

After the Jordan River we went to Beth Shan, which was known as Scythopolis in Jesus time. It was a pretty big and pretty impressive Greek city in Jesus time, it was part of a bunch of Greek cities in the area that were called the Decapolis. It’s funny, after all that time that I spent in Turkey Greece and Rome last year, I feel a little bit like the Greek/Roman city designs are old hat for me. I was definitely more worried about our Beauty and the Beast performance that we did in the theater there than I was about taking notes when we were in the teaching part. The city was cool, it was familiar in some ways, it was pretty big, and even though it was in ruins they have reconstructed enough of it to get a feel for how impressive the city would have been before it was destroyed by a big earthquake.

Our performance in the theater went well. There were five of us and everyone who wasn’t Belle played a bunch of different parts. I have sung the Gaston parts from Beauty and the Beast in the shower plenty of times so I had my Gaston voice down when I was him. It was fun, everyone seemed to enjoy it, and I’m glad it’s over and I don’t have to do it again. I spent most of the morning before our performance wondering if I had caught the stomach flu that has been going around or if I was just nervous. Turns out I was just nervous. I felt fine after we were done.
After Beth Shan we went to Ein Harod, which is the spring that Gideon brought his men to when his army dropped from 10,000 men to 300 men. It used to be bigger, I guess there used to be a lake there. Now it is just a little stream, somehow they control how much water runs out through the stream so that there can be a nice park around the spring and not a swamp like there used to be.

And that was it for what we did today. After Ein Harod we drove back to Jerusalem, to Yad Hashmona, where my camera was waiting for me and we checked in for our last night as a group together in Israel. Most everyone else leaves tomorrow night at midnight. I leave at 7:00 am two days from now to meet up with Dad in Jordan for a few days before I head back to the states on the 21st.

Day 18 - The Sea of Galilee

2010-01-15T20:31:00.000-08:00

I've had internet trouble the last few days so I haven't posted anything, but here is what I've typed up. I'm not going to upload any pictures yet, I want to get this stuff posted while my signal is still good.

Well, today’s is a little bit late, sorry. As some of you might now from me telling you about our last trip, when we visit a theater (ancient theater), some of the people on the trip perform, singing, a play, reading poetry, things like that. Well last night at dinner (it’s morning here now) someone mentioned that they wanted to do the opening song from Beauty and the Beast, but only if I would sing the Gaston part. Not completely in my right mind, I replied, “absolutely, let’s do it.” So I spent most of the time that I would have written or posted last night practicing. I am wondering a little bit what I was thinking when I agreed to sing, by myself, in front of people.

Sickness is still going around some, we had more people throw up a few night nights ago and yesterday three or four people stayed home. Which is too bad because yesterday was a really cool day. We spent all of our time around the Sea of Galilee, in places that Jesus visited or in places where people think that he visited.

A quick itinerary for yesterday is: The sowers cove (where Jesus may have given the parable of the sower), Capernaum (where Jesus lived during his ministry years), the Mt. of Beatitudes (the traditional site of the sermon on the mount), Tiberius, the Jesus boat (a boat that was found that is from the time of Jesus. It is a fishing boat from the first century AD and the same size boat that Jesus and his disciples would have used. Chances are it wasn’t their boat though.), a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee (not on the Jesus boat), a place that is probably not Bethsaida, and a place where the pigs didn’t run down the mountainside and into the sea when Jesus sent demons into them.

After that we had a fish dinner (I had cheese pizza) at a restaurant down by the sea. In between our getting back to our place and dinner, I took a quick swim in the Sea of Galilee, I didn’t stay up top when I tried to walk, I sunk right down, but it was really cool. I’ll mention that later.
After dinner we had a worship service down on the beach by the water and then it was Beauty and the Beast rehearsal time for a few hours.
That’s all I have time for today, I’ll try to come back and fill out a little of what we did in some of the places later (the sower’s cove, Mt. of Beatitudes, Capernaum and swimming) as well as add a few pictures. Only two days left in Israel then I’m off to Jordan for a few days to see dad.

As always, thanks for reading.

Day 17 - Rosh Pinna Sill, Huleh Basin, and the Golan Heights

2010-01-13T11:33:00.000-08:00

Wow, today was a busy day. Unfortunately, no pictures today, I took some good ones, but the girl whose camera I’m using sometimes has a bit of a stomach bug so I didn’t get the memory card from her today. We had three or four people who threw up last night, if you could pray for them and for the rest of us I would appreciate it. It would be a bummer for everyone to be throwing up on the plane-ride home. I’ll try to post some pictures to today when I get them. Anyway back to our busy day. Here is the itinerary that our teacher Todd gave us when we got on the bus today.
- Chorazin
- Hazor
- Lebanon boarder crossing (just to look at, not cross)
- Lunch
- Dan
- Caesarea Philippi
- Slopes of Mt. Hermon
- The Golan Heights near the Syrian boarder

It was a full day but we fit everything in. It is interesting, these places (except for Chorazin) were all places that were up in the northernmost part of the country, and some of them were only mentioned in the bible a few times. Chorazin and Caeserea Philippi were only mentioned once each, and although Hazor was an incredibly massive city it didn’t play as big a role as many of the cities down south.

Chorazin sits near the shores of the sea of Galilee. I think it’s only reference is when Jesus says, “Woe to you Chorazin! woe to you Bethsaida! For if the mighty works that were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes.” Chorazin seems to have been a city that was part of the region where Jesus spent a large amount of time during his ministry. The most striking thing about Chrorazin is that all of the buildings are made out of basalt, a black volcanic stone. There some extinct volcanoes in the upper Galilee region and in the Golan Heights, and as a result of that there is a lot of black volcanic rock around here that people used to build their cities with.

After Chorazin was Hazor. Hazor maybe the largest Canaanite city in the promised land during the time of Joshua’s conquest. Its tel is massive, something like 200 acres, but only a small part of that is excavated. One of the cool things that we saw at Hazor, is something that we saw at Gezer and at Megiddo, city gates. It says in the Bible that there are three cities that Solomon fortified, Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer. At all three of these cities archeologists have found gates in the walls that are all triple chamber gates (if you care enough about what those are, ask me when I get home) of a similar design and they pretty much have the same dimensions. And they all date from the same time, Solomon’s time. It’s cool to see archeology match up with what we know from the Bible, and it is cool to see an expansion of what was meant when it says Solomon fortified those towns. At least part of it involved fortifying the walls and making the gates more defensible.

After Hazor we went up to the northern most tip of Israel and looked out at a couple of sites that we couldn’t drive to because they were in Lebanon. The northern part if Israel is really pretty, as is the southern part of Lebanon. Most of Israel has been really green in the time that we were here, I guess that is because January is part of the rainy season (it rained a little bit today). In the summer a lot of the green fields and hills that we see will be brown, but I think that some of the places that we saw today are green year round.

For lunch I had Macdonalds, part of the reason was because the back patio of this Macdonalds sits just beyond one of the three source springs of the Jordan river. Most of the springs that I know about are little mountains springs in Colorado that are just little trickles. These springs that are the source for the Jordan are like small rivers in themselves. For anyone who has been to Lake City, the river that came from the spring near this Macdonalds is about the size of Henson Creek.

The next place we went to, Dan, is a city that was built near the largest source of the Jordan River. In fact the spring there is the largest spring of its kind in the middle east, it pumps out 240 million cubic feet of water a year. The area of Dan was absolutely beautiful. It had a river running right through the tel (thanks to the spring), and was surrounded by a thick forest of Oak trees and the ground was heavy with green vegetation.

Dan is the city that belonged to the tribe of Dan. Dan was the tribe of Samson, their tribal allotment was down in the Shephelah, but they weren’t able to run the Philistines out of the land so they decided to go look for somewhere new, they found a city in the northernmost part of the promised land, that had lots of water, great natural resources, and was kind of isolated from any neighbors so they decided to go up there, kill everyone and live there. On their way up there they decided to bring some idols up there with them so that they could have their own gods to worship when they got there.

After Solomon died and God split the kingdom into two, the ten tribes in the North and the two tribes in the south, Jeraboam (king in the north) was afraid that if people went to Israel to worship they would turn against him so he made two golden calves for the Israelites of the northern kingdom to worship, put one in Bethel and put one in Dan. Archeologists have found the high place in Dan where the golden calf was and even part of the altar that they made sacrifices on. They reconstructed the altar out of a metal frame and it is gigantic. I measured it out and it is about sixteen feet wide, sixteen feet long and eight feet tall.

After Dan we went to Caesarea Philippi. The only mention of Caesarea Philippi in the Bible is when it says that Jesus was in the region of Caesarea Philippi when Jesus went up on a mountain with Peter, James, and John and the transfiguration happened. The mountain near Caesarea Philippi is Mt. Herman. It is the largest mountain in Israel and is snow capped year round. Caesarea Philippi is also the home of the third source spring of the Jordan. The spring used to come right out of a cave so people built a bunch of pagan temples there to different gods, in the cave they worshiped Pan, god of the wild places, and there is some evidence that there were some human sacrifices that went on there. It rained when we were there, but it was really beautiful there, at the base of Mt. Herman. I got some great pictures of the river there. I even saw some fish rise on the river there and I skipped a going to the bathroom to try to get a better look at them but I wasn’t ever able to get a good look at them.

After Caesarea Philippi we stopped for a great view (the rain had stopped) in the Golan heights, then we drove out and looked down on the Syrian border from the Golan Heights. At that point we were only 35 miles from Damascus. We were actually looking along the direction that the road would have gone when Paul was travelling to Damascus. We read the story of Jesus appearing to Paul on his trip and then we got on the bus and headed back to our resort on the Sea of Galilee. No swimming/attempting to walk on water for me today, it was too cold today, but don’t worry, I’ll try it before we leave.

In case you are interested, today’s mystery candies were, a chocolate bar that was filled with pop rocks, and some kind of red, yellow, green and white candy that when you ate it felt like a mouth full of sugar but not as good.

Tomorrow we will be around the Sea of Galilee (and even on it for a while). Until then, thanks for reading.

Day 16 - The Jezreel Valley and Nazareth

2010-01-12T09:55:00.001-08:00

While yesterday started out poorly, today started out well. We got a call from Yad HaShmona saying that they have my camera and they will hold onto it for me so I can get it when we get back there on Friday. That was very good news.

In the meantime, one of the girls on our trip has let me borrow her camera from time to time so that I can take some picture while we are up here in the north.

Today we stayed pretty focused on the Jezreel valley. What is important about the Jezreel valley you ask? Ok, I’ll tell you. The Jezreel valley is a kind of giant crossroads in Israel, anyone going north or south to Egypt, to Mesopotamia, to Damascus, to Greece will pass through the Jezreel valley. There were a ton of important stuff that happened in the Jezreel valley. It is where Saul went to visit the witch of en-dor, it is where Saul fought his last battle and committed suicide, it is where Ahab’s body ended up and dogs licked up his blood, it is where Jezabel was thrown from the window of a tower and was eaten by dogs, it is where Deborah and Baruk (book of Judges) defeated one of the –ites that were oppressing Israel. It is where Gideon was from, and where all the Gideon stuff happened. It is where Elisha raised a woman’s son from the dead, and it is where Jesus raised a widow’s son from the dead. It also sits between Mt. Carmel (where Elijah faced off against the prophets of Ba’al, and the Nazareth ridge, where (you guessed it) Nazareth is.

(In the courtyard to what may have been the stables in Mediggo)

Our first stop today was Megiddo (Armageddon means mountains of Megiddo) Megiddo is the city that guards the best pass through the Mt. Carmel range, but also the narrowest pass. We looked at some different stuff from Ahab’s time and from Solomon’s time at Megiddo, and we looked out at the valley of Jezreel and about the different routes that ran through the valley.

After that we went to the city of Jezreel, which is where Jezebel was when her eunics threw her out of a window and dogs ate her. There isn’t much that is visible on the tel (hill that the city is buried under), but we looked out at the valley and talked about the story of Jezebel and Ahab and how they met their demise.

(Looking into the Jezreel valley from Jezreel. Is this what you expected when you thought of the area where Jezebel was thrown from a tower and dogs licked up Ahab's blood?)

It’s funny, I had a comic book Bible when I was a kid that I loved and read a lot. In fact I think that I learned a lot of Bible stories from that comic book Bible. And the story of Ahab and Jezabel were so vivid that I still remember the pictures of dogs lapping up Ahab’s blood and Jezebel getting thrown out of a window. Even though it was for kids they didn’t pull any punches.

After Jezreel we went to lunch, which was pretty good. I have had a request to talk about the food so I will mention a few things here. Honestly the food in Israel is ok. We have had some good stuff to eat at most of the hotels that we’ve stayed in, but we have also had some stuff that was not great. In some ways it is thoroughly Middle Eastern, lots of hard boiled eggs, cucumbers, flat bread and hummus. Most places are Kosher which means no pork and no meat and cheese together (it probably means other things too.) The deserts have been more western, which has surprised me. I expected a lot of baklava, and a lot of honey and nut based desserts, but we have had a lot of chocolate desserts, there has been this cheese thing with honey that I don’t remember the name (but is good) that we have had a couple of times.
In Jerusalem there was a really good pizza place (not kosher) where we had Arabic cheese pizza, which tasted like it was a kind of feta that melted, and a meat pizza, which was like salami and turkey and roast beef.

At Joel’s house yesterday we had little homemade pizzas from a fire oven in the backyard that were made on homemade flat bread, and then you put hummus and tabouli on top.

But far and wide, the most popular food has been Magnums. Whenever we stop at a convenience store or gas station, someone gets on the bus with a Magnum. What is a Magnum? A Magnum is an ice cream bar coated in chocolate. They use good ice cream and good chocolate and sometimes add in fruit or other things. The best one that I had was pretty simple. It was a dark chocolate coating with vanilla ice cream and it was delicious (I had that one at the dead sea). I have also had one that was chocolate outside with chocolate inside and chocolate chunks in the chocolate ice cream. I had one that was called Magnum desire (you have to say desire in a whisper) that was not what I expected, it was white chocolate outside with strawberry icecream, chunks of cherries and raspberry swirl (that one was a little much for me), and I’ve had a plain milk chocolate and ice cream one. Perhaps the most fun food thing has been mystery candy on the afternoon in the bus. On days where we stop and there is a convieniance store I have started to by candy or snack food where the wrapper is completely in Hebrew and the picture gives you no idea of what it is. Then at some point (usually in the afternoon) I open it up and pass it around to the eight or ten people around me count to three and then we all eat it at the same time. Today’s mystery candy ended up tasting like crunch berries from Capitan Crunch. We all kind of wished that we had milk with us.

(Me standing in front of Nazareth.)

Ok, back to our day. After lunch we went to Nazareth. We didn’t spend much time in the city, what was a small village in Jesus time is now a pretty large city. We went up on a hill that overlooked the city and the valley and talked about a couple of stories that happened there.

After Nazareth we went up to an outlook that overlooked the Sea of Galilee. We didn’t do any teaching up there today but we did take out our atlases and find the major points of interest around the sea of Galilee. Then we hiked down from the ridge in a pretty fun hike, some of which was on steep enough and narrow enough trails that they required hand holds for large portions. Then we came to our hotel for the next three days, the En Gev Resort right on the sea of Galilee. Our back door actually opens up out to the sea. I haven’t tried to walk on it yet, I’m hoping that tomorrow we get back with a little bit of light left and I’ll give it a shot then.

(The sea of Galilee)

Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day 15 - The Sharon Plain and Mt. Carmel

2010-01-11T21:39:00.000-08:00

Today started out poorly. I left my camera in the restaurant of our last hotel we stayed at, Yad HaShmona. I realized it pretty quickly, and we called them to let them know (we will be back there at the end of the week so I could get it then). But that does mean that even if they do find it (which hopefully they will, it’s a Christian community there) I won’t have it for Galilee, which is a bummer. One of the girls on the trip has told me that I could use her camera to take some pictures and I think I will take her up on that. At first I thought it would be silly to use someone else’s camera, but not having my camera today I know that even though I can get pictures that other people took, I want some that I take on my own.

Today was a relatively light day, we had three major stops.
Our first stop was in Aphek. Aphek is a city whose name doesn’t come up a lot in the Bible, but it is a city that has a lot of importance. There was one major international highway that ran through the coastal areas and plains of Israel, it was the highway that connected Egypt to Mesopotamia and to Greece. This highway had two branches, and those branches merged into one branch at Aphek. So even though there were only a few stories that mentioned Aphek it was a city that had a lot of importance to Israel, and it was a city that a lot of Biblical people travelled through to get to their destinations.

After Aphek we visited Caesarea. Caesarea was built by Herod the Great on a sandy beach with no harbor. He built a massive harbor out into the ocean and then built a city to match it. It is pretty incredible to repeatedly see the amazing things that Herod built. Caesarea had no natural harbor, and after Herod built the city, it had a harbor as large as the harbor in Athens.

Caesarea was a city where a lot of stuff happened in Acts. It was where Cornelius the Centurion lived, who was the first gentile to become a Christian (Peter came to his house after he had the vision from God saying, “take up and eat…” it was also the city where Herod Agrippa was hailed as a god and when he did not give God credit he was struck down and died. And it was the city where Paul was imprisoned for two years waiting for a trial and then eventually appealed his case to Caesar and sailed for Rome.

After we left Caesarea we drove up to Mt. Carmel, which is where Elijah had his showdown with the prophets of Baal. It was cool to read that story sitting up on the mountain, around what may be the area where it happened.
After that we went over to our driver, Yo-el’s house for dinner. His in-laws made little Arabic pizza’s for us and we had hummus and tabulie. Then we came inside and drank tea (we had Arabic coffee with dinner) and sat around and talked. It was really kind of him and his family to make time (and room) for us, and it was a good time.

Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day 14 - Biblical Nature Reserve and the Maresha Archeological dig

2010-01-10T13:02:00.000-08:00

The internet is really slow again today so I’m not going to try to post any pictures. Hopefully it will be faster next time.

Today was kind of a bonus day that we fit in between our time last week in the south and next week (this week I guess) in the north. Today we spent most of the day in the Shephelah, (the area where Samson did a lot of stuff and where David fought Goliath).

First we went to a place that is a Biblical nature reserve. That means that they try to make their land in the nature reserve look like the land would have looked back in Biblical times. The only plants that they have are plants that are mentioned in the Bible, and they show the different ways that agriculture was done (vineyards, olive trees, wheat, barley, figs, dates, and pomegranates) and how they were harvested. So we saw an old fashioned wine press and guard tower, olive press and threshing floor. It was actually pretty cool, the nature reserve was gorgeous, and it was really cool to see the different tools and methods that they used in farming. The lady that we had giving us a tour was really good, and she tied a lot of the stuff she was talking about into Biblical stories and parables and even into stuff that Jesus said, which was surprising to me because I’m pretty sure that she is Jewish.

After that there was a Torah scribe at the place that showed us the process that Torah scribes go through when they write the Torah Scrolls (There are some things that scrolls are still used for.)

