Oct 6 2012

Ships on the Galilee coast

I am on the edge of the Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) in the city of Tiberias, on the coast of the lake its easy to see how fishing his been part of the economy for years.

Sadly this fish processing plant looks kind of derelict, although when I walked back to the hostel when it was darker, the lights were on.

A lot of the fish I see in Jerusalem supermarkets comes from Norway. There is however plenty of small restaurants serving fish caught in the lake to Christians who want an authentic biblical meal.

This boat looks like a lot of the vessels for taking Christian pilgrims around the lake, but its up on blocks for service. I remember my grandad telling me its important to paint the bottom of your boat each year (or at least for a small sailing dingy with a wooden hull)

Wonder what conversations went on during Jesus’s time during the times when boats were being repaired and maintained around here.

This is an odd looking machine, some kind of drill or milling machine I guess.

One of the unique things about the middle east with scarce rain, is most of the year your yard can easily become an outdoor lounge, workshop or kitchen, with appliances and furniture (that aren’t worth stealing) not in danger of getting wet, only by sand from the dusty atmosphere.

I did spot some people fishing after all, in a more casual non business fashion, an Arab father and son here.

Its kind of funny that these cats sit her awaiting, it seems they are used to getting the fisherman throw them the small ones not worth taking home, but there was some discarded pizza, so I think they get fed quite well!! 🙂

Sep 28 2012

Sweet New Year

There been quite a few Jewish holidays happen in the last few weeks, one of them is new year.

We are now in the year 5773. At my work, the food bank was working hard with not only regular food deliveries but also to provide apples and honey which is popular during Jewish new year to some of Israel’s most disadvantaged families here. I got a jar of honey and some apples which I tend to stick on my cereal in the mornings.

Whilst I was staying the Galilee city of Tiberias which is on the coast of the Kinneret, the famous lake where Jesus did many of his ministry, I tried doing some walking around the edge of the lake. Not that close to the lake mind you, only small part of it has beaches open for public use.

But, this path on the side of the road I thought was public, but led to a dead end:

I came across this, no less than 40 hives on this hill next to the main road, I didn’t get too close there are actual bees here.

The Galilee area is quite famous for its vibrant active agricultural industry here. On the direct opposite part of the lake I see many banana plantations there. Close to here there were many orchards of oranges here too. I am not quite sure what flowers the bees get to pollinate though.

Dec 17 2011

Bad taste bible stories

Sometimes I see people use stories from the bible out of context in the worst way possible. In the case of these two pictures its from both people groups here in Israel.

The last supper with Hollywood stars? Me and another Christian friend challenged the Jewish owner of a youth hostel on this, wondering if its really wise considering how many Christians visiting his business might feel offended about this but he just seem to think it was funny.

Yes, its the nativity scene with a seperation barrier. This commonly used by Palestinians to manipluate the west that this hated barrier uses to keep terrorism from getting into Jerusalem. The concrete pilars that make up this structure are ugly, but no sensible person wants to go back in the days during the intafada where there were bombings on buses and coffee shops every week.

Jun 17 2011

Tiberias city centre and Muriels and Maimonidies

Some of the hotel complexes and apartment blocks in Tiberias look concrete and utilitarian, but this one is a bit more interesting; on each floor are circular logos of different species of crops that is popular in Jewish culture.

This painting on the wall is pretty nice too:

It combines a faux set of railings and balconies to match the rest of the block but also images of what the city overlooking the water in ancient times.

Founded in 20AD and named after a Roman emperor of almost exactly the same name, today Tiberias is just a Jewish city but has Arab Israelis living in the outskirts of town and many neighbouring Arab towns close by.

This iron structure doesn’t look like a normal religious shrine, but its a significant place for Orthodox Jews as the grave site of famous Jewish philosopher Maimonides.

Like the Kotel in Jerusalem and Rachel’s Tomb close to Bethlehem, praying is done in separate for men and women.

Lots of Judiaca items in neighbouring gift shop, not just souvenirs for Christians!

This is part of an ancient wall around the city which was destroyed, not by conflict but by an earthquake in the 11th century.

There has been no less than 16 earthquakes affecting the greater Galilee area, including a big one killing 600 in 1837, and also a big flood in 1934.

This mosque is empty and abandoned. Many Islamic countries where Jews once live, including Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Morocco etc have destroyed old synagogues as after people started to move to Israel in large numbers, here buildings of all types of faiths that are not used are always kept as part of history, as it seems there is a great deal of respect put on history of all (Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Islamic, Crusader Ottoman and Jewish) eras of people dwelling here.

A day in my work in the Galilee – The Jesus boat in Ginosar – The Kinneret Lake – Tiberias evening light show – Preaching and miracles of Jesus in Capernaum – Tiberias city centre and Muriels and Maimonidies

Jun 10 2011

Tiberias evening light show

As it started to get dark, the coastline started to look interesting with the cloud formations..

Restaurants have usual fare of middle eastern food but also specialise in fish aimed at Christian visitors to the Galilee.

A couple of years ago, a strange looking beacon was installed along the side of the Galilee, its unlikely ships would get lost, instead this is a project that display colour patterns onto fountains of water…

It pretty and entertaining too, and free.

