Galilee Day 11 - November 26, 2011

This was our last day in Galilee. We all loaded into the bus and went to a few nearby historical sites, including a Tel with a mosaic where there is a Mosaic of a lady that they call The Mona Lisa of the Middle East.

We then went to Mt. Carmel, which is where Elijah killed the priests of Baal.
Gotta love Biblical History!

Then we went to an overlook of Haifa and the gardens of Baha'i, which is a shoot-off religion of the Re-Shiite Muslims.
It was a very, very expansive temple-like garden overlook, and the view of the city was beautiful. But I was mostly anxious for the next stop.

The next stop was to a cemetery in Haifa, where John Alexander Clark, my great, great Uncle was buried. I read his letters home in a book my mom gave me before we left, and really learned about his story. He was called on a mission to Palestine in 1894, where he left his family and went. He paid his own way there, and found his own lodgings. He learned the language on his own, and preached among Muslims there, where he caught the Bubonic Plague and died because of it. They had to bury him immediately because of how contagious the disease was, and his family was not allowed to bring his body home. A year later, his college class raised money to have a gravestone placed on his grave, and the grave of another missionary that died there in 1894, that reads "A missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." Because of this, when the Church was trying to get authorization to build the BYU Jerusalem Center on Mount Scopus in the 1970's, they were able to prove that they had a presence in the Holy Land prior to the organization of the State of Israel, which made it possible for them to build the Center. Without my great, great Uncle, and the other missionary buried there, the Church would be unable to operate in the Holy Land. Needless to say, it was a very special experience to get to visit his gravesite and have a chance to tell my classmates all about the center.

Here are some pictures:

Me at John Clark's grave. The broken column represents a life that ended early.

This is Kali Clark, my cousin (second cousin?) who was on my study abroad with me, and also related to John Alexander Clark.


This is Adolf Haag, the other missionary who died before John Alexander Clark.

After visiting John Clark's grave, we made the long drive back to Jerusalem to return to the Center for our last few weeks in Israel.

And, finally, two years later, I am finishing my Jerusalem blog. Now....the book!

Thank you for all your love and support while I was in Jerusalem, and for listening to me talk about it... a lot. I love you guys!

Galilee Day 10 - November 25, 2011

Okay, so I didn't finish before the week was over, but I am doing another post. Only one more day after this, and my blog is complete. I love looking through the pictures, such good memories in Israel!

On this day we went to a Crusader city called Akko. I'm disappointed that I had never heard of this, or had a chance to research more about it before we went, because the place was huge! A lot of what we visited was a huge Crusader Castle that had lots of dark stone passageways and cool history... but, compared to everything else in the Holy Land, it gets kind of a "Class B" reputation, you can imagine. The only reason we were able to visit is because we had so much time there (and because we packed it in, especially in Galilee).

This is the entrance to Akko.

Some of the inside stonework was incredible!

I guess Marco Polo was held there for a while in a "Khan," which is a kind of inn or market that are enclosed squares, which could have been the kind of "inn" that Mary and Joseph went.
This is the Khan they showed us first.... love what they make of historical areas, right? If you prefer....
This is probably a better picture to allow you to imagine how it was a market/inn-type area.

It's right on the coast, so we got to go out to the Marina and saw some fishermen and had some free time before we had to get back on the bus.

This is proof that I was there :)

After that we went to Tabneh, or Bet She-erim, to see see some graves. We were supposed to look for four symbols on the tombs and turn them in for homework.


It was pretty cool, cause all the graves were in caves, and we got to go explore to find symbols.

This is significant because of the time period these graves were created, and a menorah is a symbol that developed over the years.

The BEST part of the day was definitely that night, when we got back to the Kibbutz. They held a Thanksgiving dinner for us there, complete with turkeys that had sparklers coming out of them, red, white, and blue streamers, and American flags. It seems they had gotten their American holidays a little mixed up, but we had a very lovely Fourth of July Thanksgiving in Galilee that year.


I guess I forgot to mention the balloons :)

(I told you there were fireworks in the turkey. They were really bright, and really....flammable.)

It was a magical Thanksgiving, in a very, very different way.