Then we made a mad dash for Gath of the Philistines (where Goliath was from) and we just had time to take a picture (which is a bummer because it was a really big tel, and it would have been fun to be able to walk around it for a while.
After Gath we went to our last stop, the Archeological site of Maresha. At Maresha we met an Archeologist who gave us a little introduction to the site and then took us down into the caves where they were digging. The caves at Maresha are kind of an ancient garbage dump from 2200 years ago (some people were run out of the city so they tore down their houses and dumped them into these caves which were their basements.) Because the caves are kind of like dumps, you can give 45 people a trowel and a little pickaxe and tell them to start digging. So after telling us a little bit about how to dig and what to look for we started digging. It was really, really cool. Most of what we found was pottery although someone did find a ring (which was a pretty big deal). I found a lot of pottery, some bones, and a building stone (a stone that was used in to build a house). I thought the stone was pretty important, but it turns out that it wasn’t, it was still cool to find though. After we dug for about an hour we brought the buckets of dirt that we dug up to the surface (as well as our buckets of finds), then we sifted through the buckets of dirt to find stuff that we missed. Mostly we found more pottery and bones (animal bones, from a dinner 2200 years ago), but it was still fun. The Archeologist that we were working with (or for) told us that you can actually take the bones (fish bones for instance) and send them into a museum, where someone can tell you what kind of fish the bone came from. And if you know what kind of fish then that can tell you different things about the city. If it is a fish that lives only in the Nile River in Egypt, and you find it’s bones in a city in Israel, then you know that it was a city that had some major trade connections.

After digging and sifting we went through a cave system that hasn’t been excavated yet to see what it looked like. It was really fun even though we had to squeeze through some pretty tight spots. The Archeoligist, Ian, was passing info about the caves back along the line of people (we had to go single file) and when we got to the end I started passing back some fake info to people about what the last room was, that was pretty fun.

After our mini-dig (I think I could have done the digging part for another three or four hours, the thrill of exploration and discovery was pretty high) we came back to Yad HaShmona, had dinner, and then had a preview lecture for our last week, which is in the North. Tomorrow morning we set out and we will spend the night at the base of Mt. Carmel (think Elijah and the prophets of Baal). We may or may not have the internet tomorrow. If we do hopefully it is faster than it has been here the last few nights and I can get some pictures up. If not then my next post will be in two days from the Sea of Galilee. As always, thanks for reading.

Day 13 - Free Day in Jerusalem

2010-01-09T11:33:00.000-08:00

I'm having internet trouble tonight so I'm not going to post any pictures. I'll try to post some particularly good ones tomorrow to make up for it.

Today was a free day, so it was a pretty light day. We had a test this morning, then we went off to church in Jerusalem (did I mention that we were back n Jerusalem?) The church service was cool, it was in Hebrew and translated into English, and then there were a number of different languages that it was translated into as well.

Worship was really cool, they led worship in Hebrew, and had the words projected up in Hebrew and in English, and some of the songs were songs that we knew so we were able to sing in English while they sang in Hebrew. For some of the other songs it was harder to sing along in English because I didn’t know the songs so I sang along in Hebrew.

Part of the way through the service I realized that I was in Jerusalem, singing with believers from a bunch of different countries, singing in a bunch of different languages and we were praising God in his eternal city. We were praising Jesus for his sacrifice for our sins in the same city that he died on the cross and rose from the dead. It was awesome.

After that we headed into the city for our free day. I took a look at a first century, rolling rock tomb (like Jesus was buried in). Then I had lunch at a pizza place in the Christian Quarter that was really good. Then I headed over to the Garden Tomb, which is a really nice pretty place but isn’t where Jesus was buried. Some people think that it is the place, and it is a lot more appealing to our ideas of what the area around the tomb would look like, but the tomb is too old, it was dug sometime in the 700’s BC, and Jesus was buried in a new tomb. But it was still a nice place, I think I would hang out there if I lived in Jerusalem, it was quiet and calm and cool. (by the way, we have had about seven days in a row of perfect weather, we’ve had sun every day and just perfect temperatures. It has been really nice)

After I left the garden tomb I headed up with a guy and we looked for (and found) the visible remains of the “3rd wall” of Jerusalem that was built sometime in 41-44 AD. It was in a neighborhood in East Jerusalem (which is the Arab part of Jerusalem) and the wall is just out in the sidewalk in front of the gas station. After we looked at the wall, we took some pictures and then talked about some different parts of it for a little bit (comparing a section that looks like solid stone to a section that looked like it was filled with stones and concrete.) When we were walking away I saw an Arab family who had watched us go over and look at the stones sticking out of the sidewalk and try to figure out why we found them so interesting.

After that I went with some people to the souvenir shops in the Arab Quarter of the old city. I didn’t see anything that I liked although I did think about buying some t-shirts so I wouldn’t have to do laundry tonight. (the nice weather has thrown off my wardrobe a bit, I only packed two t-shirts) I decided against getting anything though. But while I was waiting for a few of the girls outside the ship was witness to a shop keeper pulling out all the stops to sell a different girl on the our trip anything from his store. The high point (or low point) came when he held up a dancing girl outfit and said, “you are size sexy, you should buy this.” She did have enough self control to walk away before she punched him.

And that was it for today, it was nice to have a day where we didn’t have to do anything or study anything. I am pretty excited about the prospect of going to bed early tonight also. Tomorrow we are going to a Biblical garden (They have all the different plants that are mentioned in the Bible and also talk about the agrarian lifestyle that was pretty prevalent throughout Bible times. We are also making a short stop at Gath (where Goliath was from) and we are going to a city in the Shephelah where we will spend the afternoon excavating at an archeological dig. Then we are back to Yad HaShmona (where we are staying near Jerusalem) for one more night before we head up north to Galilee. Until Tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day 12 - The Dead Sea

2010-01-08T11:14:00.000-08:00

Whew, what a day! we had a busy day, and one that was suprisingly physical. But I do have a test tommorow and I have used up a good chunk of time posting the rest of our Sinai trip and talking about what we did yesteray (scroll down to see) so I will try to make this fast.

Today we hiked up Masada, we went to the En Gedi Oasis, we floated in the Dead Sea, and we went to Qumran, which is where the dead sea scrolls were found. I'll try to make a couple of quick notes about each of these stops.

Masada. Masada is one of the three major fortresses that Herod the Great built, but that is not what makes it famous. It is famous because it was the last place standing during the Jewish revolt of 66-73 AD. Jerusalem fell and the temple was destroyed by 70 AD but Masada held out for three more years. That was mainly dependant to the fact that Masada is probably one of the best fortresses ever built. It is built on top of a 1000 foot tall mountain that has steep cliffs on all sides. The water system is desigined to catch water from all of the sourrounding areas and the cisterns are so large that they can hold enough water for years. Food can be grown there and the store rooms are so massive that even after three years of a siege the Jews that were there had pleanty of food (and water) left over. The only reason Masada fell was because the Romans built a massive siege ramp that came up on one side of Masada and eventually burned down part of the wall (stone fortified with wood to protect against a battering ram). When the wall burned down and it was clear that the Romans would breach the wall and take Masada in the morning, 960 of the 967 Jews that were there committed suicide rather than being captured and taken into slavery by the Romans. Two women and five children hid and survived.

We hiked up Masada to see the sunrise, unfortunately I forgot my camera (it was early and I was pretty tired) so I don't have any pictures, but watching the sun rise over the dead sea was pretty awesome. After our time there in the morning a few of us decided that it would be fun to jog down the Masada to the base (there were a lot of stairs) so we made it down in about 15 minutes, which was really fun.

After Masada we went to the En Gedi Oasis. David probably hid from Saul at some point in the En Gedi Oasis. In fact, the cave where David cut off part of Saul's cloak may have been somewhere in En Gedi. We hiked back into the canyon to one of the big waterfalls and then we hiked back out. This hike was pretty easy (Masada had a pretty tough staircase at the end), partly because it was reall crowded so we couldn't move that fast.

(The big waterfall at En Gedi)

(the dead sea from En Gedi oasis)

After En Gedi we crossed the street, ate lunch and then swam in the dead sea. I'm not sure if swam is the right word, floated is probably more accurate. It is a really strange feeling, you cannot sink. The water acutally has a denser mineral content than the human body does (the water is 30-35% solid matter) so when you dip into it, you just float. You do need to be careful though, you don't want to get it in your eyes, it apparently burns so badly that some people absolutely freak out. The water is beautiful, and apparently has healing qualities, there are some skin conditions that can be cured by regular soakings in the dead sea. I got some on my lips though, and it tasted pretty gross. In fact, even though I took a shower after I got out my hands still felt wierd and tasted like salt for the rest of the day.

(The lowest point on earth, the dead sea. About 1300 feet below sea level)

After the dead sea we went to Qumran. Qumran is a community that existed during the new testament time of these people who seperated themselves from society because of a desire to stay pure from the corruption that existed in some places. We are not exactly sure, but for some reason there were 11 caves around their community that were found that were full of scrolls (mostly pieces of scrolls) over 900 scrolls were found, and among other things they found every book of the Old Testament (except Esther) and the copies that they found were about 1000 years older than the oldest copy of the Old Testament that we have. And they are almost exactly the same. You have heard of these scrolls, they are the dead sea scrolls.

After we left Qumran we made a bonus stop, which ended up being one of the coolest bonus stops ever. Our teacher, Todd is one of the few people who know where cave 1 is, where they discovered the first dead sea scroll (also the cave where they discovered a complete copy of hte book of Isaiah - a really big deal). And as Todd said today, he is the only person who is crazy enough to take people up to the cave. So after telling us that the way to the cave was dangerous, difficult, dangerous, and hard, about 30 people decided to follow him up to the cave. The terrain is pretty tough getting over there, up and down wadi's, rocks everywhere, really sharp rocks that you have to climb up in order to get to the cave. When we left the bus Todd looked back and saw how many people were following him and he started to run up and down the wadis. I'm pretty sure he was trying to disuade people from coming with him but everyone kept following (although by this point my legs were pretty shot. I can hike pretty fast if I need to, even up hills and stairs, but running up these sandy wadis was really tough).

The cave was cool, there was nothing special about it other than it was cave 1Q, but it was way cool to be able to be one of the few people in the world who have been there where that important discovery was made.

(me inside cave one)

And that was it for our day. I really good day, a lot of hiking and a lot of fun, and I am looking forward to having more of a down day tomorrow in Jerusalem (free day). Time for me to study. Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day Eleven - The Aravah

2010-01-08T10:47:00.000-08:00

I never realized how much I wanted to go to a Crocodile farm until I wasn’t able to go to one today.

Today was a pretty easy day for us, which was nice. Our focus today was on the southern part of the Aravah, which is the Jordan rift valley between the Dead sea and the Red Sea (gulf of Elat/Aqaba branch) or as I like to call it, "the dead to the red." We were still in recovery mode from Sinai and the late night we had coming across the border so we got to sleep in a little bit and we started our day with snorkeling in the Red Sea in Elat.

The snorkeling was fun, we only went for about an hour and a half, but I saw some cool fish and the water felt great (it was about 74 degrees). After snorkeling we went off to see a life size model of the Tabernacle. I was surprised at how small it was, it was a large tent, but it was still just a tent. It was good to see that and get a feel for what that would have been like for the Israelites to worship God there.

(life size model of the tabernacle)

After the tabernacle we went to this dairy kibbutz (a kibbutz is an Israeli commune, there were a bunch of them in the sixties and seventies but there are a lot fewer now) that is supposed to have the world’s greatest chocolate milk and had lunch. The chocolate milk was really good, as was the ice cream.

After that we made a few more small stops, where we talked about and looked at some ancient trade routes. Far and away the most exciting thing about this place was the fact that there were two things on the sign that pointed in the direction of our destination. One said Tamar (where we went) and the other said “Crocodile Farm”. I have never really had the urge to go to a crocodile farm until that moment, where I was pretty sure that there wasn’t anything that I wanted more than to go to a crocodile farm. We didn’t go there, but out teacher Todd did ask us if we wanted to go to a “bonus” stop after that, I was really hoping for the Crocodile farm at that point, but our bonus was a trade route that they only found a few years ago, the Ascent of Aqrabim.

(The Ascent of Aqrabim, does it look like it goes over a hill that is nothing but rocks? Because it did.)

And then we called it a day and drove up the Masada guest house where we are staying tonight. It was a pretty light day, but we spent a lot of time on the bus, and a few of us went for a little hike at one of the ancient routes we looked at (the ascent of scorpions) which really hurt at first (my legs were sore from Sinai), but helped my legs to feel a lot better now. Which is good because I am hiking up Masada tomorrow to watch the sunrise over the dead sea.

Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day Ten - Sinai part 2

2010-01-08T09:59:00.000-08:00

Here is the second part of our day in Sinai, it's long, but what can I say, stuff happens in Egypt.

…When Dad and I walked it a few years ago we walked the camel path, the path or repentance is a set of stairs that were built into the mountain by a monk. It is supposed to be harder, but shorter, and it is hard to find. Dad and I couldn’t find it, and I don’t think I would have found it yesterday if I had been alone.

Our teacher, Todd, had been telling us how hard the hike would be, warning people against the path of repentance, and even the camel path if they thought they might have trouble. His warnings didn’t work, there were about 25-30 people who decided to go with him. I was one of those 25-30, I had already done the camel path and wanted to go up the other way but I was really nervous because Todd can set a pretty grueling pace. Well fortunately Todd wasn’t leading us up the trail, that honor fell to Osama, our Egyptian tour guide. Now I hadn’t had the best experience with Egyptian tour-guides in the past (in Alexandria we had a tour guide who consistently used the F-word when talking to me and my mom because he thought that was how Americans talked. Amazingly that was one of his better traits.) So I (perhaps unfairly) carried some bias against Osama into our experience with him. It wasn’t really helped by the fact that it was required for our group to have four members of the tour company with us, a driver and a guide (that is normal), a police officer (who was carrying an uzi machine gun under a suit coat), and a “company representative.” We also stopped for a bathroom stop and were encouraged to spend 20 minutes or so shopping and drinking coffee or tea at a place that charged seven dollars for a can of coke. And when we got to Sinai (and St. Catherine’s Monastery) we were somehow herded away from two different bathrooms, either because they were too small or we were in a hurry only to find ourselves at a bathroom that charged for entrance (the other two were free).

(heading up the path of repentance)

(Osama at the first of many breaks)

So you will have to forgive my skepticism when I wondered if Osama would even be able to find our way up the staircase that is the path of repentance to the top of Mt. Sinai. He did know the way but he was certainly not prepared physically to hike it. We actually began to time him, our typical pace would be to hike for nine minutes, and then rest for seven. Unfortunately there were a few people who were really having difficulty with this pace, so Todd went back to try to help them keep up (one ended up heading back down them mountain.) We stayed with Osama a little bit longer, then he told us that we could go on ahead without him, which was nice. With Osama our first fifteen hundred stairs took an hour, without him our next fifteen hundred steps took thirty minutes. We stopped at a place called Elijah’s hollow. It is the place where tradition says that Elijah hid and then heard God in a still small voice. Todd taught us there for a little while and then everyone took the last 750 stairs to the top. I remembered these stairs being difficult (they are the only way up there) and they were. The way of repentance wasn’t actually too difficult (although I am sure that some of that had to do with resting as much as we were walking). But these last steps were hard, definitely the hardest part of the hike.

(the chapel at the top of mt. Sinai)

The weather was great it was just a little chilly at the top (7500 feet), and we could see forever. After spending some time up there and reading some stuff from Exodus, we headed back down the mountain, hoping to make it down before dark.

(the sun setting over the mountians in Southen Sinai)

We did not make it down before dark. The group got pretty spread out on the way down, there were two people in particular who were having a difficult time descending. One of them fell and bruised a rib which slowed them down further than they would have been. And there were a few other people with knee or other problems that slowed them down. So we pretty much came down in four groups, the fast healthy group and then three groups with people who were ailing or healthy people who were helping those who were ailing (carrying bags, holding on to arms, giving support). I moved around between some of the ailing groups at first, trying to see where I could help (I felt fine). I ended up with the person who fell and bruised their rib. I carried a backpack, tried to keep watch in case of another fall (there were two people helping to support the arms), and when darkness came I tried to keep the path well lit for everyone with a flashlight. We were the first of the walking wounded to arrive at the bottom and we probably walked for an 30-45 min in pitch black darkness on the descent.

The amazing thing was the fact that as we were walking down in the dark, a Bedouin who kind of helped to guide us popped out of nowhere, having just come down the side of the mountain, not using any trail I could see in total darkness without any light, and showed us a few “short-cut” paths so that we could get down quicker. (He was a character in himself, I could write more about him, but I’ll just say that when we were getting ready to break up into groups and hike up the mountain there was a guy who was walking through our group begging for food. I was wondering who he was until Osama introduced him as the guy who would guide the people who were walking the camel path up the mountain. In case you were wondering that put our total up to five “guides”: a driver, a guide, a police officer dressed in a suit carrying an uzi, a company representative, and a Bedouin who hiked up the mountain smoking a cigarette and hiked down in the dark with no path and no light.)
After we reached the bottom we still waited for almost another hour for the final group to come down. The stars were beautiful there. I laid back and looked at them as we waited. I can’t think of any way to describe what the milky way looked like, it was amazing.

The bus ride back to Israel was awful. Everyone was tired, I was afraid because we were driving in Egypt after dark. And there was something wrong with floor in the back of the bus. The bus was the same design as the one we have here in Israel, but in Egypt the floor was hot to the touch, and I’m pretty sure it was leaking exhaust fumes. Unfortunately I was sitting in the back so the ride was hot and miserable.
When we finally reached the border we got through the Egyptian side pretty quickly, but the Israel side took a couple of hours. Nobody detained this time but they were training someone on the ex-ray machine and computer that was connected to the machine took a while. At first I was upset that it was taking so long, I was tired and hungry (it was about 11:00pm at this point and we hadn’t had any dinner), but when I finally went through and saw what was going on I actually didn’t mind. I had seen them take forever to scan bags, sending them through more than one time, and when they got to my bag they scanned it, then a lady looked through it, took out my books, then sent it through the machine again. I could see the people looking at the x-ray image on the computer, pointing out each thing and talking about it, and then when they were done they gave me my bag and sent me through. It was inconvenient, but at least what they were doing made sense. They were working very hard to keep their country safe. It was inconvenient, but I understood what they were doing and I respect it. They care and they were doing things the right way.

It was such a contrast to Egypt, where it seems like no one does anything the right way and you spend a lot of time wondering what it is that people care about.
We finally made it to the hotel at 11:30 pm. Our driver Joel (who is the best) set us up with an order of pizza and soda (not surprisingly the dining room was closed when we got to the hotel). And after that I collapsed into bed.

Day Ten - Sinai

2010-01-06T21:59:00.000-08:00

Started this last night, almost fell asleep, now I’m having some trouble with blogger this morning and it is almost time for me to go, so this may be really, really short.

Sinai today. Egypt is still a country that drives me crazy. As soon as we crossed the border I could feel the difference between being in Israel and Egypt. I’m exhausted so this will be very short.

Long drive to Sinai, the bus had some weird heat that is came up from the floor so the drive to and from was very uncomfortable.

We had guides up the mountain, they weren’t in very good shape and after about an hour, where we had been resting as much as we had been walking we just asked our guide if we could go on ahead and we did, leaving him behind. There are two paths up to the top, the camel path and the path of repentance…

And on that note I have to leave. We’re staying out near Massada tonight so no internet, but I’ll post the rest of this in two days when we’re up near Jerusalem (as well as some pictures).

Day Eight - The Negev

2010-01-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

Today, today, today. What did we do today… Well it was another good day, but the days are starting to run together a little bit, we are learning so much and we have so much that we are accountable to know that some things (like what day it is and when we did what) are starting to get a little fuzzy. I haven’t sorted through my pictures from today yet and I am really, really tired so I’m not going to post any pictures tonight, I might try to add some to this post later if I have time.

