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.