July 11, 2007

Good morning! It's our last day in Galilee. Today we head back down south. The morning was spent packing up the rest of our stuff, organized for easy retrieval, and headed down to Nazareth. With the Center we had visited a couple of really cool churches in Nazareth and so it was decided that we'd try to find them again. Especially since I had wanted to get better pictures of all the depictions of Mary that I couldn't do myself. Y'know, once upon a time, Nazareth was a podunk town. (Hence "No good thing cometh from Nazareth.") It would have been easy to find a church in it. Nowadays, Nazareth is a tourist town, and thus has grown quite large. We drove all over that place, up and down hills, through the most impossible of streets, and got utterly lost. Then, in a stroke of inspiration, we turned on one street and saw this giant billboard advertising Nazareth Village. (Check out the website to get a much better feel for this place) on the billboard were pictures of people dressed up in ancient garb. It looked promising, so we drove up and found the place.

We couldn't have asked for a more perfect place. Both of us were floored. Basically, this is a tourist spot where people could set up tours of 1st century AD. They had this hill that had all of the different important things. There was a grain field, threshing floor, sheep, wine press, oil press, vineyards and olive trees. There were buildings of various sorts, houses, a carpenter's shop, a synagogue, weaving looms, wine storage, etc. Then, they had volunteers (adults and children) that would come in and dress up in authentic garb and act as though they lived in this village. Sometimes even kids! We got a brief tour of the place, then left to go grab lunch and plan. We were scheduled to go back at 4:00 when a group was going through. Then we could take pictures to our heart's content.

We drove around for quite some time, trying to find a place to eat. Finally we maneuvered our way through several parking lots and found a KFC. It was a rather nice KFC except that the A/C was turned up way too high. I was freezing! (Anyone surprised? Doubtful.) Travis and I sat there with our scriptures and notebooks, trying to think of any stories/events that we could portray with this too-good-to-be-true set up. (Believe me, this is harder than you'd think...)

We finally left the icelandic wasteland of KFC and defrosted instantaneously upon entering our car. Still having some time to kill, we decided to look for an Internet Cafe. We had no luck, but did see a Playstation 3 store. Figuring they would be in the know, we stopped to ask if they knew where an Internet cafe was. Instead, they let us buy Internet time at their store! Nice people.

At last, we went up to the Village. We got there a wee bit before 4:00 so that Travis could set up and scope out the pictures he wanted to take. While he worked his magic, I set up shop in the winery where it was nice and cool and wrote in my blog. (I was rather behind at this point. I'll bet you'd never have guessed, huh?)

The group came... but the tour was in Portuguese! So not helpful. I understood not a word they spoke. Also, today was apparently a slow volunteer day. Only 4 adults showed up. Also, no kids nor sheep! Boring! Well, admittedly, it was still rather awesome. But not as cool as we had anticipated. While Travis set up his 4x5 camera to take real photos, I got his digital camera where I followed the group around and took pictures of whatever I wanted. I'm sure I was nowhere near the quality he shoots, but I still felt kind of cool walking around and taking pictures, as if I were someone important.

After the group finished up, we convinced a couple of the guys to stick around and model for some pictures, but they were in a hurry, so it didn't last long. To be honest, we were quite disappointed at how it turned out. It held so much promise... Oh well.

Though we had seen neither of the churches we originally set out to see, we decided it was getting late and wanted to head back to Jerusalem. At one point along the drive, we remembered that the closer we got to Jerusalem, the less fast food we'd find. So, seeing a McDonalds sign, we decided to break our vow never to eat McDonalds and pulled over. It was a large building with lots of stores around it, so we ended up driving and walking around a few times trying to find the McDonalds, to no avail. About to give up, we found a large food court right in the middle of the building. Turns out we had lots of options and didn't even have to eat McDonalds!

After lunch, on the way back to the car, we passed a book store with Harry Potter books in Hebrew on display. We backtracked to the front door and headed straight to the display. I am a devoted Harry Potter fan; how could I turn down such an opportunity? To tell you the truth, I had been wanting a Harry Potter book in Hebrew ever since I first saw them at Hebrew University. I even sent money with various people when they went to Hebrew U, but whenever I did, it was closed. I had finally given up hope that I'd ever get one. And now, here they were, right at my fingertips. I struggled deciding which one to buy. Should I get the first because it was the first? Should I get the sixth because it's my favorite? Also because it's the only one I didn't own? I had been debating this all summer. Travis helped me decide and the sixth was purchased.* As we were at the checkout, the cashier looked up surprised and asked if we spoke Hebrew. I laughed and said I read Biblical Hebrew a little bit. She smiled and said I should definitely try to read this. That's how she learned English, after all, was reading the Harry Potter books. So I should learn Hebrew the same way. Awesome.

We got back in the car and I decided to finish up one of my blogs before we took off. I was so close. Once I was done, we drove up to a cafe right next to the bookstore, to see if, by any random chance, it had free WiFi. It did. My battery was dying, however, so I quickly got online, posted the blog, saw BJ was online, so I quickly told him that I had blogged, and closed my computer. Then we took off to complete the last leg of our journey to Jerusalem.

Is anyone surprised that we got lost trying to find the hotel? We wanted to stay at the same place we had stayed before. We were tired of the hole in the wall in Galilee, and for the same price could stay in the nice hotel in Jewish Jerusalem. We finally found it, then was annoyed when, once again, our reservation didn't make it through due to the Sabbath. Finally, however, we got a room. We crashed and I tried to call Mom. There was no answer, however, so we went to bed instead.


*Here it should be noted that Travis is among the coolest brothers ever. He has bought for me all of the Harry Potter books (at this point not including 6), as well of all the Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites books. (Though, come to think of it, he still owes me the last one. [cough]) The fact that he bought me #6 in Hebrew technically completed my Harry Potter collection. Isn't he just awesome?


Quotes of the day:

- "Pass me some dirt! ... I've always wanted to say that, but I've never had a reason to... until now." Travis

- "People have always been saying they want to have dirt on me."