Today was a day that was focused on the Negev. Imagine chalk dust and flint. Bedeuins and camels. Imagine almost no water. Imagine breathtaking vistas and deep canyons. Imagine all that and you might imagine the Negev. The Negev is the southern wilderness that Abraham and Jacob both spent a lot of time in as well as where the Israelites sent spies into the promised land from and then decided that Canaan was too tough a place for them to handle.

The first place that we stopped was where our hotel was last night, Beer Sheba. The Negev is dry, the weather is beautiful for January but right now is the dry season and even now it is mostly brown. I guess that the government subsidizes a lot of the cities and settlements down here in the Negev because there is just not enough going on for these places to support themselves on their own.

In the Bible, Beer Sheba is a place where God came to Abraham and promised to give him and his descendents the promised land. It was also Abraham’s last stop before heading on out to Egypt (where he told Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister). It is also the place where God confirmed his covenant with Isaac and it is where Jacob was when he sent his son’s into Egypt because of the famine that was in Israel.

After Beer Sheba we went to Arad, which was a southern fortress during the time of David and Solomon. The most interesting thing about Arad was that they have found a temple where Israelites worshiped God in Arad. That is a really bad thing to find. God was pretty clear that the only place where sacrifices were to be offered to him was the temple of Jerusalem. This temple in Arad actually has two gods that it worships, God and his “mistress.” It is a pretty clear case of what people call syncretism, where different religious beliefs get mixed together and a third thing is formed that draws from both. The Bible is pretty clear that there were people in Israel and Judah who did not worship God as they should and that God did not want them to be too close to the Canaanites because he didn’t want their religious beliefs to be tainted by them, and this is a clear case of that mixing and tainting happening. Actually they found an altar in Beer-Sheba that was destroyed and then built into a wall during the time of Hezekiah, so when the Bible says that Hezekiah took down the high places and altars to false Gods, we actually saw an example of that today.

After Arad we had lunch down near the wilderness of Zin. Then we went over to another part of the wilderness of Zin and took a great hike through a canyon there, I got some cool pictures that I’ll try to post at a different time.

We spent some more time in the wilderness after that, the wilderness of Paran this time, and we spent some time in prayer and solitude thinking about what life was like for the Israelites spending forty years wandering through the wilderness. You get a whole different understanding of God promising them a land with pools of water, pomegranate trees and as much bread as they can eat when you are standing in the dry wilderness, where the chalky ground has cracked under your feet because it is so dry and the world is filled with nothing but rocks and a few shrubs.

And that was pretty much it today. I am really, really, really tired, and tomorrow we are going into Egypt to climb Jebal Musa (Mt. Sinai). I am pretty sure that there were some more things that I was going to add that I thought were important or funny but I can’t think of anything else. I did post my stuff that I wrote for yesterday down below, so if you want to you can read that, yesterday was a pretty cool day. I’m off to bed. As always thanks for reading and until tomorrow…

Day Seven - The Shephelah

2010-01-05T11:17:00.000-08:00

(Hiking through the Shephelah)

(As you can see I am posting this a day late from Eliat, I typed it out last night in Beer Sheba)

Well, no internet here in Beer-Sheba so tonight I’m typing this from the fourth floor lobby of our hotel. There are about seven of us who are sitting here in the lobby, most of us are journaling or working through our pictures, except for our Bedouin bus driver, Joel, who packed a hooka and is sitting out here with us smoking apple tobacco. (in all fairness he did open the window, and he is really funny)

Today we travelled through the Shephelah (pronounced Shfaelah). We went to Gezer, Beth-Shemish, Azekah, Qeiyafa , and Lachish. I know what you are thinking, wow I’ve never heard of those places, that sounds like a lousy day. What if I told you that today we saw the places where Samson was born and was buried, let loose 300 foxes with their tails on fire, and met Delilah? What if I also told you that we saw the place where David killed Goliath? What if I told you that we saw the last major city that the Babylonians and the Assyrians destroyed before the moved on to Jerusalem? Ok you may not be as excited about that one but it is a pretty big deal.
It is amazing what a big difference geography makes in hearing some of these stories. Take the story of Samson taking the gates of Gaza and carrying them to Hebron. A few weeks ago if I heard that story those cities wouldn’t have meant much to me. Today when we heard that story I said, “Gath to Hebron! Are you serious!?!” (the distance between those two cities is about 40 miles and there is an elevation change of over 3000 feet.) I think looking down at those valleys and cities where the Samson stuff happened and David and Goliath made me pay more attention to the details of those stories. Did you know that when David was talking to Saul about killing the lion and the bear that this is what he says to Saul? “I went after him and struck him and delivered it out of his mouth. And if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard and struck him and killed him.” When David chased down a lion to save a lamb, if the lion turned and attacked him, he grabbed it by the mane and killed it. That is amazing, I can’t even imagine doing that, if he could trust God to help him kill lions and bears with his hands no wonder he had no problem trusting God to kill Goliath.

(The Sorek Valley, where Delilah was from, and Samson spent a lot of time)

They aren’t exactly sure where David and Goliath fought, they know the valley and the know the two cities it was between, but they don’t know the exact spot. Our teacher Todd has an idea though, and if he is right, then we walked right through that battlefield today. I even picked up five stones from the brook (sling-stones weren’t small, each one would have been the size of a baseball.) I should have picked them up on the way down, because we climbed a pretty serious hill to visit a new, maybe really important site and it definitely felt like I was hiking up that hill with a bag full of rocks (which I was).

(The Elah Valley where David fought Goliath)

Lachish was the city that we visited that the Babylonians and Assyrians destroyed before they went up to Jerusalem. I won’t say much except to say that Lachish was the second most important city in Judah, it was the second strongest city in Judah (in terms of army fortifications), and it was such a big deal to Sennacharib (the Assyrian king) that he decorated part of his palace with his victory in destroying Lachish. (Assyria was the world’s resident superpower at that time).

Well that is the highlights from today, we saw a few more things that were great but I won’t mention them. One thing that really struck me today was how beautiful the Shephelah is, I guess it is very brown and dry in the summer, but here in the winter it was green and absolutely beautiful.

Tomorrow we’ll be down in the Negev (southern wilderness) where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob spent a lot of time, as well as the Israelites. And we’ll be in a new hotel (in Elat) where hopefully I’ll have internet and I can actually post this. I hope everyone is doing well. Thanks for reading.

Day Six - Free Day!

2010-01-03T11:59:00.000-08:00

Today we had a test, a church service and then had a free day. It was good timing, we were all pretty tired and I think that about three quarters of our group has either been sick or started to feel sick at this point.

So after the test (which I did pretty well on) and our church service (which was really good) I went out with some people in our group to look around Jerusalem a little bit on our own. First we went to the citidel museum (It's called David's citidel, but it was built by Herod the great). It has a great view of Jerusalem and and pretty cool history of the city of Jerusalem.

(David's citidel)

After that we went up to Solomon's Quarries, which burrow a pretty good distance under. Just like David's citidel didn't have anything to do with David these quarries don't have anything to do with Solomon. A lot of these names came from the crusaders or muslims who came into Jerusalem from like 700-1200AD and they pretty much named everything impressive after David or Solomon or some other impressive sounding Old Testament king, when in reality most of the impressive stuff that they saw was built by Herod.

Solomons quarries were really cool, another Indiana Jones like experience (a lot less water than Hezekiah's tunnels). As one of the guys we were with said, it wouldn't feel like Israel if we didn't spend part of the day underground. They were big caverns that were quarried for stone to build stuff around Jerusalem (everything here is built out of stone. I dont' think I've seen a wooden building yet in Israel.)

(One of the big caverns in Solomon's quarries)

After Solomon's quarries we ran (literally) over to get a quick look of the Garden tomb (where Jesus wasn't buried) only to find that it is closed on Sundays. Then we headed back to our hotel and then the bus for an optional trip to Yad HaShem.

I am trying to think of the best way to describe Yad Hashem. The part of Yad HaShem that we saw today is a Holocost museum. But it is more than that too, they are very active in trying to find the names of the Jews that were killed in the Holocost, Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews and I think the Nazis who killed them.

I didn't want to go to Yad HaShem. Honestly, I didn't want to spend my afternoon being depressed. However, everyone said that it is a place that you have to go to, that it really shows what modern Israel is born from and it tells a lot about the identity of the modern Jew. so I reluctantly decided to go. I'm glad that I went. It wasn't what I expected. I thought that it would be the kind of place that beat you over the head and shocked you into horror at what was done to the people in the concentration camps, it wasn't like that at all.

What it did was told the story of the Jews in Germany, Eastern Europe, France and anywhere else that Jews were killed. It talked about how the laws against the Jews began and how they progressed. How first there were restrictions on what Jews could do, then their property was taken and they were moved into ghettos, then eventually they were taken out and executed, taken to death camps, or taken into hard labor which killed many. All along the way it told the stories of individual people who left diaries, paintings, drawings, wrote songs, recorded songs... It was tragic, it was heart rending, I cried more than one time. But what Yad HaShem did most was affirm the humanity if the Jews that went through those things, it remembered them and their stories. And that was really powerful. We were only able to be there for a few hours but I think I could have easily spent two more hours there. After you exit the main exhibit you walk right out to a view that overlooks Jerusalem. There are no signs or anything but it is pretty clear that the message is that finally there is a place that Jews can come to be safe from the antisemetism that has followed them everywhere else, finally there is a country that Jews can call their home. It was definately powerful.

And that was it for today. We did have a lecture after dinner and I had to pack up my bags. Tonight is our last night in Jerusalem. Tomorrow we head south, we'll spend the night in Beer-Sheba (think Abraham) and along the way we'll see where David fought Goliath, where Samson did just about everything that he did and a few more spots as well. I'm not sure if I'll have internet tomorrow night, but if I do, I'll post about all of that good stuff (and probably some stuff that is boring as well). As always, thanks for reading.

Day Five - Mount of Olives, Bethlehem,

2010-01-02T12:33:00.000-08:00

Whew! another busy day. I am starting to feel better, thanks for everyone who prayed for me. Today was the first day that I have felt healthy for a while. I think that part of it was that last night was the best nights sleep I had since (I think) Christmas. I still have a stuffy nose and a cough, but I feel a lot better. This will be another short one, I have a test tomorrow that I have been studying for and I need to get to bed.

Today we started up at the mount of olives. We tried to get into Bethany (which is right off the mount) but it was blocked off by a wall and the checkpoint was closed. Next we went up to the mount of Olives, to Beth Page, where Jesus got on a donkey and began his triumpah entry into the city. (there was a guy there selling, "Jesus taxi rides" rides on a donkey). From there we went went to where Jesus came over the mount of olives and looked at Jerusalem and began to weep for the city.

(This was Jesus view of Jerusalem, Luke 19:41-44. And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes...)

From there we went down to the Garden of Gethsemene, We can't really know it its the exact spot, but its in the same general place as the Garden of Gesthemene would have been (By the way Gethsemene means olivepress.)

(me in front of the Garden of Gethsemene. I had a better picture of the garden, but it didn't have me in it and I figured that mom would appreciate to see a picture of me every now and again.)

After the Mount of Olives we went to Bethlehem. Bethlehem is another one of those Area A cities. It is in the West Bank, and Jews aren't allowed to go there. There is a big checkpoint that you need to get through to get in, but tour buses and Americans don't have too much trouble. Bethlehem is no longer a little town like the song, it is a pretty big city. It is an Arab city, it used to have a lot of Arab Christians in it, but it is becoming more and more Muslim. There is a church there called the church of the Nativity that sits over what they say is the cave that Jesus was born in. They actually have a little star in the floor of the cave where they say Mary gave birth to Jesus. I don't think that Jesus was born in a cave or a stable, I think there is a pretty good argument to make for Jesus being born in a house (people shared houses with animals back then), but it was kind of cool to see it. What wasn't cool was the super long line, it took us about an hour to go the fifty feet that we needed to go to get to the cave in the church. It did get kind of fun at the end though, when a bunch or Russians who were behind us tried to push pass us in line and we blocked them off.

(The church of the Nativity in Bethlehem)

After a quick lunch in Bethlehem we ran down to this place called Solomon's pools, which have nothing to do with Solomon, but Herod the great built them to hold water for Jerusalem. There were three gigantic pools and they had aquaducts that fed them. We actually took some time hiking around in the Judean hillside there looking for the aquaduct. It was a beautiful countryside, tons of rocks, but really pretty. They may have even been hills that David had shepherded his sheep on when he was a boy. After we found the aquaduct (I found it) we hiked it back to the main pool then set out for Herodium.

(My roomate Rob sitting on a rock near the aquaduct.)

Herodium was a giant fortress/palace that Herod built as a victory palace once he became king. It was also a place that he could hold out against an army if there was a revolt or Marc Anthony decided that he wanted to give Judea to Cleopatra.

It was an incredibly clear and beautiful day today. From the Herodium we could not only see the mount of Olives in Jerusalem like it right next door, we could see the dead sea, the mountains of Jordan, and even the capital of Jordan, Amman. Apparently visability is almost never that good, so we were lucky today.

(East of the Herodium, the Judean Wilderness, the Dead Sea, and the mountains of Jordan.)

Tomorrow is our last day in Jerusalem before we head down south. After our test and church we get a free day around Jerusalem which will be nice. As always, thanks for reading.

Day Four - Benjamin, Samaria, and Jericho

2010-01-01T11:35:00.001-08:00

It was another busy day here in Israel. Yesterday was our last day just in Jerusalem. Starting today we will be taking bus trips to different areas of the country. Today we looked at the area of the tribe of Benjamin, we looked at Samaria and then we went down to Jericho.

The first place we went to today is a place that is called Nebi Samwil, it is where the Muslims think Samuel was buried (he’s probably not buried there). From there we could see most of the tribal area of Benjamin. Nebi Samwil is probably the place that is called the high place of Gibeon in the Bible. It is where God came to Solomon and asked him what he wanted and Solomon asked for the wisdom to govern the people of Israel.

From there we went to a place called Michmash, which is where Jonathon climbed down and then up the cliff with just his armor bearer and then killed a bunch of Philistines. There were two cities there, Geba and Michmash, Saul was on one side with his troops, and the Philistines were on the other side with their troops. There was one pass between the two cities and it was being guarded by the Philistines. Jonathan ran off from Saul, climbed down and up a cliff that is really steep and then came up where the Philistines wouldn’t have expected anyone to climb.

(Hiking up in the area where Jonathan killed a bunch of Philistines)

After that we went to Shiloh. It is the place where the Tabernacle was in Israel for a long time. It is the place that Samuel grew up,

(Shiloh, in the spot wehre the tabernacle probably sat. I ran around on the rocks down there looking for an 3800 year old wall, I'm not sure I found it but I had fun.)

Then we went to Mt. Gerazim, which sits right over the ancient city of Shechem. Shechem is a really important Biblical site, it is where God came to Abraham and promised to give him and his descendents the land of Israel. It is the place where the whole nation of Israel came together with Joshua to have the blessings and the curses of God read to them. Jacob was also in Shechem, and Shechem was the place where the northern ten tribes of Israel split from Judah and created their own kingdom. Shechem is now an Arab city called Na’ablis. It is in the West bank in an area called Area A. Area A is an area that the Israelis have completely handed over to the Palestinians. As a result of this, Jews are not allowed into Area A. To be safe we didn’t go into Na'ablis, we just looked down onto ancient Samaria from Mt. Gerazim (we also saw the Palestinian refugee camp where large number of terrorists are recruited.)

There are only about 600 remaining Samaritans in the world (think Jesus talking to the woman at the well), and most of them live on Mt. Gerazim. They actually still sacrifice an animal for Passover every year and then put the blood on their doorframes.

After Mt. Gerazim, we went to Jericho. Jericho was really, really cool. There is actually archeological evidence that Jericho was destroyed at the same time that Joshua and the Israelites were taking over Canaan. And the evidence points to the walls all collapsing outward during the destruction. The walls were mud brick walls and they collapsed down over the retaining walls (that supported the foundation of the city) creating a ramp and easy access for the army that attacked Jericho. They also found jars and jars that were full of grain that were burned during the destruction, which is really strange since most of the times an army destroys a city it takes the stuff like grain and eats it. All of this evidence points to Jericho being conquered in the same way and at the same time as Joshua and the Israelites were coming through. The retaining wall that the mud bricks fell over is still standing, and we got to see it which was really cool. There is also a tower that they have found in Jericho that is made out of stone, is seven meters tall and seven meters in diameter and is dated back to 7000 BC (although our teacher Todd thinks that it is probably closer to 5000 BC.) So there was a settlement and maybe a fortified city at Jericho 7000-9000 years ago, which is pretty crazy.

(The retaining wall in Jericho. Joshua and the Isrealites marched around this wall and then walked over it when the mud brick walls collapsed on top of it.)

Tomorrow we are going to the Mount of Olives and Bethlehem among other places. Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day Four - Jerusalem New Testament City tour

2009-12-31T11:31:00.000-08:00

I’m still sick so this will be on the short side.

Today we spent most of the day on the Temple mount. In case you are curious what the Temple Mount is, it is the place where the temple used to be and the courtyard that surrounded it. As our teacher Todd said today, it is pretty amazing that we were even allowed onto the temple mount, it is a place with a lot of tension. The Temple mount currently has two major buildings on it, the Al-Aksa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. There is also an underground mosque called the Al-Marwani mosque there. Since it is where the Temple used to be, it is far and away the holiest place in Judaism. There are some Jewish people who will not even go up on the mount to avoid the possibility that they would desecrate the area where the holy of holies of the temple was. They believe that not only is it a the place where the temple was but also that it is the place where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac.

(the Dome of the Rock)

The temple mount is the third holiest place in Islam, they believe that it is the place where Mohommed ascended to heaven on a horse and spoke with Allah. There is a rock inside the dome of the Rock that they say he ascended from. It is the same rock that the Jews say that Abraham sacrificed Isaac on. It is also the same rock that was probably in the Holy of Holies and the ark of the covenant sat on.

Part of what is interesting about all of this is that the Muslims say that the temple never stood there. They don’t want to admit that the Jews might have a prior claim to the area. They won’t let anyone do any archeology inside the temple mount, you can get arrested for praying inside the temple mount, or having a Bible or a tape measure. It is definitely the most Arab feeling part of Jerusalem that I have been in so far, the dome of the rock is really pretty, but some of the other buildings are more run down, and part of the temple mount has become a trash dump. In fact most of the eastern side of the temple mount, what used to be Solomon’s colonnade, where Jesus met with his disciples and the disciples met after he died is just piles of rubble and trash.

(pile of trash in what was Solomon's Collonnade)

After we were inside the temple mount we looked at some of the archeological digs on the southern end of the outside of the mount (there is some work that is done outside of the mount.) The coolest thing that we saw there were the gates that used to be the entrance to the temple. There were three gates that were the entrance to the temple mount complex, it would take them through and underground tunnel up into the courtyard. The exited through double gates that were further west. The only exception to this is when someone was in mourning, then they came in through the western doors moved around the temple in a clockwise motion and then exited through the eastern doors.

(me standing next to what is visible of the exit gate of the old temple.)