There is plenty of bars and restaurants here, its a pretty lively city. With the bars that open onto the beach, they remind me a bit of Eilat, albeit with the Galilee and not the Red Sea though. 🙂

I got to go for a beer with my friend Arnold who was already good friends with the youth hostel owner, and he came out and brought along his daughter.

This bar has a tree growing out of the inside of it…

Jun 7 2011

The Kinneret lake

The Kinneret, or the Sea of Galilee, or even Lake Tiberias are the names of the body of water where Jesus spent probably the majority of his ministry.

Its 214 metres below sea level, not as low of course as the Dead Sea, and has a radius of 53km or 33 miles.

Either name, its a peaceful and relaxing place to spend a few days off work. When I came here last year in a rented car its actually very pleasant to drive around the bendy road that heads along the west edge of the sea.

I went into the Jesus boat museum previously whilst waiting to get a boat ride. This pleasant path with trees and iron modern art is a path that heads towards the jetty onto the Kinneret.

Like the previous times I have been here, the sea seems like a peaceful and great place to relax, by the side or in a boat.

However the bible tells us of great storms that happened here, and of course Jesus commanded a storm to stop in Matthew 8 : 23-27

It would be interesting to witness a storm here I think, thunderstorms are good fun as long as you are safe indoors 🙂

There is a lot of gadgetry on this boat. There are 3 cellphones, an iPod nano with Christian worship music playing during the trip, a Motorola CB radio and a music mixing desk and tannoy system, oh and a rudder for steering, a throttle and other typical nautical controls.

The Arab chap who was the man in charge of tour boats who came onboard has an iPad as well which contains the schedules of the boats, I thought maybe there could be some kind of nautical navigation and weather conditions apps as well, but I can’t really see anyone getting lost!

There is a party of Christian visitors from Bratislava, Slovak republic but as they booked the trip themselves and there isn’t a tour guide with them they were happy for me and my friend Arnold to share with them 🙂

Next: I investigate this mysterious beacon that shines over the Galilee…

Jun 4 2011

The Jesus boat in Ginosar

My two days of work projects were done, and it was nice to take off a friday from work and relax and see some places. I booked into a youth hostel in Tiberias and made friends with a South Africa pastor and got to see a lot special places.

The community of Ginosar is a Kibbutz on the banks of the Kinneret, this concrete exhibition hall has this wonderful piece of history.

In my home city of Portsmouth, a historic ship from the time of Henry the Eighth was pulled out of the harbour in 1982, at the time craning an ancient ship out of the sea without it breaking up, a not so conventional bit of archeology probably not been done before, and I remember as I child watching it at school on live television as it was shown all over the world.

Just a few years later, this ancient boat found in the Galilee in unusually high tide conditions in 1986, archeologists sprayed it in foam and carefully lifted it out.

Mounted in a metal cradle you can see the boat, it has been treated in wax to stop it rotting.

Its dated from the first century AD, so its quite possible it was owned by someone who may have known Jesus maybe.

There is some nice drawings on the wall of this museum, although it is very small, as well as the video showing how it was carefully excavated and cleaned up, you can see the whole exhibition in less than 10 minutes.

Interestingly enough, the boat is fabricated from 12 different types of wood as the colour coding here shows.

Left: photos of the boat being winched out after being covered in foam, and a model shown. Right: a model of what the model looked like in its day.

Ginosar also has these nice new bungalows which look very new which look out onto the sea.

There was also a folk music event happening, there were people camped out and bands playing close to the sea. I asked the man at the car park who was checking tickets where the Jesus boat was, after he spoke to his colleague, I heard him say the word ‘Yeshu’ rather the ‘Yeshua’ this was sad, as the Yeshua is Hebrew for Jesus but Yeshu, spelt similar is a insult sometimes used by critics of Christianity and Messianic Judaism in Israel.

This chap who worked in the gift shop had an interesting tatoo from the Psalms. He told me he is a Jewish believer in Jesus, so I shook his hand 🙂

Next a ferry around the Kinneret…

Check out the official site of the Jesus boat here:

http://www.thegalileeboat.com

Jun 3 2011

A day in Christian IT work in the Galilee

As I have mentioned before, my job as a volunteer IT support and system administrator for the charity Bridges for Peace means I am normally based in one of two offices in Jerusalem, and on odd occasions I work up in Karmiel, which is a city in the centre of the Galilee.

This means a 180km visit by car or bus when I have to do work up there. The food bank I work does a huge amount of service in helping the poorest people in this area especially new immigrants to Israel mostly from Russia or some of the other ex-Soviet Union nations. Every so many months I need to do a trip probably not that different from journeys Jesus did himself.

I have learned since being here this site requires careful planning as its an awful long way if something breaks unexpectedly.

This empty room in the middle of the warehouse seems like a good place to put the server. This server will replaced later this year as its running Windows 2000 which is very old now and we need a new more reliable system that helps us with our day to day food bank operations up here. This room is good as it means an easier job of adding some extra wiring here as its close to the network cabinet which is in the cupboard opposite the door.

