Ra’anana, Israel, Asia

Today started with an early rise to get ready for our big day up north. Pnina and Marta picked Lee and I up from Gillad’s house at 7:30am and we hit the road. We first visited the kibbutz where Pnina and Marta grew up, along with the rest of their family. It is quite a small community now (they think there are only about 300 people still there), but you can tell that it used to be a lot bigger. We went straight to the cemetery, which was much smaller than I had anticipated, and visited the graves of Lee’s Grandfather, Grandmother, aunt and cousin who had all passed away. I then got a tour around the kibbutz to see where they used to live, where the livestock is held, where the school is, and where multiple bomb shelters are. It was very interesting, but a bit sad to see how dilapidated some of the buildings were. Apparently since the kibbutz has turned private, it is not nearly as good as it used to be.

We left the kibbutz and headed up to Nazareth. It is entirely different from Hod HaSharon where I had been staying yesterday. Nazareth is how I imagined Israel to look before I came here. This is an Arab city and you can tell a huge difference as soon as you get there. The buildings look different, the signage is all in Arabic instead of Hebrew, and the people drive like maniacs. It was wild to see how different a place could be, but still so close.

We visited the Church of the Annunciation and St Joseph’s Church. The former was much more impressive than the latter, but both were much more modern than I expected. They were built on top of Joseph’s workshop and you can see part of the grotto that has been excavated. The most impressive things within the complex were all the works of art depicting Mary and Jesus. They had been sent from countries all over the world to give their own adaptation of how it looks to them. Of course, USA’s artwork was more in-your-face than anyone else’s, but I’ve come to expect that.

We walked through the market for a bit, saw the White Mosque (briefly) and then headed out for lunch. We tried two Arab restaurants that are family favorites, but found out that both had been shut down. We found another one a bit further out of town, in Nazareth Illit which was excellent. I’ve never seen so much food put on one table in my life. There must have been 15 or 20 plates that all came out at the start. We had also asked for some meats to come out, so the picture that I got of all the food, wasn’t really all the food. More came, and it was all delicious! I tried a little bit of everything, didn’t know what most of it was, but liked everything.

We drove back down to Hod HaSharon and waited for Dikla and Noam to come hang out for a little while. We then got picked up by Dorita and brought to her house in Raanana for the night. She is closest to our pickup point in the morning for our two day tour, so we’re crashing at her house tonight. It’s a really nice house and Raanana looks like a really nice little town. We had a walk up the main street and I imagine in the day time it would be beautiful with all the flowers that are planted there. Unfortunately I probably won’t get to see it in the daylight tomorrow either as we are leaving at the crack of dawn…