(Apparently Tuesday's and Thursdays are big days for BarMitzpha celebrations here. Underneath the canopy a 13 year old boy is blowing a shophar. a giant horn (musical) made from a giant horn (animal). Then the guys in white start playing drums and singing (he lai, lai, lai, lai...) and march the kid (still under the canopy) up to the wailing wall to read from the Torah and pray. Down in a hidden part of the wall we saw them doing somehting similar for a girl, and she was putting on a phylactry, box on forhead, and then a thing around her arm and wrist. It is usually just resevred for men and they would have done up where they were having the drum-horn party she would have been arrested.)

After that we went and looked at the ruins of a house that is from the same time and is very similar to what the house where Jesus was interrogeted by the Jews after he was arrested (the high priests house) looked like. In fact, since the high priest would have had one of the nicest houses in the wealthiest part of Jerusalem, it could have been the actual high priests house.

After that we went to a place that is called David's tomb, but probably isn't where David is buried, then we went to the traditional site of the upper room where the last supper happened. The building is too new for it to be the actual site, but it our teacher Todd thought that it seems to be in the right area where the last supper took place.

Tonight we went to a tunnel tour of the western wall of the temple mount (the same wall where the Jews pray.) It turns out that a large portion of the Arab quarter of the city has been built on an artificial platform sometime around 1200 (maybe, it may have been the 700's, I'm not sure on that one. The tunnel was really cool, it goes along the western wall, under the Arab quarter of the city.

One more thought for the night.

We spent a lot of time around the temple today, and there was a lot of talk about the holiness of the the temple and the holy of holies. It is something that the religious jews are passionate about. And it is a place where God's presence used to dwell. But in the same way that God's presence dwelt in his temple, it dwells in those of us who are Christians. So as we walked through the temple mount today, God's presence came through with us and dwelt among us as it used to dwell in the holy of holies, and then as we left it was still with us. The access to God that used to come through the temple is available to all of today regardless of where we are.

That's it for tonight. Tommorow we are going out to see the territory of Benjamin, down to Jericho and over into Samaria. Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Jerusalem Day Three - Old testament tour

2009-12-30T11:16:00.000-08:00

Jerusalem, Jerusalem. I feel like I know this city (at least the old city) and if you told me that I have only been in this city for about 54 hours I would call you a liar. If you showed me my airplane itenerary, took me back through my pictures and my blog, reminded me that it is December 30th and on December 27th I was back in LA...well I guess I'd have to believe you, but it sure feels like we've been here longer. All of the stress of flying in on El Al feels like it happened 100 years ago.

(music side note: If I asked you to guess which country I have seen the most tourirsts in Jerusalem from (other than our group), what country would you guess? Did you say Germany? If you did you are wrong, the winner is definately France, followed by Russia. This may be because there are a bunch of french people staying in our hotel. In fact they are in the lobby around the corner from me having a beer-cigarette-piano party. Whoever is playing piano is pretty good.)

Another note before I get started. I am starting to get sick, I woke up with a sore throat, and as the day went by it moved to my sinuses. I am pretty sure that if I had some airborne and about 12 hours to sleep I'd be fine in no time (about 12 hours). Unfortunately I forgot to bring my airborne (I'm pretty sure it's at home next to my watch and sunglasses), and 12 hours of sleep doesn't seem likely for a few weeks. I'm mentioning this for two reasons: 1. I'm going to keep this post kind of short and to the point so I can get some extra sleep tonight. 2. I would really appreciate it if you all would pray for me (and about five or six other people on our trip who are sick) that I would get well soon, and that the sickness wouldn't slow me down at all, physically, mentally or spiritually. Ok, now on to Day three.

We begin some days with a lecture, today was one of those lecture days. Todd (our teacher) began our lecture by saying, "You will learn more today than you ever have in your life...at least in one day." I don't know if that is true, but I took 22 pages of notes in my field notebook today. Some of them were really cool notes where I would try to make a quick sketch of the area that he was talking about (wall, tomb, city map) so that I could make my notes on top of it to help me remember better. Most of them were just writing.

Our first stop today was this old hotel that was the first hotel in the old city, they didn't really take care of it so now it's a hostel. From the roof you get a really good view of the city, the picture above is from that rooftop. You can see the dome of the Rock there and pretty much the whole mount of Olives in the Background. If you want to know what Herod's temple would have looked like in the city imagine the dome of the rock, but twice as big in every dimension and made out of polished white marble. Must have been impressive. Those clouds in the sky turned into rainclouds, it was pretty wet and cold today, a bad day to be sick.

Today was our Old Testament day so we looked at a bunch of walls, different building periods for the city, and different expansions and destructions. I thought it was awesome but the pictures are pretty dull so I won't post many. We looked at Hezekiah's broad wall which he built to protect the city from the Assyrians, and spent a lot of time talking about David's city. Isn't David's city Jerusalem you ask? That is a good question, and the answer is...kind of.

Jerusalem in David's time was small. How small was it! (sorry I'm sick, it does awful things to my sense of humor) Well let me show you how small it was.

This picture above is of what us ol' Jerusalem vets call the eastern hill, specifically the southern side of the eastern hill. See the spot where I drew on the picture with an ugly red line? that line runs along the slope of the hill, near the vally, the eastern wall to David's city would have been somewhere around where that line was.

Ok, now look at this picture, see where it overlaps with the other one? The white stone and the wooden building with the green roof? Ok, good. Now look at the flags that I circled and highlighted with ugly red and yellow? That is where the the western wall of David's city was. See I told you, small. the city was a lot longer north south than it was east west, but all in all the city was 10 acres, it got bigger with Solomon (30 acres) and with Hezekiah (150 acres).

At the end of our time in the city of David we spent a lot of time discussing and exploring the water system of David and Hezekiah's Jerusalems. Included in that was one of the coolest things I have ever done.

(Look, people doing archeology! Those rocks are something called the pool tower of the spring of Gihon. They were here in David's time but they date all the way back to 1800 B.C. That would be Abraham's time when Melchizidek was the king of Jerusalem, which was called Salem back then.)

So Hezekiah didn't think it was a good idea to have a spring outside of the city, especially when the Assyrians were coming to attack him, so he built a tunnel to bring the water from the spring that was near this tower underground into the city of Jerusalem. It was dug about 40 to 50 feet below this tower in the picture above, through the limestone bedrock. It ended up being 1750 feet long, all dug with pickaxes and shovels. Workers started at each end of the tunnel and then met in the middle. Think about that, they had work crews that started on two sides, dug a tunnel with pickaxes and shovels, and met halfway, deep underground without GPS or anything else. And the tunnel isn't straight, it is in an S shape. Did I mention that they did this in 701 BC?

Today I got to walk through this tunnel, and it was awesome. Definately one of the coolest and the most Indiana Jones things I have ever done. The tunnel has water in it, most of the time it was shin high, the for a little bit it was mid thigh. It was never wide enough for two people to walk side by side, a few times my sholders brushed the walls on both sides. Usually it was four to seven feet tall (I bumped my head a lot) but at the end it is closer to 30. It is dark, you can't see without a flashlight. Did I mention it was awesome? Imagine walking through a dark narrow tunnel with these dimensions and water levels. Imagine knowing where the tunnel ends up but not knowing what lies being the range of the flashlight. Imagine this walk taking about half an hour. Imagine it being awesome and you can get a sense of what it was like. Imagine walking through the tunnel with a beautiful Israeli archeologist behind you and racing the Nazi's to some important secret and you can imagine the Indiana Jones movie I was making up as I walked through the tunnel.

Where are my pictures of the tunnel you ask? Well...I kind of thought that the water would be deeper so I passed my camera off to someone who didn't go through the tunnel. I did get someone else to take a picture of me doing my best Indiana Jones pose in the tunnel though and I will post that as soon as I get it from them. I do have to warn you though, my best Indiana Jones pose looks a lot more like Derek Zoolander's Blue Steele than Indy.

Ok, I need to stop and go to bed (I haven't even gotten to everything we did before lunch) so here is what else we did today. Visited the pool of Siloam where Jesus told the blind guy to wash his eyes in John 9, spent a lot of time with a 1st century model of Jerusalem that was a 1:50 scale (I hope I said that right, it's fifty times smaller than actual size.)

Oh, did I mention that we saw the Dead Sea scrolls today? We did that too.

Tommorow is our last day focused on Jerusalem, we're doing a New Testament tour. As always, thanks for reading.

Israel Day Two - Overveiw of the Old city

2009-12-29T10:31:00.000-08:00

Ok, this is a long post and I need to go to bed before the hotel lobby clerk kills me. Sorry but these first three pictures aren't in order, I'll just label them and you can read about them below. I also apologize for any spelling or grammer errors, no time to proofread tonight.

(the via dolorosa and the ecco homo this is the man arch - arch dates to 130 AD, not the time of Jesus)

(Pools of Bethesda, I think I forgot to mention this, where Jesus healed the lame man)

(The dome of the rock on the temple mount.

Jerusalem, a city full of surprises. Sometimes there are surprises like: "Remeber how we were awake all night long because of the construction working yelling and using jackhammers until 5:00am? Turns out our window wasn't closed right." Or, "You guys have been working on this preview homework for an hour and a half? What page are you on? Oh...you guys are doing the wrong stuff, you need to do this stuff, it's way shorter." (and it was) Then there are surprises like, "We are about to go into the church of the Holy Sepulcher, this is probably the place that Jesus was not only buried, but also crucified." All of those things happend today, as well as a few other surprises that I will mention later. I will try to do my best to fill in the highlights of our travels today, but it is pretty late (working on the wrong preview work threw me a little behind) and the jackhammers did keep me up most of the night (I am confident tonight will be better), so this may be a little short or incoherant or maybe both.

(Belltower and entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher)

Today started with a pretty good breakfast and a lecture on the geography of Jerusalem (you might not believe it, but it was awesome). Then we headed out to the city. Our first stop was the Chruch of the Holy Sepulcher, which is the church of the holy tomb. Back in the day, wherever Christians thought that Jesus had done something awesome in a place, the built a church over it. This changes what some of those places look like (you'll see with the pictures of the Holy Sepulcher), but it is a good thing in that the locations of a lot of these sites were preserved because they had churches sitting on them. There are six different Christian sects that control part of the church of the Holy Sepulcher (from here on I'll abbreviate it CHS). They have so much trouble getting along with each other it is a regular thing during Easter to read about fistfights between priests and monks of different sects (Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Coptic, Armenean, and Etheopian) because they were getting in the way of each others celebrations. The relationships between these Christians is so contentious that none of them actually have a key to the front door of the church. A muslim family has had the key to the door since the 12th century, and they come down and unlock it every morning and then relock it every night. Part of the sad thing about this is that this is how the Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem see Christianity. The Jewish tour guides talk about how this is the holiest site in Christianity, this is the Christians wailing wall.

The difference (in how I see it) is that the Jews see the wailing wall as all that remains of the temple where God's presence dwelt (and they stay still dwells). The site of Jesus death and ressurection is a very special place, but is not a place that we think God's presence is manifest in any way different than any other places. Jesus is God, he did amazing work at the site of CHS, but it is still not the same as the wall.

I think I am going to go back to the CHS at some point this week when I have free time. I was still in, "hold on, this is probably, the place, where Jesus died and was buried?" mode when I walked through it. I knew that it was a possible site for his tomb, but I was blown away by him being crucified there as well. I wasn't really able to process that this was the place where Jesus paid for the sins of mankind on the cross and then defeated death. I would like to go back there and spend some time reflecting on that.

(Side note, currently it is about 11:00pm in the hotel, I'm the last guy in the lobby working on his computer. Around the corner is what sounds like a guy trying to impress a girl with his Arabic guitar and singing. I don't know if she is impressed, but I thought I was listening to a cool cd until I heard them start talking to each other. Pretty awesome.)

Here are some pictures from the CHS, I guarentee that they look different that you imagine them.

(The site of Jesus Crucifixion, you can see rocks from the hill in the glass cases to the sides of the giant crucifix.)

(Inside this building is Jesus' tomb. There is not much to see there, the tomb was completely destroyed by an Egyptian kalif in 1000 AD. (or something like that, i don't have my notes with me) He was the guy who created the Druze religion.)

(Guitar side note, the guy has moved into somethink like an Arabic version of Bron ayr Stomp.)

I have more to say on the CHS, but I still need some time to process that place and go back to it again. I'll try to say more about it later.

(Guitar guy is now playing Neil Young, Heart of Gold)

After the CHS we walked through a good chunk of the Arabic Quarter of Old Jerusalem. There is something about this city. By lunchtime I was pretty sure that Jerusalem is far and away the coolest city I have ever been to. That may still be true, but as the day went on we learned and heard more about the tensions and conflicts that exist in the city (mostly Jew and Arab). Serious business, serious tension. At the same time, walking around Jerusalem it is hard to imagine that this is a city where people hate each other and kill each other. This is a special city, a special place. I have felt it walking around. This is God's holy city, the place that he chose to dwell in and the place that he will reign from, and I really felt some of that as we walked around.

( I should note here that when I say Jerusalem, I mean the old city. It is where we have spent all of our time and will spend all of our time. the new city is about 110 years old, sections of the old city and the area south of it are closer to 4000 years old.)

We left the Arab Quarter through the Damascus gate to the north and then climed up the ramparts and walked along the old north wall east, and then south along the east wall.

(View of the Arab quarter of Jerusalem from the Old wall. The gold dome in the background is the Dome of the Rock, the muslim shrine that is built on the temple mount. This (unlike the Christian and Armenean quarters is mostly residential. Jews try to buy the land from the Arabs so they can control more of the old city, they do this buy working through middle men that keep the identity of the buyer secret. If an Arab realter sells property to a Jew, on puropse or on accident, he is killed.)

Walking along the old wall, Jerusalem had two more surprises in store for me. The first I didn't get a picture of but I wish I did. I was walking up to an arrow slit on the wall (the walls are from the middle ages), looking though my camera lense when all of a sudden my right foot stepped into empty space. There was an square hole on the floor of the wall, about 18" by 18", that dropped all the way down to the next level, about 20 feet. As I stepped through the hole my right elbow caught me on the edge of the wall right in front of the arrow slit and my left foot was on solid ground, so I wasn't hurt and my camera was ok (which is what I was really worried about). All in all it was pretty funny, but I didn't get a picture of the hole. I have been very careful to look where I step since then though.

(uh, the american girl is trying to impress the arab guy by singing Alanis Morriset now but she can't remember all the words. bad move)

As we walked along the top of the eastern wall (Suprise!) we had a great view of the Mount of Olives. Mountains in Israel aren't like they are in the US, they aren't peaks like Pikes peak or Mount Shasta where you can see them and say "here it is" they are more like ranges that run for a few miles. The mount of Olives is a small range that runs for about two and half miles. We'll talk about it more when we go and visit is, but today we did read about the Day of the Lord in Zecheriah 14. I was going to copy and paste the sections from the Bible, but apparently blogger isn't too fond of copy and paste so I'll just say grab a Bible and read chapter 14. It talks about the Lord descending onto the Mount of Olives and vanquishing the enemies of Israel. I think (it's getting late and my minds getting fuzzy.) it's also the place where Jesus ascended to heaven will descend again from heaven.

(The southernmost part of the Mount of Olives. Everything that is white and looks like it could be a building is a grave. Try to look and see that there is a hill that descends from Jerusalem (where this picture is taken) then meets a valley and then the Mount of olives begins. All the little white things on the mount are Jewish graves, they believe (according to that Zechariah passage) that this is where the ressurection will take place, and if a body isn't here, then it will have to burrow underground to get to here and be ressurected. You have to be a very rich or very important Jew to be buried here, sometimes both. The white things on the Jerusalem side of things are Arab graves. Graves are a good way to hold property (it's hard to move a graveyard) and the area behind some of these graves is the golden gate, where the Messiah is supposed to enter into Jerusalem by. If he has to walk through a graveyard to get to the gate he will be ritually defiled and not be allowed to enter the city. Did I mention that there is Arab Jewish tension in this city?) The garden of Gethsemene is also in this picture, a building with a cool mosaic at the base of the mount of olives.

Whew it's getting late, the guitar folks are gone and the guy at the front desk is tapping his foot waiting for me to leave. So...after that we went to a roman fortress (name escapes me) where the Roman soldiers lived, tradition says Jesus was scourged (tradition is wrong on this one) and the via doloros began (place where Jesus walked his cross to golgotha. I'll explain another time but...Jesus probably didn't walk the via dolorosa, it was likely that Pilate wasn't staying at the fortress but at Harods Palace which is on the other side of the city. From this fortress we were able to have a good view of the temple mount and the dome of the rock and then we walked along the via dolorosa back to the CHS and then to our money changer and our hotel. all in all another good day, another long day, but I am looking forward to tommorow.

Tomorrow we will still be in Jerusalem, we will do an Old testament tour of the city. As always, thanks for reading.

Isreal Day One - LAX to Jerusalem

2009-12-28T11:03:00.000-08:00

Wow, what a day. As some of you probably know I am taking an interterm class this January (and end of December) in Israel. Today was the first day of our trip, we left LA on El Al airlines, flew directly to Tel Aviv (in an incredibly long, 14 hour flight), and then after dinner some of us took a walk down to the wailing wall. It was a really full, really stressful day, but the ending was incredible.

This moring (techinically it was yesterday morning, but for me it was this morning, I finished packing my bags and then headed out towards LAX. We had some textbooks that we had to bring for this class, and they were kind of heavy, so I weighed my suitcase three different times and then dumped stuff out three times before I finally got it under fifty, then I left.

(What I packed into my bag before I started dumpin stuff)

I dont' know if any of you have flown El Al before, if you haven't, let me tell you about them a little bit. They are (I think) the only Israeli airline, and they have (I think) the best saftey record in the world. The reason that they are so safe is because they have the most intense security I have ever seen. I am sure that the security was increased because of the guy who tried to blow up the airplane a few days ago, it is safe to say that it was the most stressful departure I have ever had.

After I got to the airport, I began to wait in line with our group, we got there early (and it was a good thing) so that they could get us in before the rush. Most airlines have ticket agents who work up through the line and help to make sure that everyone can get through the process as effeciently as possible. El Al has security agents that work their way up through the line to see if you need to be pulled out of the line for further questioning. At first I wasn't worried about anything, the security girls seemed nice and some of them were really cute, and when one got to me it was a pretty easy exchange. When she saw the stamps for Arab countries in my passport I had to explain what countries they were and why I was there. I thought it went well, but then she left for a moment and brought a pretty large and intimidating guy, whose indimidation had nothing to do with his size. Our exchange went like this:

Him: I am head of El Al security, tell me about countries in your passport.
Me: (nervous) all of the countries? You want me to name them?
Him: Arab countries.
Me: uhh, Egypt and Dubai, the United Arab Emerites. My dad works for an oil service company and I was visiting my parents when they were there.
Him: Which company.

I named the companies that Dad had worked for and he said, "Petroleum, ok." And walked off.

Then the cute security girl was back, and she was very nice, but she did ask to take all of my carry-ons to search them before I brought them onto the plane. She told me that I could take my wallet and that I would get everything else back at the gate when I boarded. She wouldn't even let me take a camera book that I had with me in my coat. "This feels heavy for a photography book, we better check it." All in all a little scary and pretty inconvenient, but not awful, at least not until I saw the big security guy pull another one of the girls on our trip off to the side for a longer questioning session. She has lived in both Lebanon and Jordan and has a number of Palestinian friends, which it turns out is big trouble in El Al's eyes. They made all of us, even our trip leaders Dr. Rigsby and his wife Donna head through to the gate while she was still off to the side of the ticketing desk while they decided what to do with her. Half an hour before boarding word came down, El Al decided that she couldn't fly. They ended up moving her to Lufthansa, and she'll get her and meet us tomorrow, but I didn't find that out until after we landed in Jerusalem. It was pretty intense. At that point I was thankful that mom and dad were here for petroleum reasons and not other ones. Otherwise I might not have been on that plane either.

