Word from the Holy Land

WOW.  These past days here have been amazing! On Thursday night, after our last day of digging, we went to Tel Aviv for a quick evening tour of the older city and to have dinner with Dror.  The traffic was bad and we were very tired and packed too closely in our van to breath, but it was a great experience overall.  On Friday,  we went to an the Hecht Museum at Haifa University.  It was one of the best museums that I have been to.  Not extremely large, but lots of quality stuff in a great layout.  Afterwards, we came back to the hostel, went to the mall, and washed and labeled the rest of the pottery shards that we dug up in the field.  Later that night, I saw the last Harry Potter movie in the Haifa Mall with a bunch of ladies from our group and discovered that the movie theater and its vicinity are the hot place to go on a weeknight!  There are bars, clubs, and people dressed up!  We were all wearing yoga pants and sweatshirts or t-shirts, but we still loved the film and will try to go back there dressed better if time permits (which it probably won't).  On Saturday, we woke up bright and early (breakfast at 6, just like our work days), and went to Galilee.  We saw some really cool archaeological sites, including an old city with an amphitheater, cool hill to climb, and an old bathroom as well as the castle of Tiberias.  The castle was amazing!  I scraped my arm a little climbing up into one of the places that the soldiers would defend the fortress from, and was happy to shed a little blood where so many others had in the past...That sounds a bit creepy, but in the moment it was a cool thought... We had a great lunch in the area, and I had a "Saint Peter's Fish".  My shoes broke while hiking up a hill, so I had to buy another pair of cheap and unsupportive sandals while all the other shops were closed.  On Sunday, Koby (the director of underwater archaeology in all of Israel and some high up guy in the Israel Antiquities Authority who we are working with by some favor from God) and Dror (the rugged Don Juan type I've mentioned before) took us to a the IAA headquarters where we got a VIP tour of the facility.  We got to watch what happens to artifacts that come from the sites in all of Israel.  We saw the rooms in which they preserve and piece together glass, pottery, metal, clothing, shoes, etc. and where they take surveys and work to publish all of the findings.  After that, we went to Jerusalem, the Old City!! We walked into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, said some prayers at the Wailing Wall, and saw the Dome of the Rock.  After, we went to Koby's house to have dinner and meet his family.  I helped his wife cook and clean in the kitchen and sang the ABC's with his youngest child and only daughter.  We got home around eleven to find cockroaches in the room that I am staying in...4 or 5 of them.  My friend Abbie killed two of them and my professor, Will, came in and killed two more.  Abbie and Zara fled to find shelter in other rooms with their belongings and my remaining roomie Dana made moves to do the same, but, after Will scoured the place and we were convinced that none remained, we decided to stay.  I changed my sheets, showered, and went to bed.  Today, we went back to the Old City with Koby and Dror, but not before stopping at the IAA to get another tour of generally off-limits storage of some pretty amazing archaeological finds.  In the Old City, we ate and went shopping for hours before going to the Rockefeller Museum Building.  We were simply at the museum to get free parking that Koby arranged, but somehow with his connections we were able to climb to the top of the tower there and get a great view of the city.  We are truly blessed to be on this trip and see what we have seen, and I'm sure there is so much significance that I can't even begin to process it all right now.  Tomorrow, we go to Akko again, to enjoy one of the last days of this trip.

p.s.  The better photos are the ones I didn't have my camera to take, so please refer to facebook!

p.p.s.  Please excuse the typos, it's hot, I need a shower, and I'm tired!