Galliee and Nazareth - Israel day 2

It was another early wake up day for us.  We had to be ready to leave by 6:30 am again.  One wonderful thing is that our favorite hostess on the ship, Kathy, was coming with us today!!!  We were all very excited!!!  She is truly fantastic and so much fun!!!  We were glad she was there because our guide this day wasn't very good.  English was his third language and we went with Spanish speaking as the other language and he was much better at Spanish than English.  I could pick out bits and pieces of the Spanish that he didn't translate into English.  Good for him though knowing three languages, it was just a little frustrating to pay the money and then not have a tour guide that speaks really good English.

 

Here the boys are - such great travelers - ready for another bus trip.  Luckily this one wasn't as long as yesterdays, only about an hour-ish.

 

We had some beautiful scenery on the way there.

 

Our first stop was the place where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.  You are able to "be baptized" here also.  We weren't baptized because there was no pastor there to do it.  I am sure that it happens because over on one side it looked like they were being led by a preacher of some sort.

 

But we thought it would be really neat to dunk ourselves in the same place where Jesus was baptized.  Here we are getting ready.  There are small fish in this water also.  If you stand still long enough they will come and nibble at your feet.  Both AJ and David had their feet nibbled, I guess they actually have fish pedicures in surrounding areas and David saw an advertisement for this in Messina.  I was too busy taking pictures of other people to stand still long enough.  :-)  

 

The boys weren't so sure about it, so we went first.  I do have to say it was a little cold, nothing like Lake Wenatchee or Icicle Creek for those of you from Washington state though.

 

Michael still wasn't so sure, but AJ was ready and let me dunk him right away.

 

Here David is saying you will go under

 

And then he disappears and you can only see his little feet sticking up.  :-)

 

The four of us, all dunked in the same place Jesus was.

 

They had these signs in all different languages - we didn't see the heavens open up, but it was a great experience!!

 

After that we headed to Nazareth to see where Mary received the news that she was going to have Jesus.  An interesting fact about the Dead Sea is that it is 430M below sea level and it has 22 different minerals in it.  They don't export those minerals as much any more but some are still used, mainly in cosmetics.

 

One thing that both David and I noticed is that there weren't a lot of single family homes, I don't think I remember seeing any on our two road trips.  This shows all the apartments stacked up on a hill and this was one small neighborhood.

 

These things were huge!!  I am not sure what they were and we were heading up to the church but they were very interesting.

 

I am not sure if you can read this or not, but it says "And whoever seeks a religion other than Islam is will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers."  They had many different religions in Israel and with this sign you can see how much they don't like each other.  There were many different signs like this throughout.  David just thought is was funny that they didn't spell "accepted" correctly.

 

We then made it up to the church they built where Mary and Joseph lived.  The church was first built in 300 AD. 

 

Michael was already running down the stairs and I couldn't catch him  ;-)

 

So may different countries all had art up on the walls in and out of the building.  We looked around and were having trouble finding the one donated by the US.  This one is from Ireland and we thought it was pretty.

 

No matter where we are, the boys always and I mean always, find something to climb on.  It is really quite amazing. 

 

Here is the one from Germany.

 

This was the statue that was outside the church.

 

When we walked in, the church was HUGE!!  It was two stories and on the bottom story is where Mary was when the Angel Gabriel told her she was going to have Jesus.  She was only about 12 or 13 when she was told and had just recently been engaged to Joseph.  I am not sure what I would have done at that age, so young and I look at girls that age now and can't imagine something like that happening to them and being mature enough to handle it.  It definitely took a strong woman.

 

Here is the altar that they put up.  You can see the stairs behind it that was part of the home.

 

We thought these were neat, they were in all of the fence around the alter; there was a snake, a moon and stars, this cross and a few others.

 

This is the upstairs of the church.  They were having a service while we were there.  I think it was a special one because there was only about two dozen people.  Again, in a different language so I am not exactly sure what they said.

 

So on the upstairs I saw this one and knew it had to be the USA one and sure enough it was.  It is much different than all the rest to put it nicely.

 

This are some stained glass windows that were in the back of the upstairs.  I want you to notice the holes all over the ceiling and the columns.  They were everywhere in the church to help with the acoustics.  And it did have pretty good acoustics - we really had to keep the boys silent on this trip.

 

The excursion was only about a half day because we were leaving port around 2 pm.  so we had plenty of time to play on the boat that afternoon.  We all changed into shorts as soon as we got back and then headed up to deck 11 for the boys to get their drinks and to play some cards.

 

 

Me and my boys!!!

 

Here we are playing trash, Michael is hard at work trying to decided where to play his king - that boys was so lucky, he sometimes had three of the four kings, it was unreal!!  For those who don't know, the kings are wild in this game.

 

Michael stole David's glasses and was being a goof!!

 

We took a walk up on the deck after dinner and the sun was just starting to go down.

 

And the boys thought it would be fun to play catch me and tickle me when you do!  Mommy joined in the game when she was done taking photos.

 

The boys being boys on the back of the boat.  They really do crack me up!!  After this we went into the disco for another game of tag.  The boys do love to play tag, almost as much as they love playing cards!!!