At the gate, before I got my carry-ons back they tested my shoes, boarding pass, and passport for explosives residue (that was pretty cool) then we load up on a bus that takes us to a special boarding area that is far away from everything else. Police cars escorted our bus to the special El Al boarding area and there were police at the boarding area too. My carry-on had been completely emptied out and then repacked. Anything with batteries had the batteries removed (including my noise reducing headphones) and my camera had been tested at different settings to make sure it worked.

As for the flight...well it was long and uncomfortable. We sat on the tarmac for an hour before we took off (leaving an hour late), I guess there was a bag the decided was suspicious and took out of the plane. There were lots of noisy kids, I was stuck in the middle seat, and the seats were very, very tight. The only other flight that compares to the sheer uncomfortableness was an Aeroflot flight from Moscow to LA (that then broke down and spent the night in Oslo before resuming again).

I was very, very tired when we got to immigration and met an immigration agent who must have been the sister of the scary El Al security guy. Eventually she let me through and I actually made it to Israel. The airport is pretty nice. There was set of posters on the wall that had the "first man" of a bunch of different countries. Socrates for Greece, VanGogh for Holland, Motzart for Austria. The first Isreali man? A cactus. I've been in this country for less than a day, but I get it.

Jerusalem is a realy cool city with a distinctive feel. I think it is one of those places that you would never mistake for something else. All of the buildings have to have the same limestone facade so that the city looks uniform, it gives it a really old, cool feel.

(Jerusalem from our bus as we drove in. Every building in the city has this same limestone facade.)

We are staying in a hotel right inside the walls of the old city, the gloria hotel.

(a hallway in our hotel)

After dinner about twenty of us went off to look at the western wall. I thought we were going to the western wall of the old city, near the Jaffa Gate, which is right by our hotel. Instead we walked further into the old city, through narrow, winding streets filled with shops selling identical souveniers, we walked through the Christian Quarter, the Muslim Quarter and into the Jewish quarter when we turned a corner and, wow, we were looking at the temple mount. The western wall is also called the wailing wall. It is all that is left of Harod's temple, the one that Jesus overturned the tables in. It was the outer wall of the temple, inside the wall now stands the dome of the rock. Standing there and imagining what the temple must have looked like, all I can say is that it must have been incredible. We walked down to the wall took pictures and prayed. It was pretty incredible to be there, to be at what is left of the temple. There are signs around that ask you to respect the place where God's glory dwells, which is what the Jews believe. Some Orthodox Jews walk backwards when they walk away from the wall so that they don't turn they backs on God or his glory.

You have to wear something covering your head when you go to the wall (if you're a guy, girls need to have no head coverings). They provide cardboard Yamikas for you as you go up there to pray. Praying down there at the wall was pretty amazing. Amazing enought that when I walked away I walked backwards.

(The western or wailing wall where Jews still come to pray and stuff prayers into the cracks in the wall. The men and women pray seprately, men on the left and women on the right.)

(Me in front of the wailing wall.)

A long day ended up being a long post. We are in Jerusalem all week, tommorow we officially begin our tour of the Old city of Jerusalem. As always, thanks for reading.

Celebrating the end of summer school

2009-07-03T16:52:00.001-07:00

This is how I celebrated the end of summer school. Now I know what a dog that sticks its head out of a car window feels like. It took me about 20 seconds to figure out how to breathe, (through the nose) after that it was awesome.

Paris - Day Three

2009-01-25T15:59:00.000-08:00

Today was the last day of the trip, tomorrow we head out to the airport and fly back to the U.S. It will be nice to get home, but I have a lot to do. We get home on Monday evening and I have a full day of class and work on Tuesday. I also have to move this week, which will be a pain but I’ll get it done.

With all that coming up this week I took it easy today. This morning we went down to the Cathedral of Notre Dame and went to Sunday mass. The service was cool but I was a little disappointed in the building. I probably would have loved it if I hadn’t visited St. Peters in Rome a few days ago, but I did so when I came in the first thing I thought was, “where is all the color?” The building is very big, but it is also very gray, and while the rose design stain glass windows are nice, they look a little dull when compared to the mosaics at St. Peters. I think St. Paul’s outside the wall in Rome was more beautiful too.

(Notre Dame)

The acoustics in Notre Dame are great though and they have a giant organ, and a great choir, so it was really fun to listen to the music. Some of the organ music was pretty dramatic and gothic, a good match for the cathedral.

After that we grabbed lunch and I decided to break away from the other people that I was with and head back to the hotel. I was tired and I needed some time to be by myself. Since the metro stop was on the way, I ended up stopping by the Louvre again to see if they had any paintings by El Greco. I spent about two hours in the museum again, this time just in the section devoted to the Italian and Spanish painters. Even then I missed some stuff but I was able to see some great paintings that I missed yesterday. They have some great paintings by Leonardo and Raphael that I missed yesterday. They also have some cool stuff by Caravaggio and Annabel Carracci. When I finally made it to the Spanish painters I did find a few paintings by El Greco, so all in all it was a good trip. I stopped by the Mona Lisa and the sculpture of Cupid and Psyche again today as well and today Cupid and Psyche were definitely my favorite. It is such a delicate sculpture compared to the rest of the marble statues, and it’s newer so the marble is cleaner and smoother.

(Cupid and Psyche)

(The Winged Victory of Salmonthrace)

After the Louvre I headed back to the hotel and took a little nap. Then the rest of my roommates got back so I tried to go to sleep for a while but I was unsuccessful so I gave up and went to Starbucks for a Latte. After I got back we headed up to Montmartre for dinner.
Montmartre was more of what I expected Paris to be like. It is the Bohemian part of the city, where the painters and the musicians all live, and the streets and squares are smaller and feel cozier. We stopped at a great little restaurant and had a fantastic, fantastic dinner. I had a glass of champagne, escargot, steak, a pear tartan pie with ice cream for dessert and a cup of coffee. It was the best meal I’ve had in a long time.

(Top, Sacre Coeur, bottom, the steps leading down from the Sacre Coeur.)

After that we went up to the Sacre Coeur, and looked out on the city. It was different view of the city than the Eiffel tower view. From the Sacre Coeur, you see everything but it isn’t as small, instead of just seeing the lights of the city, you see all the buildings but they look like big doll houses. It was pretty cool. After that we headed down to the metro and rode it back to our hotel. I’m surprised how safe a city Paris is. Even riding on the metro at 11:00 pm, it felt totally safe, I even saw girls that were going down to take the metro by themselves as we came out.
And that was it for today.

All in all it was a good birthday in Paris. Like I said tomorrow I’ll be back in L.A. I’ll try to get some stuff about Rome written and hopefully posted while I’m in the airport and on the plane. Until then, thanks for reading.

Paris - Day 2

2009-01-24T14:16:00.000-08:00

Today was our first full day in Paris. We went to the Louvre and the Musee D’Orsay. We were going to go to the Rodin Museum but when we got there the museum was closed. A huge police blockade was stopping traffic and blocking off a section of the city where there was a protest against Israel (and where the entrance to the Rodin museum was.) I tried to get closer to the protest to see what it was like but there were literally 30 to 40 police vans lining the streets and blocking off the section where the protest was.

On top of missing out on the Rodin museum, I also left the memory card for my camera in my computer again (I did that once in Rome too,) so I wasn’t able to take pictures of anything today. To make up for it, here is another picture of the Eiffel tower from last night.

So far I have been surprised by how happy and friendly the French people seem. The city is a lot cleaner and more open than Rome is. That also means that it has less personality than Rome. It is a cool city though. I think that it would be really easy to live here (if you could afford it, it’s pretty expensive.) I honestly think Paris may be the foreign city that is most like the U.S. that I have ever been to.

The Louvre was a cool museum, but it is so big that it is overwhelming. It is probably the biggest museum I’ve ever been in. There are three different sections and each section is as big as a normal sized museum. The most famous things that we saw at the Louvre are: the Venus De Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace and Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. The coolest thing may have been the statue called “Cupid and Psyche” but I did think the Mona Lisa was pretty cool. I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but there is something about her smile. I whenever I looked at her it seemed like she was just about to or just finished smirking.

After a stop at Starbucks we headed over to the Musee D’Orsay, which was really great. I was worried about time since I wanted to see the Rodin museum too, so we started at the top floor and worked our way down (the top floor has the impressionists.) They had some great and really famous paintings by Manet and Monet, Cezanne, Renoir, Gauguin and Pissarro. My favorite paintings were by Van Gogh and Degas. Even in a museum section that has all the great paintings that this one did, the colors in the Van Gogh’s were just amazing, the only things that were even close were some of the pastel drawings that they had up there. And Degas had some really cool paintings too, I even got a print of a painting called something like ‘Blue Dancers’ (the title was in French, so I’m guessing.) But maybe the best thing I saw in the whole Musee D’Orsay was a statue of a little girl ballerina by Degas, it was amazing. If I had my memory card with my camera I would show you a picture of it, but as things are you’ll have to trust me.
It turns out that we had plenty of time to see all that we wanted of the Musee D’Orsay, it’s not nearly as big as the Louvre, so when we all had our fill we headed off in our ill fated trip to the Rodin museum.

After our unsuccessful attempts to get close enough to the protest to see part of it we walked back up to the Eiffel tower then up to our hotel and rested for a little bit. After that it was off to dinner (tonight was McDonalds) and then over to the Eiffel tower. In general, the Eiffel tower is just way cooler than I thought it would be, especially at night. It’s awesome. We were able to make it up to the top tonight and the view of the city from up there is breathtaking. I didn’t get any pictures of that either, I will try to get some that other people took and post them.

That was it for today. Tomorrow we’re going to try to catch a church service at Notre Dame, go into the Catacombs at Notre Dame, and maybe climb up the Arc de Triumphe. For my birthday tomorrow night we’re going up to Montmartre (the bohemian part of the city) to find a cool café to have dinner in and then we’ll head over to the Sacre Coeur. And then the next day it’s off to the airport and back to L.A.

As always thanks for reading. Until tomorrow…

Paris - Day One

2009-01-23T12:48:00.000-08:00

I know I'm behind. I have a lot to say about my days in Rome, but again I'm too tired tonight. I will try to fill in my time in Rome soon and upload some pictures from Athens and Rome, but not tonight.

I am in Paris, most of the class is on their way back to L.A., but five of us are staying in Paris for a few days. I'm staying at the Marriott here (thanks mom and dad) and it is really nice. After we flew into Paris today, took a bus from the airport to the city, and then dragged our bags to the hotel we rested for a few hours. After that we walked out to the Eiffel tower, which is really, really cool. We were going to go up to the top, but it was so windy tonight that the top level was closed, so we'll try again a different time. After the Eiffel tower we walked over to the Arc de Triumphe and up the Champs-Elysees. We had dinner up there and then headed back over to the hotel.

Tomorrow we're starting out with the Louvre then headed to the Musee D'Orsay and then the Rodin museum. We'll see what we do after that. Thanks for reading.

Day 23 - Rome

2009-01-21T13:40:00.001-08:00

Rome is great. If you haven't been to Rome you should come. It's that good.

Today we went to the Vatican, saw the Vatican museum, the Sistine chapel, and St. Peter's Basilica. Then we went to St. Paul's outside the walls, which was built over Paul's burial spot, then we went to the church of the three fountains, which was built where Paul was beheaded. After we got back to the hotel I went out and had dinner (lasagna and espresso) then walked to the Spanish steps and the trevi fountain. On the way back to the hotel I stopped and had gelato, the chocolate chip is pretty much the best chocolate chip I've ever had.

I am almost falling asleep as I write this, so I will stop now. I will try to come back tomorrow and fill in a little bit more about the stuff we saw today and post some pictures for today and the last few days. I will just quickly list the things that took my breath away today: the Disputa and the School of Athens (Raphael painted them on opposite walls of the same room,) the Sistine chapel (seeing a picture isn't in the same universe as seeing the real thing,) the Pieta, my first steps into St. Peters, my first steps in St. Pauls, and the front facade of St. Pauls.

More to come tomorrow, until then, thanks for reading.

Days 21-22 - Athens to Corinth to Athens to Rome

2009-01-20T13:49:00.000-08:00

No pictures again today, I'm too tired to upload them. Tomorrow I should have time to post pictures for both the last post and this one.

This will be another double post. I’m here in Rome and I’m pretty wiped out. We have two more full days here and then I have three days in Paris and then back home.

Yesterday we woke up in Athens and then drove out to Corinth, the Acrocorinth specifically, which is this huge hill where the temple of Aphrodite was. Aphrodite was the goddess of love and beauty, so naturally her temple was a huge brothel. Corinth was a big time port city, any ship travelling east or west would travel through Corinth so the temple of Aphrodite was the first stop that a lot of the sailors made as when they got to Corinth (and let me tell you, that wouldn’t be easy, we drove half-way up the Acrocorinth and it was still about a 45 minute hike up to the top.)

Every other year there is a Talbot class that goes to Turkey, Greece, and Rome and the alternate year a class goes to Israel. There are some people on the trip this year that went to Israel last year and yesterday a girl came with us who went to Israel last year but now lives in Greece. She is starting a ministry here in Athens that is focused towards girls who are involved in human trafficking. I guess Greece is one of the top ten countries that are destinations for human trafficking (Italy and the U.S. are also in the top ten.) The girls get tricked into thinking they are signing up for a job and then are forced into prostitution when they get to the new country. She told us about one girl who she met at a women’s shelter whose story is pretty typical. She is a Ukrainian girl who was from a small town and applied for a job to work at the Athens Olympics. She went through a whole interview process, she was 17 but lied and said she was 18, she said there were 13 and 14 year old girls who did the same thing. She got the “job” and so did a bunch of other girls from her town. The girls all left on a bus, thinking they were headed for Athens. The bus took the girls to Istanbul, where they were checked into a hotel and brutalized for a couple of days to break the girls and get rid of any resistance they had. After that they were taken to Athens (prostitution is legal in Greece) and forced to work in a brothel where they worked 14 hour days and saw 20-30 clients a day. The girls are threatened if they try to leave, if threats to them don’t work their families are threatened (the girls give all their personal info when they think they are applying for a normal job.)

It was pretty wild to hear Kelsey (the girl who is trying to work with these girls) talk about that then go and visit one of the major prostitution centers of both the Greek and Roman worlds. I’m not sure what the temple of Aphrodite was like, but I’m sure there were plenty of things that went on like that in the 1st century as well.

After the Acrocorinth we went and visited the old forum (or agora) in Corinth, had lunch, and then visited a shop where they made authentic museum copy pottery and statues. I got two small pieces, a little vase with Hector on it and a little container that had Achilles. I really like both of them. Before we headed back to Athens for the night we visited a port town that Paul stopped at on his way back home from his second missionary journey. I skipped some rocks there and we tried to get Jin to break open some sea urchins but she said they were too small to eat.

After dinner a few of us hiked from the hotel up to the top of the highest hill in Athens, it was really cool. It was another beautiful night and we had a great view of the city. We looked down on the Parthenon, which was cool. There was a church up top there, and we prayed for a little bit and then headed back to the hotel.

This morning we got up extra early, headed to the airport, and said goodbye to Athens and hello to Rome. The flight wasn’t bad but it was delayed about 45 minutes and then it took forever for us to get our bags so we were a little behind schedule for our first day in Rome. From the airport we drove straight to the town of Ostia which was the primary port for Rome for a while, and then was the secondary port for Rome. If Paul ended up going to Spain like he said he was going to in the book of Romans, he would have come through Ostia.

After that we drove to the Appian way and walked the last two miles into the city, which was the main road into Rome and the road that Paul took. Then we saw some catacombs and then drove to the hotel.

Our hotel here in Rome is very nice, it’s about ten minutes from the Coliseum and the Forum and it is practically across the street from the church called St. Peter in chains, which has Michelangelo’s Moses. I had pasta and pizza for dinner (it was great,) gelato for dessert (won’t get banana again,) and then walked around and saw the Coliseum and the Forum (St. Peters was closed; I’ll try to see it tomorrow.)

Tomorrow morning we’re going to the Vatican and St. Peter’s basilica, and I’m really excited about both of those. We have seen a whole lot of archeology stuff, and I’m ready to see some art. So tomorrow is the Sistine chapel, the school of Athens, and I think the Pieta. And I’m sure there will be other really cool stuff too.

Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Days 19 & 20 - Delphi to Athens to Athens

2009-01-17T11:44:00.001-08:00

We’ve got some internet troubles at our hotel here in Athens, so no pictures right now, I will try to upload some if our internet situation improves here or if the internet access is better when we get to Rome.

I know that I said I wasn’t going to post two days at once again, but I’m going to give it a shot again. This post will cover yesterday and today.

Yesterday we went to Delphi. Delphi was the religious center of Greece and much of the surrounding world. There was a temple to Apollo at Delphi, and at the temple they had an oracle that people believed Apollo spoke through (Apollo was the god of divination.) It started out that one day a year (April 7th) the Pythoness (priestess) would come out and answer questions. Eventually they would do it once a month (the seventh day after the new moon) nine months a year (Apollo apparently wintered somewhere else.) So nine days a year people would come to Delphi to ask the oracle what they should do. The oracle always gave these mysterious answers that could mean anything, but people believed they were from the god. There was a king (I think the Lydian king, they had a city in what is now Sardis, Turkey. One of my favorites on this trip) who asked the oracle if he should go to war against the Persians. The oracle answered that if he warred against the Persians, a great kingdom would be destroyed. So, thinking that the oracle gave him the ok to go to war, he attacked the Persians and lost and his kingdom was destroyed.

Ten percent of the spoils from battle always went to the gods, and Delphi was where that ten percent was offered. So there were all sorts of monuments that were built as offerings to the gods at Delphi. Most of them are gone, but a few of the Athenian things were still there. One of them was a treasury that the Athenians built to commemorate their victory over the Persians at Marathon.

We had a beautiful day at Delphi, so it was really fun to hike up the mountain and look at all the stuff. I was even able to crawl underneath the foundation of the temple of Apollo where the Pythoness would go to get the answers of the questions from Apollo. That was fun; I also hiked up to the top section of the city on the mountain and saw the theater and stadium that were there. You’re not allowed to climb on a lot of that stuff in Greece like you are in Turkey, but it was fun to see stuff that was in really good shape.

After Delphi we drove to Athens. Athens is a really cool city. We had great weather here yesterday, and today the high was in the mid fifties, which is great. After we checked into the hotel last night we walked out and saw some of the city. We saw the changing of the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier, which became I lot more impressive when I found out that each of their shoes weighed six pounds (there was a whole lot of high stepping and holding the feet out in the air.) Then we went to a gyro place, had dinner, and then walked out and took some pictures of the Acropolis at night.

Today we went out and saw the remains of the temple to Zeus, then went over to the acropolis, where we saw the Dionysus theater, which is the oldest theater in Europe, then we hiked up to the top of the Acropolis. There we had a great view of the city, and the Parthenon and another temple was up there too. It was a great place to see the old Agora, Mars hill and other old places in the city. After spending some time up there taking pictures we went down to Mars hill, where Paul may have made his defense to the Areopagus. Then we went down to the old Agora, and went to the other place where Paul’s defense to the Aeropause may have taken place.

