Spring Break!!!

I guess I should start by saying, for those of you who don’t have or check facebook, that Mike and I broke up. But that’s all I’m going to say. Sorry. Also, this is from a couple of days ago, and I will post about today and yesterday probably later tonight.

Today we headed up into Galilee. Someone said something today about this being our spring break and I was like, hey ya! So I finally get a spring break! Woohoo! Take that, Provo! Lol. Our first stop was at Caesarea Maritima (not to be confused with Caesarea Phillippi, apparently). It’s a harbor that Herod the Great built on the Mediterranean coast. There’s not much of it left, but it was so nice to be out on the beach. The beach there is almost entirely composed of shells. It’s trippy. Even where there’s sand, it’s saturated with pieces of shells. One of the girls found this incredible shell. It’s one of those spirally ones, and it was purple. Like, a deep, gorgeous purple. I don’t think I realized you could even find shells like that like, on a beach. It’s also the place where Paul preached to Agrippa (“Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian”), and probably where he took off on all his travels. I have to say, I never realized that scene actually played out in Israel. I always thought it was off in like, Greece or somewhere. The weather was really nice, too. It was warm and sunny and gorgeous. It made me very happy. Ooh, I also bought some sandals yesterday (more about that later), so my feet were happy to be out in the fresh air.

Then we went to Megiddo (Armageddon, in the Greek). This is where the world is going to end, and a force of 200 million will gather against the children of Judah (Revelations 16, I think). It looks out over the Jezreel Valley, and it’s all green and empty, and it was cool coz I could see in my mind’s eye an innumerable host camped and ready to march. Although I was imagining more of like, a Narnia-style army with all tents and banners, and in reality it’ll be like, tanks and trenches and/or some other futuristic military technology. And there was an Israelite altar. I never realized before that one of the requirements for an altar in the Bible is that it has to be made entirely of “unhewn stone,” which means they basically just stacked up a bunch of rocks, and it was actually really neat to see how they did it. Like, the altar was totally intact, it was pretty cool. And like, it was big. It had steps leading up to it and it was I think they said 9 meters in diameter. Crazy.

Our last stop was Nazareth. First we visited the synagogue. This is where Jesus stands up to read from the Bible and says that he’s the Messiah and everybody says, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” and they reject him. But Brother Wilson said something that I thought was even more profound and even humbling. Today we were in the place where Jesus went to church as he was growing up. Kind of a neat thought. Bro. Wilson was saying it in the context of “Someday you’ll be teaching ‘Jesus Once Was a Little Child’ in Primary and you can say…” and it made me smile to think of Jesus as a sunbeam, learning about God with all the other children. Then we went to the Church of the Annunciation, where Mary was visited by the angel Gabriel. There was a service going on inside. It was kind of cool. I got a neat picture of all the like, um, people that conduct the service (…wow, I feel ignorant all of a sudden) standing up at the front. And last of all we went to the Carpenter’s Shop. My favorite thing there were these really sweet (as in nice, not as in like, rad) stained glass windows that depicted Joseph being visited by the angel, with his wedding to Mary, and with Jesus and Mary standing over his deathbed. They were very nice.

Then we came to our kibbutz/beach resort. I’m rooming with some girls I don’t know as well, so it should be fun. I’m definitely excited to spend some time on the beach.

Yesterday we also went on a field trip. We went to this place called Neot Kedumim. It’s almost like Nauvoo or Kirtland or something, where you can go to like *experience* another time period. Like, they don’t have people dressed up or anything, but we got to herd sheep (ya, lol) and crush up spices and they had a presentation on Torah scroll writing. It takes about a year for a scribe to hand-write a Torah. And it has to be on a kosher animal skins all sewn together, and if he makes a mistake he has to rip out that section and start it over, and then ceremonially bury it. It’s pretty intense. And we also made pita at lunch. It was kind of fun. I have to say, I really like pita. I never did that much before, but I really do now. And then we had this herbal tea stuff with date honey in it. It was pretty good, the honey made it really sweet and it just had this kind of minty edge to it. And we put our crushed up spices on the pita with some olive oil. And the sandwiches that we had in our packed lunches from the center were excellent. I ate two and a half… Lol. And after the field trip we went out and bought some sandals for Galilee. After all, how can you really walk in the Savior’s footsteps in tennis shoes?