Category Israel & biblical history

Aug 9 2010

Jerusalem Segway tours

Something funny I see sometimes on the promenade of the Peace Forest about 1km from my house.

People doing tours of Jerusalem on Segways. These funny looking upright two wheel scooters can be rented on organised tours which let you whizz about in convoy around the outer parts of the city.    I have always wondered how these things work, staff at Disney world have them and so do some police forces around the world, you balance on two wheels only as there are some gyroscopes and nifty electronics that keep you perfectly upright, steering and changing speed by the rider is done but just tilting the handlebars forward or back and left and right.

Riders on these tours have helmets and wear pads on their knees.   Remains to be seen if you get a Segway (I think they are extremely expensive)  if the tyres can be changed over between road use or more rougher terrains.  Looks fun though.

www.segway-jerusalem.co.il

Aug 7 2010

Dead Sea Odyssey 422 metres below sea level – 4: Ein Gedi springs

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

Ein Gedi is an interesting phenomenon, its a little oasis just on the other side of main road from the Dead Sea.

Its odd that a body of water completely sterile of life has a stunningly attractive beauty spot a few hundred metres away.  Here at Ein Gedi you walk along twisty paths around large boulders and streams, see unusual animals not seen in Europe, and follow your way around streams that twist around rocks and paths up to a big waterfall.  Ein Gedi served as a water source during biblical times.  Joshua 15 : 62 and 1 Samuel 24 : 1-2 feature this place.  The Bible  records that 3,000 years ago hid from King Saul at Ein Gedi. When David surprised the King and spared his life after finding him unarmed, Saul said David would succeed him on the throne.

Not far from Ein Gedi, is Qumran one of the most significant archaeological sites here in Israel as the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.

There are more unusual animals, in this case its these little critters, Rock Badgers,  officially called Hyrax, large rodents that seems to dwell around mountainous places with sources of water.

When I came here before in 2006, some people on the tour chose to get baptised here.  Often the river Jordan is the main choice for that amongst Christian pilgrims here, but Ein Gedi is just as good. 🙂

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

Aug 7 2010

Power cut in Talpiyot

On wednesday when working at our food bank warehouse in Talpiyot we had a power cut.

Quite sudden, I was working on setting up a server on my work bench which suddenly went off.  It wasn’t running anything important.  A repeated beeping came on from the various UPS (battery back up) units around the building.   One of them I rebuilt myself as the batteries were old and no longer functioning, each of the cells has a life span of 3 years or so.   I am glad I did now.

With multiple circuits around the building, with the sockets labeled for computer use, it seems everything went to plan, apart from the lights going off in my workshop (one of the only rooms with no natural light)  and the video intercom system on the front door.  I had to manually power down the servers and tell everyone to quickly save their work and shut down their PCs.  Meanwhile our giant walk in freezer had its own battery system, so no food that was to be supplied to the poor got spoiled.

After the utility company was called, we were told there could be a wait of 2 hours.  I think the power outage ran for about 45 minutes, this meant the electric water heater built into a water bottle dispenser was still hot enough to get two cups of tea each.   Once the power came back on, I manually powered on four PCs in my workshop and the two servers and all seems to be fine.    Oddly enough, some switches and routers were still blinking away protected with a shoebox sized UPS but we had no internet connection, although I could ping our router.  It seems during the hotter months, more people have their air conditioning on and the electricity supplier may not be able to cope.   It seems all companies I have seen in Israel all have UPSes on PCs and critical equipment, often see them underneath a cash register in a shop.   If this sounds like a big concern, now that I have been here a year, this is the first time I have seen a power cut at one of our offices.

I want to look at means of monitoring our bigger UPS units remotely, we have some APC and some lesser brand units, so I can see sources of problems from my main desk.

Aug 4 2010

The modern Shepherd

Found these pictures from last year.

This was a nice way of a glimpse of something around in biblical times that hasn’t changed much today.

I got a glimpse of a shepherd and his flock of goats just off a main road towards the Arab part of the city.  A good way of visualising life like by Yeshua (Jesus) himself.  Especially with the backdrop of hills in every direction, rocky desert like ground with olive trees and white stone buildings.

Here after getting some pictures, the Shepherd asked if I had some money as a token in getting pictures of his flock, I pulled out about 3 shekels, but he said in a mixture of basic English and hand gestures he was wanting 10 shekels to get some cigarettes.   This was a young Arab man of about 20.

I think today’s shepherds mostly tend to be Arab Bedouins in open spaces often seen on the side of highways living in tents.

