March 27

Dear ones,

I spent almost two weeks in Galilee. We stayed in little bungalows right off the Sea; coming out of my door, I only have to walk twenty feet to find a grassy slope down to a little brown beach, with the Sea of Galilee beyond, and green mountains on the other shore. Every other day we went on field trips around the area; otherwise we stayed behind in Ein Gev, the Kibbutz that hosted us. On those days we had three hours of New Testament class in the morning (it went surprisingly fast) after which we had a whole free day. We mostly spent the time relaxing on the beach or the grass overlooking the beach. Everyone brought books. I brought The Bronze Bow from the Jerusalem Center library, a perfect book since it's set in Galilee.

The sun was warm, but a cold wind blue off of the water. We wore sweatshirts and wrapped ourselves in the itchy pink blankets from our rooms. The cold didn't keep us from swimming. For the first couple of days the wind was strong enough to make big waves, and we frolicked in them. I didn't swim much after the wind died down; I'm not sure what to do in water if there are no waves. The Sea was stunningly beautiful when it was still, though--silver-green during the day, bronzy-red at sunset, black at night with gold streaks from the reflection of Tiberias on the opposite shore. We came in the best season of the year, when everything was green green green. My favorite days were spent reading or talking on the shore, or standing ankle deep in the water skipping stones, or making castles and pots out of muddy clay.

On three nights we had bonfires where we sang and told stories, baked scones over hot coals, and made 'Smores. It's hard to find regular marshmallows in Israel, and impossible to find graham crackers, so we ate 'Smores with pink, fruity-flavored marshmallows and giant animal crackers. One night we played "Ride that Pony," one of those games you learn at EFY or during your freshman year at BYU. It involves singing a loud, fast song. Some Jewish girls were sitting up the beach from us, and they ran over to join us. "You know that?" they said, surprised, and sang us the Hebrew version. Then they played with us. For the last bonfire we had a testimony meeting that went for three hours.

On the days we went out, we went everywhere. We saw a plethora of ancient synogogues and more churches than you can shake a stick at. Memorable churches include the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, this huge modern-art 60's building our professor called "a monstrosity." Inside they seemed to be going for a factory-like asthetic with cement walls, twisted iron candelabras, weirdly sloping ceilings and columns, abstract stained-glass windows with lots of red. The church was filled with paintings of Mary from all sorts of different countries. The one from the United States was modern and angry-looking, but I liked the painting from Korea that depicted Mary as a Korean woman in traditional dress.

My two favorite churches were the Church of the Transfiguration and a little church marking the traditional site where the resurrected Jesus gave his disciples breakfast. Church of the Transfiguration stood on top of a mountain, a towering building of white stone, beautifully carved. Inside, you walked over a grate in the floor where people slipped their prayers on folded-up paper. The ceilings soared, held up by plain wooden beams, and the altar was inside a little cave, backed by stained glass peacocks and surrounded by mosaics of angels with peacock wings on a blue background. All light and airy and large. My other favorite church was exactly the opposite, a tiny, one-room building built out of black basalt, within a vast garden, right on the shore.

Every church we went we sang. They all have beautiful acoustics. Other tourists filmed us with their cameras, and once my friends Michael, Jeff, and Allison sang, "Be Still My Soul" and made three German women cry.

Also we saw many ruins. We explored an entire ruined town, a Hellenized town featuring a bathhouse and a temple to Bachus, all destroyed in an earthquake. I climbed on toppled-over columns and the remains of walls. My favorite ruins were the remains of a Crusader/Muslim fortress, up on the top of a mountain. A lot of the walls remained or had been restored, and towers we could climb. Signs everywhere said, "Danger Abyss," and if you looked over the sides of the Crusader walls the mountain dropped straight down to green valleys. I would call the height "dizzying" if heights made me dizzy. A castle on a mountain! Really!

We swam in swimming holes where locals have been swimming for thousands of years. The water was blue and warm, and fish nibbled at my toes; it reminded me of floating around in my friend Sam's pond in Mississippi, where the fish would try to eat us, only here the water was clear enough to see the fish approaching my feet. We rafted down the Jordan River and splashed cold green water on each other. We visited a spot on the Jordan where people come from all over the world to be re-baptized and watched a Protestand minister give a little sermon and re-baptize his congregation. It was funny to hear him describe to these old people how to hold themselves--"Hold your arms like this, and I'll hold your arm there. You can hold your nose closed if you want to..." I came to the odd realization that, as young Mormons, we're unusally good at being baptized.

One day we took a boat across the Sea of Galilee back to the Kibbutz. The owners of the boat put up an American flag and played "The Star-Spangled Banner" over their speakers. Then they played "Put your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee" and I thought of Dad.

We went to Akko, a Mediterranean port city where the Crusaders had their capital after they were driven out of Jerusalem. After the lecture, they set us free to roam the city. Kate, Snarky Jonathan and I bought bubbles. Then we went up on a short tower by the blue blue water and blue the bubbles which the wind off the water ripped away. A Jewish showed up to look out over the water as well. A little boy with a blue kepah and soft blonde sidelocks and his two sisters danced in our bubbles and laughed and shrieked.

On the modern side of things, we walked through a green and viny park, where a spring runs to the Jordan river in a thousand little trails, to an overlook where we could see Lebanon to our left and Syria to our right. Ein Gev was right up next to the Golan Heights, where Syria used to shoot rockets down at the Israeli Kibbutzim below. Israel took over the Golan in 1967, and there are still bunkers and trenches everywhere, and fields surrounded by fences with signs that say "Danger! Active Mines!" Israel is considering giving the Golan back to Syria in order to make a strong Arab ally, but it's a tricky situation because of the water sources there and the usual Israeli groups who hate giving up land. The Druze villages up in the hills sort of keep a foot in both camps, serving in the Israeli military while keeping up a connection with Syria. The Druze are an interesting little religion, an offshoot of Islam who keep their rituals perfectly secret. We drove through some of their villages and saw men in traditional Druze clothing working in the apple orchards, men in baggy pants and white caps.

One night we were taken to a fish restaurant and served "St. Peter's Fish," which they fry whole. Jeni, Kate, Elizabeth and I made a pact that if we each ate our fish's eyeball we would go on a roadtrip to California this Thanksgiving. We all managed to eat the eyeball, though not without some difficulties, so now I have plans for Thanksgiving! Yay! Afterwards they took us around the Sea of Galilee to Tiberias. I love Tiberias. We only spent an hour there, but it was a beautiful hour. We got icecream and wandered up and down the boardwalk. An old man sat on a folding chair playing the accordian. We held hands and ran around in a circle in the street in front of him, doing our best clumsy imitation of an Israeli folk dance. Then he played "Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu," a song our Hebrew teacher taught us, so we were able to sing along and clap our hands. Then he announced (with a heavy Hebrew accent) that he would play us some Strauss, and we fake-waltzed. At the end of the night he told us, "Thank You" and we told him, "Todah."

A beautiful, beautiful two weeks. We went on so many field trips that by the end we felt overwhelmed by all the sights we had seen and all the things we had learned (I've only given you a sampling). On the other hand we had a lot of free time, days worth of time to read and contemplate, to listen to the sound of birds and frogs and to look out over the water for hours. Very spiritual, very sweet.

Love,

Stella