By the Sea

     Today when we left our hostel in Kefar Giladi the rain had stopped, but the clouds were still dark and stormy. We went to a look out point where we could see into Lebanon. On a hill above us their were some soldiers with tanks watching us, so we didn't stick around for too long.

     We drove to the Mount of Beatitudes where we read from the Gospel of Matthew and visited a church. It was beautiful their, the weather had cleared up and it was starting to get pretty hot out. We stood by Palm trees and cacti as we overlooked the Sea of Galilee. We drove a bit further to visit the Church of Heptapegon where we saw an old olive press and saw a beautiful fish pool. At that church is the place where Jesus was believed to have blessed the bread and fish during the feeding of the 5,000. The floors were covered in beautiful mosaics.

     After that, we drove to Capharnaum, the town of Jesus. We saw Peter's house and visited the church built above it. We also went down to the rocks along the Sea of Galilee. Afterwards, we drove to The Yigal Alon Center to see The Ancient Galilee Boat, unfortunately photography was not allowed in the room that the boat was in. But it was very cool to see the remains of a boat dated all the way back to the first centuries BCE-CE.

     We then drove to Nazareth where we got lunch, visited Custodia Di Terra Santa, and did some souvenir shopping in the market. Megan, Mykaela and I ended up talking to a shop owner for awhile (about politics, Tel Aviv, Washington State, Canada, Texas, weather, ect.) and ended up getting some free Arab coffee from him. We are now at our new hostel in Ginnosar.