Oh Bethlehem!

Dear stars,

I hope your week is going well. Here is a view of the scenery taken on our way to Cana in Nazareth. Today was hot and sunny which everyone enjoyed (except for me and another pilgrim!) but what we all enjoyed was learning about the Jewish traditions and customs of the time of Jesus' life. Our guide has such a great way of telling facts in an engaging way which keep us interested and entertained. We learnt that in Jesus' time all the village would have been invited to the wedding of a local and the fact that the wine ran out was more due to the popularity of the family than poor judgement. It was highly likely that more people than expected attended the wedding and that the wine would have been white as it is still now. Also women were never referred to by their names especially in public as it would have been inappropriate, so when Jesus called his mother "woman" he did so as a sign of respect. 

It is wonderful to discover the history of our Christ.   

Today was MUCH cooler as we set off for Bethlehem to visit the Israeli Museum which has the story and replicas of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was so interesting and informative! Our guide went to school with the grandson of the guy who discovered them. The family is well off now and still hold many pieces of the scrolls - in fact last week they sold a piece for over $1 million. Not bad if you need a bit of pocket money!

Going into Bethlehem is a real eye-opener when you see how the people in this area are so restricted in what they can do. There is a huge wall enclosing their city full of graffiti as a sign of protest although on the whole the people are very tolerant as they know they are better off co-operating with the Israelis otherwise.... We had lunch at Bethlehem College prepared by the Hospitality students and then we watched a dvd about the Uni and listened to about 4 students describe their lives. One girl gets up every morning at 4am to arrive at the uni at 8am then she leaves at 4pm and doesn't get back home until 8pm! they describe living in Bethlehem as living in an open air prison - a very sorry situation.

The uni grounds are beautiful with lots of roses growing around the campus. It is one uni where both catholic and muslim students attend and accept each other willingly. Our last event here was attending Mass in their chapel called after "The Divine Child" and it is just beautiful.

The second thing was that one of my phones was stuck on Bangkok time (it's fixed now) but I used it to set our alarm on Monday morning for 6am. Well you've probably guessed what happened - it went off at "6" and I struggled out of bed to wash my face and just as I applied my sunscreen Leonie told me that it was actually only 2am! Oh well we slept really well last night and I didn't get sunburnt during the day!