All of that stuff was great, but seeing the theater was one of my favorites since it is so old, then every famous Athenian has probably seen a play there. If Socrates or Plato had seen a play in Athens, they would have seen it there. Pericles was probably there, Alcibiades probably lived there. If Paul went to see a play in Athens it would have been there (and there is an interesting line in his defense to the Areopagus that is very reminiscent of Aeschylus’ Eumenides.) And the great Greek playwrights, Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides probably all debuted plays there.

After that it was on to lunch and then the Athens Archeological museum. When we got back from the museum we had a little church service, and that was it for the group activities for the day.

I went out to dinner with my roommate Brian and some other people, we went to a crepe restaurant where I got a calzone, but should have gotten a crepe. After dinner we walked over to a hill in the city called the hill of the muses and hiked up it. It is pretty close to the Acropolis, and gave us a beautiful view of the city. It was such a pretty night, it was great sitting up there and looking over at the Acropolis and out over the rest of the city.

Now is a good time to note one of the really strange things that I’ve noticed in almost every city we’ve been to, in both Turkey and Greece. There are stray dogs everywhere. In the places where there aren’t stray dogs, there are stray cats. And we have a tendency to pick of the dogs as members of our groups. They just follow us along, herd the people at the back, and bark at cars or motorcycles that drive by.

I don’t know if it is us or the dogs, but even tonight, when six of us hiked up to the hill of the muses, we picked up two dogs that followed us up, down and almost all the way back to the hotel, about a two hour walk. They even chased off some other strays that got close to us, it was pretty cool.

Well I had better go; tomorrow we’re driving down to Corinth and then back to Athens for the night. Then Tuesday morning we fly to Rome. As always, thanks for reading and until tomorrow…

Day 18 - Kalambaka to Delphi

2009-01-16T13:29:00.000-08:00

Today was a good day, we did a lot of driving but we saw some really cool stuff. We started up by driving up to Meteora, which is home to some pretty wild rock formations that have a bunch of monasteries and convents on top of them. We visited the monastery of the Holy Trinity (part of James Bond, For Your Eyes Only was filmed there,) and St. Anthony's monastery, which has nuns, not monks.

(The mountains that the monasteries are on top of. Holy Trinity is on the rock to the far left.)

(Holy Trinity is on the right.)

The views were pretty incredible, Holy Trinity was pretty small, I'm not sure how many monks it can hold, but it can't be very many. St. Anthony's was bigger, and it looked a little more comfortable than Holy Trinity, I'm sure that is due to the women's touch. Holy Trinity had a better view though. The monks and the nuns asked that we not take pictures so i dont' have any to show from inside either monasteries or pictures of the views of their "backyards." And I don't think I can do justice if I try to describe them, so I'll just have to keep those memories to myself (at least until some of the people who decided to take pictures anyway forward some to me.)

After the monasteries we went to an icon factory/souvenir shop. They showed us how they make icons and then they try to get us to buy them. I like the artwork on some icons so I was planning on buying one if I found one I liked, and I did find one I liked, so I got it. I also got a really cool Greek vase that I hope I will be able to find a partner for before I leave Greece.

Emily, you will be interested to know how they make the paint for the icons. They mix natural powders with egg yoke and vinegar (I think it's vinegar) and then they paint that on a cotton, gesso canvas. Then they put the canvas on a wooden base and add gold leaf and stuff like that.

Our last stop today was Thermopylae, it's the battle ground where the Persians and the Spartans fought. If anyone wants to read a fantastic book that is based around it, read Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. It's a novel, but it's pretty accurate and it's a great read.

(The monument to the Spartans at Thermopylae)

The monument to the Spartans has a giant statue of Leonidas the Spartan king who led the 300 Spartans and the other 3700 Greeks against the Persians. The gates of Thermopylae were about 60 feet wide and the Greeks held off 250,000 (modern guess) Persians for two days. On the third day the Greeks were betrayed by a shepherd who led about 20,000 Persian infantry on a mountain trail around the gates, behind the Greeks. When the Greeks realized that they were betrayed they sent most of the Greek troops home, 1000 stayed to hold off the Persians as long as they could. The law of Sparta was that everyman who went to Thermopylae must fight to the death, so all 300 of the Spartans remained. After the other Greeks retreated, the remaining 1000 charged the Persian army that was waiting beyond the "hot gates" (translation of Thermopylae) to kill as many as they could. The Greeks fought until they didn't have any spears left, then Leonidas was killed. After that the remaining Greeks retreated to the hill of Kolonus, where they could fight from high ground. Herodotus says that those that still had swords fought with them, the rest fought with hands and teeth. Eventually the Persians killed them all with arrow fire. The Greeks were all buried on the hill of Kolonus where they fell.

(The hill of Kolonus)

There is a grave stone on top of the hill that can be translated into something like this:

Go tell the Spartans, Stranger passing by,

That here, obedient to their laws we lie.

(The gravestone on top of Kolonus. There was a wreath and a fresh rose on top of it.)

All in all a little over 1000 Greeks died. About 20,000 Persians were killed.

There is an inscription under Leonidas' Statue as well. It is a quote of his from the battle. Before the fighting started the Persian emissary came to Leonidas and gave him the terms of surrender that Xerxes, the Persian king, was offering. The emissary ended by telling Leonidas and the Spartans to lay down their arms. Leonidas simply replied, "Come and take them," which is only two words in Greek. Those two words are inscribed under his statue, Molon Labe.

Well, that's it for today, Tomorrow we're going to Delphi and then on to Athens. Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day 17 - Thessaloniki to Kalambaka

2009-01-16T11:49:00.000-08:00

Here is yesterday's post from Kalambaka.

This morning we left Thessaloniki and drove to Berea. Before we left I walked down to the Starbucks by the sea shore and started the day with an Americana, that was nice. Berea was the town where Paul went after he was run out of Thessalonica, it is notable because the Jews there searched to scriptures to see if what Paul said about Jesus was right and many of them believed. There wasn’t much to see in Berea, there is a pretty cool mosaic where they think the synagogue he preached may have been and there is a spring near there as well (synagogues or places of prayer always had running water next to them for the ritual washings.)

(The mosaic of Paul at Berea.)

When Paul left Berea (some of the Jews from up north who didn’t like him came to town and tried to kill him,) he went to Athens, most likely by way of a ship from Dion. So we also visited Dion today. Dion was an interesting place. It is right at the base of Mt. Olympus, where the Greeks believed the 12 main gods lived. There is an interesting story about Dion and Alexander the Great that Josephus wrote about that we heard today. Before Alexander went on his conquest that ended with him as ruler of everything from Greece to India he went to Dion to make sacrifices to Zeus and dedicate his army. And apparently he had a dream in Dion. We find out about the dream when Alexander gets to Jerusalem, when he sees the Jewish high priest Alexander goes up to him and bows down before him. And when Alexander’s generals ask him why Alexander is bowing to anyone he tells them that he saw the high priest in a dream he had at Dion. Alexander was in his tent, thinking about how he could move east and defeat the Persians and he fell asleep and had dream, where a man dressed like the high priest (including the name of God across his forehead) told him that he should go forward with all haste because he would be successful against the Persians and the man dressed as the high priest told Alexander that he would go before Alexander’s army and would make sure they were successful. And the high priest in Jerusalem was the first person that Alexander had seen who was dressed as the man in his dream, so Alexander bowed before him and told him that he would grant the Jews anything they wished. They asked that they be allowed to keep their own laws and Alexander happily agreed.

(The altar at Dion where they made sacrifices to the gods of Olympus.)

(Mt. Olympus, it's elevation is about 10,000 feet. The base of the mountain is at just about sea level.)

The other place that we visited today was called Vergina. It was the royal burial place of the Macedonian kings. Phillip the Second, Alexander’s dad was buried there, and Alexander IV, Alexander the Great’s son was buried there. It was pretty cool to see some of that stuff, it’s amazing to see how good gold looks 2300 years after it’s buried underground. The crown that they put on Phillips corpse when the burned in on a pyre looks like it was just made yesterday. It is a gold crown that is shaped to look like a really delicate oak branch full of leaves. It was way different, and way cooler than what I typically imagine when I think of a crown.

(The mound that Phillip II's tomb was buried under.)

We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside Vergina because the findings there haven’t been published yet, so I was going to say that I sketched what the inside of the tomb looked like then show pictures of us getting attacked by mummies but I’m too tired to do that now. I did draw a couple of pictures of mummies on the bus, mostly playing checkers, I might post those pictures later.

Tonight we’re staying in Kalambaka, which is right at the base of the mountains that have the Meteora monasteries. Tomorrow we’re going to go visit an icon factory, where they paint icons, and visit one of the monasteries, it is supposed to be one the most beautiful places in Greece. Then we’re going to visit Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans and a few thousand other Greeks held off the Persian army (not sure on the exact number, I think Herodotus says it was a million or five million or 10 million or something like that,) for four or five or six days (I’ll give you the real numbers tomorrow.) Then we’re spending the night in Delphi, which was the center of prophecy in the pagan Greek world.

Day 16 - Kavalla to Thessaloniki

2009-01-14T11:52:00.000-08:00

Here is my post from two days ago, I only have a few minutes here so I won't post yesterday's post until tonight, assuming I have internet, at Delphi.

Compared to the days that we had in Turkey, the days that we’ve had in Greece so far have felt really light. Today we drove from Kavalla to Thessaloniki, and on the way we stopped at Amphipolis and Apollonia. There wasn’t really much at either place, there was a giant statue of a lion at Amphipolis and Apollonia is a relatively new site, it is still mostly farmland. They have an interesting way of doing archeology in those fields. The Archeologists rent out a field for one season, do all the work they can then cover it back up with dirt and the next season the farmer plants it again.

(The lion of Amphipolis, it's about 30 feet high. A person standing next to it gets up to about the second row of bricks.)

Once we got to Thessaloniki we went to the museum here. It was a pretty nice museum, in Turkey most of the museums that we went to were mostly little places that held things taken from the local site. Most of them could be thoroughly examined in 20 to 30 minutes. The Thessaloniki archeological museum was bigger, cleaner, warmer, and looked very professional. There was a bunch of cool stuff there, Gordon, our teacher, took us to look at about 15 things that had biblical relevance, but the section with the stuff from the tombs, which was apparently the best thing to see in the museum was closed because the rain was messing with the lights in there (it rained most of the day today.) There was some cool finds from Apollonia, which was fun to see, and some really interesting stuff there about Alexander the Great.

(A funeral vase from the museum.)

(A fish mosaic for dad and Emily. Below is a close up.)

After the museum we went to our hotel, checked in, then had lunch (late lunch, it was about 3:00, I was starving.) Then we walked up to look at St. Demetrius church, which was really pretty inside. It is a Greek Orthodox church so there were a lot of icons and mosaics. I really like the artwork on some of the icons, I guess the monasteries that we are going to visit in Meteora (two days from now) are the best place to buy icons and I would like to pick up a few cool ones there. We were going to visit the crypt, but it was closed. Apparently they changed the hours pretty recently.

After that we walked down to the Roman forum (agora) here in Thessaloniki. It is a second century forum, but it is most likely right on top of the 1st century forum that Paul and Silas and Timothy were in.

Thessaloniki is a cool city, one of the advantages of having a light day here is that we had a chance to walk around and see part of the city. I really enjoyed walking around but there are parts of the city to avoid. I guess they have riots here every night in the university district. A few weeks ago (maybe at the beginning of December?) a policeman fatally shot a teenager in Athens (maybe?) and students have been rioting since then. Here in Greece the universities are places where the police can’t come and arrest people, so the kids all wear black masks so no one recognizes them, they riot close to the university, the police tear gas them, they run back to the university, and the police don’t chase them. I stayed away from the university district and walked down to the waterfront and got a Thessaloniki Starbucks mug, it’s not as cool as the Antalya mug, but that’s ok.

One of the cool things about travelling in Greece so far is that our route has been the same as Paul’s was on his second missionary journey. He came into Neapolis, went up to Philippi, then when he got run out of Phillipi he came down to Thessaloniki by way of Amphipolis and Apollonia, then after getting run out of Thessaloniki he went down to Berea. I’m not sure where exactly we’re going tomorrow but I do know that we’re going to Berea and that we’ll be spending the night in Meteora (which Paul didn’t visit, so that will be our first deviation from his journey in Greece.)

Well that’s enough for today. Thanks for reading and until tomorrow…

Day 15 - Kavalla

2009-01-13T10:31:00.001-08:00

Today we focused on the city of Phillipi. We began the day by going to take a look at the ancient harbor of Neapolis that is here in Kavalla, and we saw a church that is allegedly on the place where Paul took his first step into Europe. We also saw some aqueducts in town and made a quick stop at a museum. Then it was off to the remains of the ancient city of Phillipi.

(The ancient harbor of Neapolis)

Phillipi was the first major city in Europe that Paul came to and worked. It was in Phillipi that he met Lydia, it was in Phillipi that he was thrown in prison for casting out a demon. It was in Phillipi that the prison that Paul was in was hit by an earthquake, but by not escaping he kept the guard from committing suicide and then converted him. And the book of Phillipians was written to the church in Phillipi.

The city itself was founded by Phillip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great's dad) because there were some very wealthy gold mines in the region. And there was also a huge battle where Mark Antony and Octavian (who eventually became Cesar Augustus) fought Brutus and Cassius for the future of Rome. Mark Antony and Octavian won so the Roman republic was dead forever and from then on (after Octavian defeated Mark Antony) Rome would always have Emperors.

Before we saw the actual city of Philipi we went down to the river to the spot where it is pretty likely that Paul met Lydia and baptized her. It was pretty cool to see, they have a little baptismal in the river now and there is a really beautiful church there too. After that we went up to the archaeological site.

(The section of the river where Paul met Lydia and baptized her)

There has been a lot of archaeological work done on the city which was cool to see, especially after seeing how much stuff in Turkey hasn't been done. We saw the theater, and had a few performances, (Dr. Rigsby sang a love song to his wife Donna, then we had a worship song in Chinese and one on Korean.) Then we saw the commercial agora, which was where the demon girl followed Paul and Silas shouting "These are servants of the most high God!" then an annoyed Paul cast the demon out. We saw the area where the judgement seat was at the agora, where Paul and Silas were pulled and then sentenced to prison, and then we saw the prison that they were probably in (there are a few hypothesises about that) After that we hiked up to the top of the Acropolis, which was a pretty good hike, it was really cold out today, but by the time I got to the top (about 30 minutes) I had taken of my coat, my sweater, my hat, my glove (I had lent my other glove out to someone,) and was just in my tee-shirt.

(Paul and Silas' prison)

From on top of the Acropolis our teacher, Gordon, gave us the layout of the battle between Mark Antony, Octavian, Brutus and Cassius, and we were able to see the different areas where the armies were laid out, their advantages and disadvantages and how it all played out. Then we hiked back down, picked up the folks who didn't want to do the hike from the coffee shop and loaded the bus back to the hotel. All in all a good day.

(The plain where the battle of Phillipi took place.)

Tomorrow we are going down to Thessaloniki, with stops at Apollonia and Amphipolis along the way, and tomorrow night I'll be posting from Thessaloniki. Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day 14 - Canakale to Kavalla

2009-01-12T10:30:00.000-08:00

Well, we're in Greece. Tonight and tomorrow we actually get to stay in the same hotel, which is really nice. I did a bunch of laundry (in the sink) and now it's hanging out on the balcony. I wasn't really excited about hand washing my clothes and I've found it pretty unsatisfying but it's the only option so that's what I do. Whenever I'm washing them I just keep thinking that no matter what I'm doing, my clothes aren't going to be as clean as they would be if I had put them in a machine. All that being said, since we are at this hotel for a few days I washed some shirts and a couple of pairs of jeans because I knew they would have time to dry before I packed them back up again. I just hope that hanging them out on the balcony won't make them smell like exhaust.

Today was mostly travel. We left our hotel at 6:15 so we could take a ferry across the Dardanelles strait and then drive through the Gallopoli region for a few hours until we got to the boarder. I guess up until a few years ago the boarder crossing was pretty intense, you would unload from your bus in Turkey, exit through customs, then walk the 3/4 of a mile that is between the boarders, with soldiers and watchtowers on each side, then have to bribe someone to let you into the Greece side (or maybe it was bribe someone to get out of Turkey, I'm don't quite remember.) Now there is a bus that takes you from one side to another and you just unload for the exit stamp on your passport from Turkey, then a customs agent from Greece collects everyone's passport in a big stack, then takes them off, stamps them and brings them back. No intense walks and no bribes, all pretty boring. The bathrooms were an adventure though, I guess that's better than nothing.

We stopped in Alexandrapolis to talk about the Island of Salmonthrace and have lunch. It was really cold and I left my gloves in the bus, which was a bad decision. Our new teacher Gordon, told us the four reasons that Salmonthrace is important (he also gave us a quick and easy cure for tear gas just in case anyone decided to go looking for a riot in Thessaloniki or Athens, the cure is to eat a raw onion.) Salmonthrace is important because: some of mythology says that Poseidon, god of the sea, watched the Trojan war from there, it was the home of a major mystery religion in the New Testament times, Paul was there twice, maybe four times, and the statue 'winged victory of Salmonthrace' is from there. We got into more specifics about the mystery religions and Paul's time there (2nd journey and maybe 3rd) but I won't get into them here.

In Alexandrapolous one of the girls, who hadn't told her bank that she would be traveling abroad, had her debit card eaten by a machine because her account was on hold and she couldn't get it back because the bank was afraid of fraud. That was pretty terrifying to the rest of us, but I think just about everyone else told their bank where they were going so we didn't have any problems. I think I'll be nervous every time I use an ATM from now on though.

After Alexandrapolis we drove to Kavalla, which is on the ancient city of Neapolis, which was the port town to Philipi. Paul sailed into Neapolis when he crossed over from Asia to Macedonia. Philipi isn't around anymore but Kavala is a pretty big city. Before we got to the hotel we walked along some of the Egnatian way, which ran from Neapolis to Rome. That was cool, it was a section of road that Paul walked as he went up from Neapolis to Philipi.

(Above, modern day Kavala. On the other side of the finger pointing out to sea is the ancient port of Neapolis.)

(A section of the Egnatian way just out of Neapolis)

Tomorrow we visit what's left of the ancient harbor of Neapolis, check out a museum here in town, then head up to Philipi and hike to the top of the Acropolis (the hill that the city was built on.) Then it's back to our hotel here for the night.

Thanks for reading and until tomorrow...

Days 12 &13 - Akhisar to Assos to Canakale

2009-01-11T10:15:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: This post is pretty long. I don't think I'll try to squeeze two days into one post again.

Sorry I missed last night, internet trouble again. Instead of writing one post for yesterday and one for today I'm just going to meld the two into one.

Yesterday we saw the last city of the seven churches in Revelation, Pergamum. It was a pretty interesting place, it is the second place that we've seen that used to have one of the seven wonders of the world. The first was the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, in Pergamum the wonder was the altar of Zeus. It's not there anymore. An evangelist in the 6th century name John of Ephesus convinced the people in turkey to tear down the all the pagan temples. And then about 100 years ago the Germans convinced the Ottoman sultan to let them take all the pieces of the altar to Berlin and rebuild it there, so that's were it's at now. The altar was massive, 100 feet long and 30 feet wide. The smoke that went up from the sacrifices on the Altar would have dominated the sky.