Aug 2 2010

Saturday afternoon cycling and robots

When I was a child, I had this dream where I was in a playground and all the other children had run off out of the school, I wasn’t sure what they worried about, I turn around and there is an evil robot coming towards me.  It was a weird nightmare I had a few times…

Today I decided to take a ride around my neighbourhood of East Talpiyot in other direction away from Jerusalem city centre.  I head to a convenience store and get a bottle of Fanta and ride back along the main road, towards the food bank which I work there typically one day a week. Anyway I am riding my bike across a junction where there are some traffic lights and I see a policeman stopping a coach and talking to the driver, he doesn’t see me and I ride past him, in the corner of my eye there is a policewoman and a police Ford Focus stopped diagonally at the traffic…    Then someone yells at me STOP three times….  At the same time I hit the brakes when I see what is ahead of me… If you can’t see anything, look closer at the taller white railings.  There is a garbage bin with usual piles of old clothes spilling out like I see on most street corners and about 15 metres ahead is a bomb disposal robot with caterpillar tracks and a single arm is analysing the piles of clothes…. I turn around and head to the opposite side of the road, the police don’t seem to be cross that I didn’t notice this road block. I get some pictures.   The robot is partially concealed by the barriers in the road. Apart from my childhood nightmare turning into a reality, this experience didn’t worry me too much, there are all kinds of circumstances where items abandoned in odd places start a security concern and procedures have to done to see if there is a genuine threat.   Its just I often see piles of rubbish falling out in bins like this. I talk briefly to two men sitting on a bench, its seems quite funny.   I take a detour to another street to go south towards out of Talpiyot. Another 5kms or so down the road, and this is a nice view of a very new housing estate, my maps tell me this is called Homat Shmuel. A little bit further and now I am completely out Jerusalem and I can see the border with the West Bank.

Border controls.  I take a U turn and head back on the main road.

This sign seems interesting.  This is pointing the another biblical place, seemingly named after a king who was famous for killing babies.  This adventure is for another day as I have no water left and ought to get back.

Just before going home, I did see these ruins which look Roman looking, from standing in Derech Hevron Street.

Aug 1 2010

Dead Sea Odyssey 422 metres below sea level – 3: Masada secrets

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

Back to up again on Masada, there’s quite a few buildings that are interesting, for one thing there are an interesting plumbing system that brings water through some clever channels that run around the side of the mountain.

Marcel made friends with a bird that fed from his hand.  These little black birds look like starlings but have orange tips on their wings and have a fondness for biscuits.

Along the top of Masada there are many buildings for the community that lived up here, complete with synagogue and dwellings.

Whats this strange cave room down here?

Not sure what it was, but something moved in the corner of my eye, that made Magnus nervous:

It was this cute quite large mouse.  Not sure exactly what sort of rodent it is.

You can see for a long long way from here.  Of course next door neighbour country Kingdom of Jordan shares the Dead Sea and some of the thriving industry from cosmetics that come from this unique mineral rich lake.

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

Jul 31 2010

Gaza’s prosperous regions

Saw this interesting article the other day.   Seems just like Portsmouth or Jerusalem that have people in poor and rich areas, not all of Gaza is hit by poverty, even if the media shows it this way.  Interesting that shopping malls and big swimming pools have recently opened when there is supposed to be a shortage of building materials.

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001127.html

This is not to show that I don’t care about people in Gaza, its just more that their problems are less caused by Israel and more by rule from Hamas and Hezbollah who keep them in bondage, and kept the worldwide media in the dark by painting a different picture of what is happening, where other troubled places like Sudan get much less coverage in the news.

Jul 30 2010

Dead Sea Odyssey 422 metres below sea level – 2: The lowest camp site on earth…

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

In my characteristically quirky random way of doing things, I didn’t mention what we did before going to Masada.

Marcel, Magnus and myself stocked up with food and supplies at a Talpiyot supermarket for camping expedition in Marcel’s work’s Fiat Doblo van.

The camp site we stayed at was pretty good in terms of location.   The toilets were nasty to say the least, the camp site itself was free but the toilets required some coins put into a turnstile gate, but this was not working, probably as no one was taking care of any cleaning or maintenance.

When choosing a place to put our tent, some of the other people were a bit noisy, there were several cars playing Arab music rather loud, we had to get to sleep early as we planned to get up at 3am (!) to walk up Masada to see the sun rise over the Dead Sea.

So we pitched the tent closeish to the beach.  This just required a scrape around of any big stones to get the ground as flat as possible for sleeping on.

The tent is borrowed of Marcel’s Swiss work colleague, it took us three attempts to put it up as its quite unusual in design and took several goes at trying to work out if the sticks go on the inside or outside…

Another problem we hit was the ground was too hard to get the pegs in.  After bashing them with a big rock and bending them in the process, a better idea was just to tie the guy ropes to some bottles of water.  It was quite windy, so keeping the tent upright was best achieved with at least two of us in the tent at once. 🙂

Something hit me when it got dark…  This is the lowest place on earth, this is the lowest camp site on earth, AND, our tent is lower than everyone else’s.   Therefore we spent the night in the lowest tent in THE WHOLE WORLD!!!!  YEAH!!!!

( 1 ) – ( 2 ) – ( 3 ) – ( 4 ) – more soon….

Jul 30 2010

strange back/chest ache and visit to the doctors

Thanks for people who prayed for me as of late.   The illness I has this week was a strange one.

I had pain in my back not on my spine but on the muscles below my right shoulder blade.   This seem to also hurt on my right hand side and then onto my right chest.  In addition this I had some spots and a rash as well, this wasn’t too noticeable as I have acne on and off for a while.

