Leaving for Galilee

*sigh* This has nothing to do with Galilee, but as I'm sitting here typing on my blog I can smell the food being cooked for Ramadan dinner tonight, and it smells reallllllly good. I mean, I just ate my sack lunch, and it was pretty good (though I'm wondering how many more things they can stuff into our tuna--corn, onions, green peppers, red peppers, cucumber, random unidentifiable stuff, and I think I detected carrots today). Still, if the JC smells like this all afternoon... it's going to feel like a long time until dinner :P

DAWN OF THE FIRST DAY

We left the Jerusalem Center at MUCH too early an hour (breakfast was at 5:30, and I definitely didn't make it to that!). Thankfully, we had a couple of hours to sleep on the bus (theoretically, at least--those busses are quite uncomfortable) before stopping at Caesarea Maritina. The port was a major building project of one of the Herod's (I think Herod the Great, but there were kind of a lot of Herods so I'm not entirely sure), and it's where Agrippa said that "almost" Paul persuaded him to be a Christian, and where Paul set off on a boat to go to Rome. There were some cool ruins there, including a rather large theater, though I think most of it was actually a reconstruction. We had some ponder-time by the Mediterranean Sea, and then we were on the bus again.

Our next stop was Megiddo. I'm not sure if all of you know the significance of Megiddo, so let's see if this helps: Megiddo is the same as Har Megiddo, which means "Mount Megiddo" in Hebrew, and Har Megiddo gave rise to the term Armageddon. So Megiddo's where everything's gonna go down. The weirdest thing is, you can really see how it could happen! Surrounding the small mountain are acres and acres of flat, fertile fields, and even though they're beautiful and green right now, you can see how the armies of the world would have room to eventually battle it out. Definitely a depressing thought, especially considering how pretty the area was.

Soon we were on the bus once more and headed to Nazareth. Nazareth, as my religion teacher puts it, was a "tiny little podunk hick-town" in the days of Jesus, and most people were so poor that they actually lived in caves. In fact, we saw one of those excavated cave-homes while we were there, and it was certainly a humble little dwelling, giving new meaning to the words "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" We first went to a church called... well, I can't really remember what it was called. Church of the Anunciation, maybe? Anyway, it had pictures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus that came from countries all around the world, and those were cool. The one from the U.S. was... interesting. It was more of a sculpture, really... I don't know, I'll put up the picture. We also went to the Synagogue Church, so named because it's built on the spot where the ancient synagogue stood where Jesus read messianic scriptures from Isaiah and claimed that they had been fulfilled to his neighbors, and they rejected him and tried to kill him. We sang "Jesus of Nazareth" and "Jesus, Once of Humble Birth" there, and then we were on the bus again (I hate busses) and finally on our way to Ein Gev.

Ein Gev is a kibbutz located right up against the Sea of Galilee. The water was glass-smooth when we arrived--deceptive, really, because I never saw it that way again for the next two weeks. Very pretty, though, and perfect for rock-skipping for those so inclined. To our relief, we found dinner at the kibbutz to be exceptionally good, especially the soup. The little bungalow-things we stayed in were pretty cool, too, even though I pretty much slept in a closet. I mean, not literally, but I roomed with Sharon and she would agree that it was tiny. My other two roommates got there first, so they picked the beds in the big room with the better view. I can't blame them, really, and I hung out there often enough that it didn't really matter. I would've slept in a cardboard box, as long as it was next to the Sea of Galilee.