In the letter in Revelation, it mentions that the throne of Satan is in Pergamum, it may have been in reference to the altar of Zeus (which is what Dr. Rigsby thinks.) It also may have been the Imperial cult temple. Pergamum was the first province in Asia to get an Imperial temple.

(Above, me in front of what's left of Zeus. I probably shouldn't be smiling so big in front of the throne of Satan. Below the Imperial Cult temple in Pergamum.)

Last night we slept in Assos, and today we visited the ancient port there. On his way to Jerusalem at the end of his third missionary journey he decided to walk from Alexandria Troas to Assos by himself while his travelling companions sailed. Mark, our teacher think that it was because he had heard the prophecies from the churches that the Jews would arrest him in Jerusalem if he returned and he wanted to spend that time praying with God to make sure that going to Jerusalem was really the right decision. I think that is a good hypothesis.

(Part of the Roman road from Alexandria Troas to Assos)

After Assos we went to Alexandria Troas and saw the ancient port there, the water was beautiful, but there is not much there anymore. We only saw a few pillars sticking up from the water.

After that we went to Troy, Troy was cool, there have been like 11 cities there on that same spot. The oldest one dates back to something like 2800 BC. We saw sections from every city that had been there but it was really cool to see the walls of the city that they think is Homeric Troy. It was cool to imagine Achilles chasing Hector around those walls three times (even if they probably weren't real people or if they were it didn't happen like in the Iliad.)

(A ramp that ran to one of the gates of Homeric Troy, the Trojan horse may have rolled up this gate.)

Troy was the last place where I had a chance to spend some of my Turkish Liras, so I bought a few souvenirs there. I got a little wooden Trojan horse, and I got a miniature statue of the Ataturk. Ataturk is the person who's portrait you see in every building you go into in Turkey. He was the president of Turkey for like three years in the 1920's and he completely changed the country. He was the one that transitioned the country into a democracy, he changed the national alphabet from Arabic to Turkish, he secularized the country and he did a ton of other stuff. People say that he's like the Turkish George Washington, but I think that's an understatement. It sounds like the Ataturk was Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison all rolled into one. Another thing that he did was institute last names, everyone only had one name so he made everyone take a last name and he took Ataturk, which means father of the Turks.

All that said, they love Ataturk here, his face is everywhere. Every denomination of money has Ataturk on in, all the government buildings and a ton of the stores and hotels. Our hotel last night had a holographic Ataturk whose eyes followed you around the room. The funny thing about it is that the Ataturk looks like a cross between a mafia boss and Dracula, and he's always scowling. So I got a little statue of him where he's smiling and posing like the Walt Disney statue at Disneyland. It is one of the funniest things I've ever seen, I laughed for about 10 minutes straight when I saw it.

Today was a really fun day, we had some more performances at the remains of the theater in Assos. I recited/read a poem by GK Chesterton called 'A Second Childhood.' I was just planning on reading it but everyone has been so good that I tried to memorize it, I got most of it down but I still got stuck a few times, I had the book with me though so I could pick up my line where I lost it. I was nervous, but it went pretty well and it was fun. I was teasing Jin, one of my Korean friends that i was going to call her up after me on the stage to sing a song, she said that she would maybe come, but I didn't want to embarrass her so I didn't. I found later that not only was she ready to sing, but in Korea she had been part of a contemporary Christian group that recorded a cd. The more I find out about some of the Koreans that we have with us on our trip the more I am amazed at the lives they left behind in Korea to come to Talbot to study.

Another story about Jin, yesterday the hotel we stayed in was right on a little bay in Assos (it also had no hot water and some of the heaters didn't work. My conversation this morning with Jorge, one of the guys on the trip, went like this. Me: Hey Jorge, how'd you sleep last night? Jorge: Horrible man, it was freezing. Me: Yeah, those beds were pretty cold. Jorge: It wasn't just the bed, we couldn't get our heater to work. Me: Oh man, that sucks. Jorge: Yeah man, I froze my Assos off) The water in the bay was really clear, and on the rocks at the bottom we could see all sorts of sea anemones and sea urchins. Jin grew up on a little island in Korea so while we looked in the bay and saw sea urchins and anemones, she saw something different. She skipped out across the slick rocks in the bay (she is probably the most agile person I've ever seen) scooped up five or six little urchins, cracked them open with a rock, proceeded to have a late afternoon snack.

Well, I was going to try to make this a story post, where I told a few funny stories about different people on the trip and gave some impressions from my time in Turkey (we're moving on to Greece tomorrow.) But I'm sure this is longer than anyone wants to read already so I won't do that. I'll just say that after word of my upset stomach got out yesterday I ended up having acupuncture by toothpick forced upon me, and it felt like someone was trying to stab me in the had with a toothpick over and over again. Joyce (another of the Koreans) looking at my grimaces kept saying, "Make noises, Daniel, make noises, it's ok, we all know it hurts." But my stomach felt a lot better last night and it feels great today. Thanks to anyone who prayed. (another note on Joyce, we wrote little thank you notes to Mark our teacher and Mel our tour guide for Turkey, and after writing 'thank you' she drew a picture of and American flag, a Korean flag, and a Turkish flag to fill in the rest of the blank space.)

Other things that happened today, one of the guys, Phil, tried to save a baby lamb that couldn't climb up a hill to get to the rest of the sheep, only after he got the lamb up on the hill with the rest of the flock, the Shepherdess sent the whole flock of sheep running right back down the hill that the lamb was on before. Also we had another award ceremony that I emceed and (unrelated to my emceeing) this hotel has really hot water, but it's kind of brown.

Anyway, we're on to Greece in the morning. As always, thanks for reading and until tomorrow...

Day 11 - Izmir to Akhisar

2009-01-09T10:10:00.000-08:00

Here is my post from last night. My ankle is feeling good, it's probably 90%, but I there is another think I'd appreciate prayer for. I woke up this morning with an upset stomach, probably something I ate last night, if you all could pray that it goes away quickly and doesn't cause any "emergencies" in the middle of nowhere, I'd appreciate it.

(Modern day Izmir, which sits on top of ancient Smyrna)

Our time in Turkey is running down, only two days left. Its a strange feeling, we haven't even been over here for two weeks yet, but it feels like we've been here forever. At the same time, I'm surprised and a little sad that we will be leaving Turkey so soon. There are some things that I'll miss about Turkey but most of all will probably be the beautiful landscapes. I wish that I had a lot more time to spend hiking through some of the mountains that they have here. I think that another reason I'll be sad to leave Turkey is because that will be a reminder that the end of our trip is creeping up, and I've really been enjoying myself, I don't want it to end.

Anyway, on to what we did today. Today we visited four of the seven churches that have letters written to them in the book of Revelation. We visited Smyrna, Sardis, Philidephia and Thyatira. Modern day Izmir sits right on top of Smyrna, and it is the third largest city in Turkey, with something like 3 million people, so there isn't a lot of archeology to see, most of it is buried under the modern city. There is a cool story about Polycarp, who was the Bishop of the city of Smyrna and was martyred in the theater in Smyrna. They had pulled him into the theater and the judge commanded him to renounce the atheists or die (the Christians were thought of as atheists in those days because they refused to worship the emperor or any pagan gods.) Polycarp refused, and eventually as he was pressed to renounce the atheists, he turned to the pagan crowd in the theater and renounced all the pagans as atheists. After more pressure he finally said, "For 86 years I have served Christ and he has never done me wrong, how can I blaspheme my king and my savior?" Then they tried to burn him at the stake, but he didn't burn so they stabbed him with a sword and he died.

(The temple of Artemis in Sardis. The little brick building next to it is a Byzantine church.)

The next place we visited was Sardis. We have seen so many beautiful places in Turkey, I can't really pick a place as the most beautiful, but Sardis was definitely one of my favorites. There was an old kingdom here that was called the Lydian kingdom, and they were are the first people that we know of who minted coins. There was a temple of Artemis in Smyrna and we visited that and a little Byzantine church that was next to the temple, then we drove down into the city to look at what was downtown Smyrna. Some of the stuff that archaeologists can figure out are pretty amazing, they can tell a store from a restaurant by looking at bones and materials that are buried in the ground.

After Sardis we went to Philidelphia and Thyatira, both of those ancient sites also have cities built on top of them, and there was almost nothing to see at each place. It was still cool to visit them and read each churches respective letter at each site. The book of Revelation has so much crazy stuff going on I always just figured the letters were crazy too, but it's different when you see where the cities were and you imagine Revelation making the rounds to the different churches in the Provence in Asia (which was the roman province in the southwestern part of modern day Turkey.) It makes it feel a lot more real.

Well that was it for today. Tomorrow we will see the last city of the seven churches of revelation, Pergamum. I'm not sure what else we will be doing but I'm sure it will be a busy day. Tomorrow night we will be spending the night in Assos, so I'll be posting from there.

Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day 10 - Kusadasi to Izmir

2009-01-08T10:40:00.000-08:00

For some reason I kept calling Domitian, Diocletian in this post. Sorry about that, the emperor who I talk about here is definitely Domitian, not Diocletian.

(For some reason I couldn't get these two pictures to move down where I want them to be. Above I'm at the burial place of John the Apostle, below is an idol of Artemis. The idol was found buried, but dates back to the first century and was definitely an object of worship. All the Artemis idols (or Diana, which is the Roman name) in would have looked like this. It was about seven feet tall.)

Even though we did the same amount of stuff today that we normally do, today seemed like an easy day. We did have less travel, which helped, and just about everything we saw today had to do with Ephesus, which made the day feel easier too. It's enough to see four different archaeological sites every day, it's a whole other thing when they are the remains of four totally different cities.

The more we see of the ancient cities the more I'm amazed at what they must have looked like 2000 years ago. Everything in these cities is marble, they are full of beautiful pillars, statues and buildings, the views are unbelievable, there are fountains and all sorts of other things. They must have been amazing. I've never been one to think that we are smarter today than people were back then, but if I were my mind would be completely changed.

Ephesus is the biggest archaeological site in Turkey, they have been working on it for over 100 years, and they have only uncovered about 20% of the city. Granted, the government only lets people "do archeology" in the summer months, but that still gives you a sense of the size that these cities were.

Ephesus used to be a port city, now it is a few miles inland, 2000 years of silting by a river will do that to a port. We walked into the city from what would have been the land side back in the day, it was where the official Romans would do their business. That was were the Roman agora was (the governmental marketplace) its where the town clerk in Acts 19:35 would have been while the riot started by the silversmiths began to take place in the lower part of the city. There was also a temple dedicated to Artemis in Roman agora and a few temples dedicated to Emperor worship, one to Augustus and his wife and one to Diocletian.

(Part of the statue of Diocletian that was at the Imperial cult temple in Ephesus. Everyone hated him so much that after he was assassinated the Roman senate ordered all his images destroyed and his name erased forever, some pieces still survived though. That section of arm is about five feet tall and almost as big around as me.)

The acoustics of the city are set up in such a way that even if people were shouting "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians" for two hours in the theater (which is in the lower part of the city) they wouldn't have been able to hear it in the upper part of the city. (which is probably why the mob yelled for two hours without anyone stopping them.)

(The theater in Ephesus opened out to the bay, away from the upper city and the Roman agora.)

In Ephesus we also saw some of the terrace houses (where the rich people lived, they were ridiculous, ask me about them,) we saw the commercial agora (where the riot in Acts 19 started and where Paul preached regularly,) we saw the theater, and we saw the ancient library.

All in all we spent about four hours in Ephesus, and I can't really imagine spending much less time there. After Ephesus we had lunch at a place where they show you how Turkish carpets are made and then try to sell them to you. I thought about buying one but I decided

to pay my tuition for next semester instead. Since I was busy not buying carpets, I did have a few minutes to sketch a little bit, which was fun until everyone else who wasn't buying anything decided to come and watch me, that was less fun.

After lunch we went to see what is left of St. John's Basilica in Ephesus. This is was the alleged burial place of John the Apostle (He spent some time in Ephesus as Bishop) Our teacher, Mark, thinks that it probably was the place where he was buried, the tradition is really early and very consistent. The remains aren't there though, they were taken to Constantinople in the 6th century.

After that we saw what is left of the temple to Artemis, which was one of the seven wonders of the world and was the largest place of worship in the ancient world. The belief was that the idol of Artemis that was in the temple fell from the sky. If you see the picture of Artemis I posted above, you can she that she was definitely ugly enough to have crashed into earth from outer space.

And our last stop of the day was the Ephesus museum, where they put some of the stuff they found in Ephesus under a roof (stuff like the Artemis statue and Diocletian head and arm.) After the museum we drove to Izmir (ancient Smyrna) for the night. Amazingly we only have three days left in Turkey, then we're on to Greece.

I hope everyone is well and as always, thanks for reading. Until tomorrow...

Day 9 - Pamukkale to Kusadasi

2009-01-07T13:54:00.000-08:00

Here's my post from last night. After dinner tonight I'll try to post about Ephesus today. Thanks to anyone who prayed for me, my ankle felt a lot better today.

Wow, another really busy day. I was thinking back on what we did today and I couldn’t believe that our visit to Colossae and Laodicea had only been this morning, it seems like it was a week ago.

In addition to visiting Laodicea and Colossae today, we visited Didymus, which was the sacred city of the other city we saw today. I can’t exactly remember what its name was, but I think it was Miletus. At least I’m pretty sure it started with an M.

Every morning we have someone do devotions and today it was my turn. I had a class last semester where every class our prof. would randomly ask someone to give a little devotion for the class. So at the beginning of the semester I threw together a quick, easy one that I thought might be applicable to seminary students. And a month ago, when I signed up for today’s devotions and realized that no one on the trip had been in that class, I decided to just use the same one. It just happened to turn out that my devotion was from Colossians, and the day that I ended up giving it was on the day we visited Colossae. And the emotional and spiritual timing of it was perfect too. It was cool to see God work through me that way today.

(The Colossian tell is between my fingers. I'm not sure what possessed me to make that face.)

There wasn’t much to see at Colossae, it is just a big mound (the technical word is ‘tell.’) I guess an Australian University has submitted a proposal to begin excavations on the tell, but they want to do it in the winter months (their summer, so students could go work on it) and the Turks say that they only allow excavations in June, July, and August. No one is sure why that is the case, but those are the rules. Regardless of the fact that we didn’t see any ruins or anything, it was cool to stand at the base of the tell (it was too muddy to climb up to the top) read the book of Philemon and think about the runaway slave Onesemus coming back with Paul’s letter in his hand to face his old master Philemon.

Laodicea was very cool. We read the letter to the Laodiceans from Revelation in the theater there. The city of Laodicea was very wealthy (it was a banking center,) it was a medical center famous for its eye salve, and it was a textile center famous for its black wool. But Jesus tells them that they are poor, blind, and they need to put on the white clothing of God. The lukewarm water stuff may either be to contrast the water of Laodicea with that of Heiropolis (hot springs) and Colossae (cold mountain streams) or it may be a reference to the fact that the springs that were Laodicea’s water source were two kilometers away from the city and after the water had travelled that distance by pipe, it was lukewarm. By using this image, Jesus is contrasting usefulness of hot water (recuperative) and cold water (refreshing) with lukewarm water, which is good for nothing.

(I'm standing in front of an old water tower/container in Laodicea.)

After Laodicea (which is very close to both Colossae and Hierapolis) we drove down to the coast again to visit Didymus and Miletus. Didymus means twin, and it was the twin of Miletus because Didymus had a temple of Apollo there and Miletus had one to Artemis, and Apollo and Artemis were twins. There was a sacred road that ran between the two that pilgrims followed. We could see a lot of the remains of Apollo’s temple at Didymus and it was enormous. Only two of the pillars were at full height and they were massive. Didymus is also where I sprained my ankle. So I was in moderate pain as we went through Miletus. I remember that the area around the city was beautiful (as always) the city was massive, it used to be on the ocean, and they worshipped dolphins there. I’m pretty sure that it’s in the Bible somewhere too. Fortunately I took notes, I just can’t remember what I wrote.

(Look really closely, I'm standing in front of the pillar base in front of the right pillar. This is the picture I sprained my ankle to get.)

(The theater in Miletus.)

And that was pretty much it for today. During our bus rides I hosted our semi-regular awards ceremony (paper plates that point out notable things people have done on the trip,) David Park, who I will have to spend some time writing about one of these days, performed acupuncture on a carsick person with a toothpick, and someone bought and passed around some candy that I’m pretty sure was tree-sap flavored. Oh, we also got to spend some time with a Turkish pastor and his wife, which was really, really cool. So, all in all it was a typical day.

Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Day 8 - Perge to Pamukkale

2009-01-07T11:42:00.000-08:00

I couldn't connect to the internet last night, but I did write up a quick post. So here is what we did yesterday. I will try to post what we did today in the morning. One quick note before I go to bed, I sprained my ankle today, I was running down to get a picture in front of a giant pillar at the temple of Apollo at Didymus and I hit a patch of mud and my left foot slid out in front of me. if you all could pray that it doesn't hurt tommorow I'd appreciate it. Tommorow we're going to Ephesus which is one of the best sites to visit in Turkey, which means there is lots of stuff and lots of walking. Thanks.

We ran into some road trouble today, so instead of seeing Laodicea and Colossae today, we are leaving extra early tomorrow to see those sites.

Today we visited the ancient site of Patera at the coast and then we drove up inland and saw Hierapolis.

Hierapolis, Colossae, and Laodicea were the three cities that lay in the Lycus river valley. Hierapolis was well known for its hot springs. And now there are huge calcium deposits where the water used to run off the cliffs, they kind of look like petrified waterfalls, bright white, petrified waterfalls. Hierapolis is up on the top of a hill, like so many of these cities are. It was quite massive and has the best preserved Roman Theater in Turkey. The theater holds between ten to fifteen thousand people, and is in good enough shape that they still hold concerts there.

I think that Hierapolis is only mentioned in the Bible once, at the end of the book of Colossians, but it may have some significance to the book of Revelations (I’ll try to mention that tomorrow)

(Here I am standing on the top of the calcium deposits left by the springs. I bought that hat from an old lady selling stuff next the Hittite water shrine the other day. I also seem to have simultaneously lost my stocking cap I brought with me, which is unfortunate since it fit significantly better.)

The first place we saw today was the ruins at Patera. Patera was a major city in the Lycian League, which actually was mentioned by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers as a major influence on creation of the U.S. representative government. Patera was beautiful. It seemed like every direction I looked I saw one of those paintings by the French romantic landscape artists where they threw an ancient ruin into beautiful countryside. I decided today that if I every build a winter home, it will be in the ancient ruins of Patera, it was that nice.

Patera is a city that Paul changes ships in on his way to Jerusalem at the end of his third missionary journey. The just recently uncovered the lighthouse that was there in the 1st century and would have guided Paul’s ship in or back out to sea.

In all of the theaters we visit, there will be opportunities for people perform something for the rest of the group. Dr. Rigsby got us started today with a song, “I’m my own Grandpa.” I recorded it on my digital camera and i was going to post it, but I decided I'm going to ask him first, to make sure he doesn't mind. Hopefully I'll get that up for you tomorrow.

Sorry for just the one picture, if I can post the video of Dr. Rigsby singing, it will more than make up for it. Thanks for reading. Until tomorrow…

Update, the hotel that we stayed in in Pamakkale had a "thermal pool" that was fed from the hot springs from ancient Iconium. I spent about an hour in it, it was amazing. Most of us just relaxed, except for some of the Koreans who did laps. That was amazing too, they're the best.