I had various ideas.   Was it sleeping in a funny position, problems with my bed not giving me the right posture?  Allergy to a new brand of deodorant?  Bugs in my room? (I often get mosquitoes in my flat and a friend got bitten by a poisonous spider last week)

Last weekend I went to Christchurch congregation to their morning service, (just inside Jaffa Gate, in Jerusalem’s old city walls) the service was ok but the audio system was less than satisfactory so I didn’t really get a lot of the word that was spoken, but in addition to that, there are old style pews which really didn’t help my back at all.

I left it until the middle of this week and eventually visited a doctor at a clinic in Diskin Street which is in a Ultra Orthodox area and got a quickie appointment the same day at 5.45pm.   When the doc saw my back and chest it only took about 5 seconds of diagnosis for him to tell me that I have Shingles.

Seems this illness stems from Chicken pox, and like most kids, I spent a lot of August 1988 with this contagious rash which meant I couldn’t go on a church camp and generally meant I had a mostly miserable summer not being able to go out anywhere.  But as my South African GP told me, traces of this hide in your spine so a specific ‘stripe’ of your body gets this, I don’t have that many spots but it is very painful with my muscules hurting quite a bit.  This has made part of my chest ‘twinge’ a bit which is worrying although not near my heart or my left hand side which is good.

Something I take for granted, is prescription medicine we have in the UK.  Now I don’t know what this is like to regular Israeli families, but as a foreigner I have to pay for treatment of course and use my health insurance to claim for this later.  To get any drugs following a consultation with a GP at home I think costs a fixed amount of £6-7 or so.   Here my medication I got which I have to take five times a day, cost me 389 Shekels as well 400 Shekels for 15 minutes with the doctor.  In total this has been about £133, so really pray these pills do the trick and I can get better soon….

Jul 30 2010

Apostle Paul on twitter

Was thinking the other day, about Twitter the hugely popular way of making a commentary of life events, things in the media and often how celebrities get followed and current news events get shown.  I was perhaps a bit mean with my earlier writings thinking it was a bit naff, but lately I was thinking about someone who told me that maybe the Apostle Paul in the bible was the world’s first blogger, so imagine in Paul was on Twitter too, it would be interesting to see as one of the first followers of Jesus who brought Christianity to the gentiles, travelled around various corners of the Mediterranean and got put in prison a few times, how his tweets would of looked like….

SaulOfTarsius I’m outside the Sanhedrin with my fellow Pharisees.  Today we are stoning some guy called Stephen.  #MyBenjaminTribe #MyRomanHomies

SaulOfTarsius Feel the urge that I need to do some writing for some reason.
sent via Papyrus

SaulOfTarsius Sorry not been online for a while, crazy week.  Only just got my eyesight back

SaulOfTarsius Had serious meeting with the boss.  Put me straight about some things.  #Salvation #FoundMoshiach

SaulOfTarsius Thanks everyone in coming to my baptism, it was a nice day

SaulOfTarsius PS YHWH told me to change my name from Saul to Paul.

SaulOfTarsius @Ananias, thanks for relaying what I needed to hear.

SaulOfTarsius Follow my new active account at @ApostlePaul

ApostlePaul Now in Damacsus.  Had some help to get there whilst my sight returned #Damasq #Asyria

ApostlePaul Praying with my new friends @SimonPeter and @James #Apostles

ApostlePaul Writing a book, I am going to call it Acts. Got a feeling, it will be one of many.

ApostlePaul Oyvavoy… Has it been ten years I have been speaking the good news in Damascus now?
via carrier pigeon

ApostlePaul @Barnabus thanks for the invite to Shabbat, look forward to helping your congregation in Tarsius.  #Tarsius #Nicetobehome

ApostlePaul Went and rebuked Elymas the sorcerer whilst staying Cyprus.  Also got a Roman soldier following Christ.  #Paphos #Κύπρος #Cyprus

ApostlePaul Leaving Cyprus to go on a mission trip to Asia Minor tomorrow, looking forward to it. #AsiaMinor

ApostlePaul Was a pleasure to stay with you #Lydia G-d bless.

ApostlePaul Myself and @Barnabus are off to Jerusalem meet new Christians #Judea #ישראל

ApostlePaul Spending 18 months working in Corinth with @Silas and @Timothy #Κόρινθος #Greece plan to see Ephesus some point soon.
via Greek post office AD52

ApostlePaul In Jerusalem in prison.  At least I escaped from being killed in the temple.   #depressed #WhatAboutRightsOfRomanCitizens #CaesareaJail

ApostlePaul said to the soldier today ‘is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been found guilty?’ I’ll put that in Acts 22.

ApostlePaul Out of Jail.  Roman bureaucracy takes a long time, its only taken 18 months.. But Governor Felix has let me out today.

ApostlePaul Off to Malta.  The Lord told me this ship really isn’t safe and I dont like the look of those clouds, or how choppy the sea is. 😦

ApostlePaul Ship got wrecked.  Oh well, Maltese people offer unusual kindness though. #Malta

Please note, biblical extracts are very approximate and locations are probably not in chronological order.