Slowing down in Nazareth

We have been having to get up early for our breakfasts at the guesthouses we've been staying at and I've not been sleeping so well, so this coupled with long days of sightseeing and little or no rest is not the best scenario for me.  My body is worn out and I'm sick.  And I have none of my remedies from home to heal this body, but God is here strengthening me!

We are back down to just three of us traveling together and we are all worn out from all the pace so we are taking things much more slowly.

We drove up into Nazareth and wound our way through an incredibly big, busy city built on the sides of hills. We drove right past the big church where Mary received her message from the angel,  or perhaps it was Joseph's experience?  I'm not so interested in those fancy places.  I just want to see what the area looked like and do lots of my own imagining.  But we did visit this sweet little place called The Village of Nazareth which is set up on a hillside to look just like things looked back when Nazareth was a village of a few hundred people and Jesus was a boy.

We ate a lovely period meal of lentils, flatbread, hummus and dips out of stone pottery and then we had a tour through the village.  The attention to detail, creating tools that were used back in that time was just amazing.

We entered a barn where there was a donkey hooked up to a big stone press where olives were rendered into the mush to prepare them for the preparation of the olive oil.  There were tools that would have been used by the carpenters, and a woman dressed in the simple old fashioned clothing demonstrated the making of yarn from wool that was shorn from the sheep grazing on the hillside.  So authentic and informative.  The guide taking us through was a messianic Jew and he was sharing many wonderful scriptures and stories as he took us through the village.  

This guy thought I wanted him in my picture so he came over to pose with me.  Somehow I look a little out of place, in so many ways...

And it turned out that Hannah knew this fellow from a conference they had both attended in Amsterdam some 6 years earlier!  Time travel...

The olives were in season so they were being picked and there were real olives in the press where the donkey was getting his work out.  

This location was only about a 5 minute walk from where Jesus grew up so most likely it is a place he visited as well.  There was an actual wine press cut into the rock from that time period as well as the terraces where grapes would have grown.

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And now we are located in an old Kibbutz not far from Mount Carmel and close to Hannah's auntie who lives on another Kibbutz.  We drove across the Mt. Carmel Mountain range yesterday over to Haifa where we spent the afternoon on the beach and watching the sun set.  We fortified ourselves with more pomegranate juice as well, as I have been feeling very poorly.  There are some crazy hyenas or something that scream outside at night.  I hear them as I have spent lots of time here laying down and resting as I don't want to be sick on the trip home.   I've had to become creative in using this washroom as the only bar they had beside the toilet was a towel bar.  And to get out of the low bed/couch I use a chair with Anita sitting on it to help me lift myself up and over.