Day 7 - Antalya to Perge

2009-01-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

(Starbucks opened early for a few of us in Anatalya today, and I got a pretty cool mug.)

(One of the narrow streets from Antalya.)

(At the ancient port of Andrache, where Paul sailed out of on his trip to Rome, the ship that he sailed on from here was the one that was shipwrecked.)

Wow, it is amazing how much you can fit into one day. Our in our case, it's amazing how much you can fit into day after day after day. We have been driving about 250-350 miles a day, and we see three or four major sites each day with a few small things added in sometimes. We get up at 5:30am, leave at 7:00-7:30am and get to the new hotel about 7:00pm. If you're wondering if I've had a particularly busy day, one way to tell is if all the pictures are up top like today. (Another way to tell is if I had time to spellcheck.) My batteries ran out last night so here is what we did yesterday (most of it written last night.)

Today was another busy day with tons of really cool stuff. We saw a harbor that Paul sailed out of, and one he sailed into. We saw another great archeological site and we continued a string of really, really nice hotels. If anyone feels like vacationing in Turkey I have some fantastic recommendations.

Today I began to wonder if there is a limit to the number breathtaking views you can have in a day. Turkey is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen, and multiple times every day I am in awe at the scenery. We came down from the Taurus mountain range today to the coast and sea coast is as beautiful as the mountains.

Believe it or not I can't think of the names of all the sites we saw today, we saw the Perge, we saw Attalia (which I don't think is mentioned directly, but Paul must have sailed there to get to Perge) and we saw Andrache, which is the Port city of Myra which Paul sailed through on his way to Rome. And we saw Myra which was the city that Santa was from. I lost a race in the ancient staduim in Myra and a Russian tourist gave me a thumbs down. In Andrache I went down to splash my hand in the water a little bit, and after avioding one of my Korean big sisters attempts to push me in the water a wave came in and hit me about shin high.

Like always there are two many great and funny stories to tell so I'm just posting a few pictures and a few sentances. We're staying in Kalkan tonight, and the hotel here may be my favorite hotel I've ever been in. (Yes David, that includes that includes the Montreux Palace.) I don't remember everything we're doing tomorrow, but I know we're going to Colosae (and I'm pretty sure I spelled that wrong,) and Laodicea.

As always thanks for reading. I'm not sure where I'll be posting from tonight, but I'm pretty sure it starts with a P. I know it's inland and I'm rooting for the somewhere in the Taurus mountains agian. Until tommorow (or in this case tonight)...

Day 6 - Konya to Antalya

2009-01-05T11:21:00.001-08:00

(The Via Sebaste)

I couldn't get through the connection at the hotel last night, but here is a post I wrote yesterday on the bus.

Today was a good day. We left Konya, which was an interesting city. The landscape around all these cities are beautiful, to call the the Taurus mountains, which these cities are in gorgeous, would be an understatement. But it is kind of cold here, while we’ve had nice days, the last few days have had a lot of snow and ice. In Konya, (which was Iconium in Biblical times) I guess they burn charcoal for heat, and the smoke just sits everywhere in the city. I’m sure it isn’t helped by the fact that all the Turks smoke non-stop. There was a haze that was everywhere, from the hotel lobby to the mall. It must be weird to buy clothes that already smell like smoke.

Since today was Sunday, we had a little worship service as we drove out of town, Dr. Rigsby preached and we sang. As we were driving up in the mountains out of Konay, I was looking down on the city, a city that had a church planted there by the Apostle Paul, a city that was most likely one of the cities that the book of Galatians was addressed to, and now it is a city that has one catholic church, which has about 10 members, and the rest of the city is Muslim. We were singing Holy, Holy, Holy, and as I looked down on this haze filled city that had turned away from God, we were singing, “Holy, Holy, Holy, tho the darkness hide thee, tho the eyes of sinful man, thy glory may not see…” And I was really struck by the fact that God is still great, God is still holy and glorious, even when people are sinful and Satan seems to win some places, God is still the same, God is always holy and good and glorious, regardless of how we respond to him.

We saw a few things today, but the best things were the Via Sebaste and Pisidian Antioch. The Via Sabaste was one of the main Roman roads that ran through this section of the road, and it is the road that Paul took as he travelled from Pisidian Antioch to Iconium. It was really cool to get out of the bus and walk along a section of road that Paul and Barnabas walked on as the planted churches and Paul and Timothy walked as they visited and encouraged those churches.

We also saw Pisidian Antioch, which is a really well preserved archeological site of the city that Paul visited in Acts. It was really cool to walk around and get a feel for what the city would have been like, and as all these places in what was ancient Galatia, the scenery was stunning. The ancient cities were all built on the tops of hills, I’m not sure if they did that just in imitation of Rome, if they did it because they were more easily defensible, or if it was because they were more visible to travelers.

We also saw a Hittite water shrine, which was cool, and I was on the losing end of two snowball fights, usually because of Jin, who is one of my Korean nu-nas (older sisters.) Even with snow in my ear and inside my shirt I still ended up less wet than our teacher, Dr. Mark Wilson, after warning us to be careful around the Hittite water shrine, he slipped and fell into the little pond around the shrine.

Anyway, thanks for reading and until tomorrow…

Day 5 - Adana to Konya

2009-01-03T12:06:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty worn out, so this post will be pretty short. We stayed the night in Adana last night, then our first stop was in Tarsus. Tarsus was the city that Paul was from (Saul of Tarsus) It was cool, they have uncovered a road there that is from the 1st century, Paul probably walked on it at some point.

There is also a gate there called Cleopatra's gate. Tarsus has a gate named after Cleopatra because Tarsus is the city where Cleopatra and Mark Antony met. Shakespeare describes their Tarsus meeting at the beginning of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. There was also an old mosque in town that the muslims say has the grave of Daniel the prophet. Muslim tradition says that he died and was buried in Tarsus.

Then we drove on through Iconium (modern day Konya) and on to Lystra. The drive from Adana through Tarsus to Iconium is about 350 miles. And the road runs along pretty much the same path that Paul woudl have taken. But instead of by bus, he did it on foot.

The drive crosses over a mountainrange and runs along inside the mountians for most of the trip. It was beautiful, there was snow pretty much the whole way. Growing up in Tarsus and living in Antioch, Paul must have been a guy that liked the mountians.

Iconium we will see most of tommorow, it was a place where he and Barmabas stopped on his first jouney. The were run out of town by the Jews and they went on ot Derby and Lystra. Lystra is the town where the people thoguht they were gods and they brought out animals to sacrafice to them.

Ok, so I fell asleep writing this last night, and I only have a few minutes to post this before we load the bus. So up top is a picture of the mountians that we drove through and Paul would have walked through. Two more interesting things to say, Lystra is in the middle of nowhere, and it was in the middle of nowhere in the 1st century. But Timothy was from Lystra, so no matter where you are from, God can use you. And second interesting point, Konya smells like a fireplace, even inside of our shower.

As always thanks for reading,

Daniel

Day 4 - Antakya to Adana

2009-01-02T08:30:00.000-08:00

Getting on the bus this morning in Antioch was an experience I won't forget for quite some time.

When we were having lunch in the Bazaar in Istanbul (the Bazaar that I hated), my roommate Brian and I were joking about the lamb that he had ordered for lunch. I think he offered me a taste and I turned him down and he asked me if I had a problem with eating really cute animals. After assuring him that I did, I asked him if he would have ordered kittens or puppies if lamb weren’t on the menu. Then we joked about ordering just cute animals, puppies, kittens, lamb, and fuzzy yellow chicks.

This morning, when we got on the bus our tour guide got on the microphone and said, “Some of you may have noticed that there is something that looks like blood on our tires this morning, in case you’re wondering, yes, it’s real blood.” At this point I was thinking, “well I guess our driver ran over a squirrel or something this morning, I’m not sure why she is making an announcement about this.” Our tour guide went on. “Since it is New Year, and we are the first big group to go this hotel this year, and they think that they will have a good year, our hotel sacrificed a lamb this morning to help them have a good year. They give the meat to the poor and they splashed the blood on our tires. The blood will keep us safe on our trip, according to tradition.” I’m not sure what Melkem (our Turkish tour guide) expected from us after making this announcement, but what she got was 31 shocked, open-mouthed stares. After I was past the initial shock I couldn’t help but think, “I guess we're lucky there were no puppies or kittens available.”

Today was devoted to Selucia Perea and Antioch.

Acts 13:1 Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. 2 While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." 3 Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off. 4 So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus.

(Antioch, modern day Antokya)

The church in Antioch played a huge role in the evangelism of the gentile world. Paul taught in Antioch before he left on his missionary journeys, and it was Antioch that he returned to. Antioch had about 250,000 people in the Roman times, but it wasn’t a port city, so to sail off to Cypress, Paul and Barnabas had to go through Selucia Perea. Selucia Perea isn’t there anymore, the port isn’t even there anymore.

(both are pictures of where Selucia Perea was)

It was another beautiful day here. Antioch is pretty ratty town now, but I can see why Paul lived here, the landscape is absolutely beautiful. Great snow packed peaks surround the town, and the town was designed so that the sea breeze blew in through the streets. And it would have been right on the main Roman road that ran all the way to Jerusalelm (Antioch is only about 350 miles to Jerusalem.) It was a great day to hike around on some of the mountains around here.

Now on to my Korean lessons. Yesterday I asked a few Koreans what happy New Year was in Korean. Turns out Happy New Year is a full sentence in Korean. I think it’s something like se he bo mani padera. I guess that Joyce and Jin decided that teaching me Korean was fun because they haven’t stopped since. It typically goes something like this, we’re sitting on the bus, and Joyce says, “Daniel review! What’s number one?!” And I think of a Korean word that they taught me, and she keeps counting up until I can’t think of one (which is typically around four or five) then she tells me a new one. I can’t even come close to repeating it, so I say “slower” and Joyce says, “No, it means don’t eat.” And I say, “no, say the word slower” so she gives the word to me syllable by syllable, with each syllable getting louder and louder and the last one ends with her pointing at me. So learning the word for don’t eat, mochjima, goes, “Moch –jI-MA!” and ends in a point. Then I try to say it back and all the Koreans laugh and then complement me on my accent. I think they're lying. Jin helps out by yelling at me in Korean to not do whatever it is I’m doing. So if I’m about to take a bite of dinner, she’ll yell, "mochjima!" So far it’s been really fun.

Other things that happened today…we stopped to get some water at a convenience store and four Jr. High Turkish girls got on the bus to say hi to us and giggle. We gave them some candy and they posed while people took pictures. Joyce told them to sing a song and then counted, “1, 2, 3, 4!” and started clapping a beat for them. They didn’t sing. Later I asked her if she asked every new person she met to sing her a song, she said “No, but there were four of them!” I guess that’s explanation enough.

We also saw a giant canal that was cut out of rock to keep water from flooding Selucia Perea, we saw some tombs cut into a mountain side, we visited a mosaic museum and we stumbled upon a protest against Israel. And a good chunk of the day was spent driving. Tommorow is our busiest day yet, we are driving up from Adana (where we are now) to Tarsus (where Paul was from) and then on to somewhere that I don't remember off the top of my head. Tomorrow is a full day with an early start so thanks for reading and good night.

Day 3 - Istanbul to Antakya

2009-01-01T12:04:00.000-08:00

(For anyone interested, I added a couple of pictures of St. Sophia to yesterday's Istanbul post.)

Well I'm in Antakya tonight, the city is also known as Hatay. Back in New Testament times the city was known as Antioch, the church here was Paul's home church as he spread the Gospel.

(a beautiful day in Istanbul)

This morning was a beautiful morning in Istanbul, the air was brisk and the sky was clear and blue, it was a great change from the wet weather of the previous two days. After we packed up and left the hotel, we went to the Turkish Archaeological museum, then it was lunch and then the airport.

We also walked past the church where the first council of Constantinople took place. (It is closed, we couldn't go in.) The Council of Constantinople was a huge deal. I don't have time to go into what happened there, but if your curious, look up the creed of Constantinople. That was what they covered.

(Above, St. Irene's, where they had the first council of Constantinople. Left, Jin, (who tried to assign me Korean homework tonight, myself, and Brian, (not my roomate) in Istanbul. Across the Bay is Calcedon, where another really important church council took place.)

The Archaeological museum was pretty great, We saw a bunch of stuff from Ancient Assyria (whose kings had great names like "Tiglath-Pilaser III," I think it's awesome that they decided to reuse that name three times. If I ever have a boy I'm going to name him Tiglath-Pilaser Mattern IV. Or maybe I'll name my next dog that, I haven't decided yet.)

We also saw: Hammurabi's code, the oldest piece of Hebrew writing in the world, the inscription from Hezekiah's tunnel (it's in the Bible) and a block of stone from Herod's temple in Jerusalem (the one that Jesus would have been in) that threatens death to any gentile who went into the next courtyard. Pictures of stuff taken in museums are boring though (and in the case of Hammurabi's code, blurry. The Turks have something against people using tripods, ask me about it sometime.) So here is a picture of a cat posing like an Assyrian Lion.

After the museum was mostly travel, flying from Istanbul to Adana, then driving to Antakya. Tomorrow were going to a mosaic museum, we're going to look at the church of Antioch, then we're driving back to Adana, where we'll spend the night. So tomorrow night's post will be from Adana. I'd like to tell a couple of funny stories about Joyce and Jin, two of the Korean girls who have taken it upon themselves to have me speaking Korean before the trip is over. Hopefully tomorrow night there will be time for that.

Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

Happy New year

2008-12-31T15:23:00.000-08:00

Happy new year everyone, man this blogger thing is frustrating sometimes. That last post didn't come out like it should have, it was supposed to have three more pictures of St. Sophia, a joke I stole from Seth , and an update letting everyone know that it what I thought were doves were actually seagulls scared up in the air by the fireworks, which apparently wern't that great.

I'll try to post the Sophia pictures from Antioch, they were pretty cool.

So, happy new year, yes I'm writing from the future, no zombie attacks yet. (thanks for the joke seth).

Day 2 - Istanbul

2008-12-31T13:52:00.000-08:00

I think a made a huge mistake today. I stayed in instead of going out for new years eve. In Egypt last year New years wasn't a big deal, and I kind of thought that it would be the same here. So I stayed in to get some work done and try and get a good nights sleep (I felt really jet lagged this evening). It's midnight and I've been listening to live Turkish music playing through my window all night and now I see fireworks and a huge flock of doves flying from the square where my roommate and some other people went for new years. Apparently new years is a big deal in Istanbul. I am absolutely kicking myself right now.

Oh well, on to today.

Today was our full day in Istanbul, we visited the Blue mosque, St. Sophia (also called Hagia Sophia, we had a change of plans), the Byzantine Hippodrome, the indoor Bazaar, and the Byzantine cistern.

Istanbul is a great city, it reminds me of Europe and it also reminds me of Egypt (but clean). It is a really old city, Constantine (who became the first Roman Emperor to become a Christian) moved out of Rome and made Constantinople the capital of the Roman Empire sometime in the 300’s AD. The section of the city that our hotel is in has tall apartments and shops that line narrow cobbled streets, really cool.

The Blue mosque was cool, it reminded me of the Alabaster mosque in Cairo. I think that the insides of mosques all kind of look the same. There are are definitely some differences, but generally it’s the same stuff: carpets, pillars, gold leaf calligraphy. Cool stuff, but it probably means more if you’re a Muslim or can read the Arabic calligraphy.

(The Blue mosque, inside and outside)

The hippodrome is mostly shops and buildings now, back in the day it was a giant stadium where they raced horses and chariots, it held somewhere between thirty to forty thousand people. All that is left now are a few walls and some monuments that used to line the center of the stadium. The coolest monuments were an Egyptian obelisk that dated from 1400 BC, it still looks new, and a brass monument of intertwined snakes. I guess the brass monument was built by the Greeks to celebrate their successful defense against the Persian invasion. It was inscribed with all 52 of the city states that fought against the Persians, but it hasn’t withstood the weather as well as the Egyptian obelisk has and the names are all gone (as well as the heads of the snakes).

(St. Sophia)

St. Sophia was awesome. It was the built in the 6th century and was the largest and most beautiful church in the world for something like 800 years. Then it was the biggest mosque in the world. When the church was turned into a mosque they decided to cover the mosaics and frescoes with plaster instead of destroying them, (they don’t allow any images in mosques, especially when the images are giant pictures of Jesus.) The plaster has preserved the mosaics really well, and since the St. Sophia was changed from a mosque to a museum, they have uncovered some of the mosaics of the early church. They are really beautiful. The inside is gigantic, the statue of liberty could stand under the center dome and not reach the ceiling.

(Inside St. Sophia, where the pulpit of the church would have been.)

I hated the Bazaar, we had two hours of ‘free time’ there, but it was more like two hours of torture. It reminded me two much of the guys hustling out of shops in Egypt. Lunch was good though, chicken kabobs and Turkish apple tea.

After we got back to the hotel my roommate Brian and I decided to walk down to the old Byzantine cisterns. They were cool too. They still had some water in them and yes dad there were fish. Not trout though, mostly big goldfish and suckers..

Tomorrow we are going to a few archaeological museums, the church of St. Bacchus, and then we are flying down to Antioch, where we get to really start checking out the early church sites. Antioch was Paul’s home base for his missionary journeys into Asia minor (modern day Turkey) and Greece.

Thanks for reading, tomorrow I’ll be posting from Antioch.

Day 1 - Arriving in Istanbul

2008-12-30T16:11:00.000-08:00

Well, we've arrived in Istanbul. I think it's something like 2 in the morning here. Which means the wake-up call should be coming in about four and and a half hours. The flights weren't bad, they weren't great either but Air France was nice.

It was fun to sit in the airport in Paris for a few hours. The French kids (and by kids I mean anyone younger than me) all dress like they just stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad. I'm really excited to see some of the city and do some people watching when I come back through in January.

We had a five hour layover in Paris and I did some sketching in the sketchbook that Emily and Lucas gave me. Here is a picture of what I spent most of that layover looking at and sketching.

It took a little longer than I thought it would. Every time I looked up I saw a new beam or cable, but it was good practice and it was fun.

First impressions of Istanbul are that it's chilly here. I guess it's been snowing in the morning. The air felt good after spending hours in planes and airports, and the police lady who stamped my passport was really cute.

Here is a slightly fuzzy picture of our hotel.

Tommorow we are off to the Blue Mosque, the Church of St. Sophia, the market and some other places that I've forgotten.

I'm off to try and sleep, but being in a new country, hearing that the Broncos fired Shanahan and that Balgovitch appointed a senator today, I think my mind will be in overload.

Until tommorow...

On the way...

2008-12-29T16:31:00.000-08:00

Well I'm at the airport, LAX, waiting for our flight to leave for Paris, then Istanbul. I'll be honest, the feeling I got when the check in agent asked for my final destination, and I said Istanbul, was pretty awesome.

So, our flight to Paris is delayed a little, then we have about a five hour layover, then its on to Istanbul. I'm not going to post a picture of LAX for anyone, but here is a picture of a baby deer that walked by the cabin in Lake City on Friday.

Next post will be from Istanbul...

This is a test run

2008-12-08T23:02:00.000-08:00

This is my test run. I should be working on a sermon right now but I am taking a break to see how easy or hard it is to post on this thing, hopefully it will work pretty easily so that I won't have to much of a hassel as I try to update this thing on my trip.

Here I am trying out what posting a picture is like.

This is the monostary of St. Catherines at Mount Sinai in Egypt. I was there in January with Mon and Dad.