This rack full of network kit needs a good sort out. I manage to swap cables around to enable computer network use in some offices that moved around. We only have 5 staff up here and there will be at least 3 more and there is not enough ports on the 16 port switch here so I have to put in another switch. The glass door on the cabinet does not shut as the wires are in the way. I think I can rotate the brackets on the switch at the top 180 degrees so this sits flush better and should make the glass door shut properly.

There is an other switch supplied by Bezeq (Israel’s no.1 telephone company) for several VOIP phones. Not quite sure how this works as I think they maintain it.

The black things are UPS power back up units to keep equipment running in case of power failure or spikes in the electricity supply, these are a few years old, most of the equipment was set up when this building got running in 2007 and the chances are the batteries are no good as they have a 3 year or so life span. I want to get a new UPS that has network connectivity so I can see the status of it using my Spiceworks network management software. These small ‘shoebox’ type UPSes should be able to be refurbished with new batteries and they could be used on regular office PCs in another part of the building.

When I was staying at one of the staff’s place over night, looking out of the balcony, I get to see an Arab bedouin house across the road, and modern (Jewish) flats in the distance. Here in this city, these two types of communities seem to be get on well it seems. It does mean you get woken up up by roosters at 5.30am though!

I have to speak to the rest of the IT department to get some more telephones installed, test wiring for network ports and telephones, get 3 more PCs installed and test the spare server. This trip was mostly about planning to give extra capacity for this site for future expansion as I know the Lord will provide more resources so we can help the most needy people in this area. I will need to do another visit up here in July I think.

The main thing I was doing, is a careful back up of the main server and applying all the latest updates and patches. This is always a delicate thing for IT administrators to do, it puts you a big security risk if you don’t bother, and if you do it without carefully planning it can crash the server. One of the team had their monitor suddenly stop working, so a local computer store (thanks to KSP) I got a new Samsung 18″ wide screen TFT monitor.

I really like this job as I always have plenty of interesting and varied challenges so work is never boring and I get to know everyone in the organisation. It also means I can combine this with a weekend seeing some friends who moved from home city of Portsmouth UK to Karmiel Israel, and later visiting the city of Tiberias which is right on the Kinneret, or the Sea of Galilee, and a few significant places of the bible, I will show soon.

Apr 25 2011

Nazareth – 1. Arrival at the city

I have always hoped Michael Palin could do journals around the holy land one day, until this happens I try and blog on the places of the life of Jesus myself. I am tired by the attitudes of the media and fellow Brits who try to slander Israel and accuse it of being a ‘Apartheid’ state amongst other things. I set out to the central Galilee city of Nazareth, to see what it was like for Jesus to have grown up there, glimpses of places from the bible, how the Arab people there live in the centre of the Galilee and how different it is from Jerusalem.

Just before getting off the bus which took me from Jerusalem, I asked some people next to me if this was the right place to get off, and there didn’t seem to be a proper bus station, just a stop by the main road. This Arab couple were really friendly and were happy oblige to walk with me from the street through some narrow streets uphill through the old city towards my hostel.

Jesus frequently went to and fro from here or the greater part of Galilee to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. When you live some distance from your family this must be a lot of effort to travel often.

This provocative message to Christians stands out a junction heading north towards the Synagogue where Jesus first preached. Behind is the tall turret of the famous huge and grand looking Bisilica Church. It says “and whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the hereafter he will be one of the losers. – Holy Quran”

I have a better message though: Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14 : 6

I have seen this on some guides before, and all the research I did suggested Nazareth is a safe city to visit, and it is too. I had a number of worries though to do with the busy time of year. I booked this trip at rather the last minute as its in between Pesach and Easter, and with two different holidays, the buses are not running for some of those days, Easter making it more busy for Christian visitors, and I had hoped to visit Tiberias but both youth hostels were fully booked, so was one of the main hostels in Nazareth, and I got myself one night booked but not for the other days, this needed a lot of prayer of exactly how to figure out where to stay….

Soon! Different Youth Hostels, the Spice Mill, Thousands of Arab Israelis Christians in the streets at Easter, the church at Cana for weddings, today’s modern Nazarene carpenters and residents finding hidden wells in the back yards by accident!

1. Arrival at the city – 2. Staying in the old city – 3. The modern day Nazarene carpenter – 4. Where Jesus first preached – 5. Religious vehicles in Nazareth – 6. Mary’s Well and the Bath house – 7. The precipice – 8. On top of the Precipice hill – 9. More old city streets and market – 10. The spice shop – 11. Churches from A to Z or Alpha to Omega – 12. The Basilica church – 13. Easter service at the Basilica

Feb 15 2011

Mount Hermon snow trip: Part 5 Badgers Rock!

1/ Go forth north! – 2/ Snow patrol – 3/ Sloping off – 4/ Nimrod’s Fortress – 5/ Badgers Rock

I have mentioned this little creatures when I went to Ein Gedi, next to the dead Sea. Lots of them live around the rocks, they are pretty active and move fast.

These are Hyrax (also known as Rock Badgers)

They look like giant Guinea Pigs. I wondered if people ever ate them, after all they are a bit bigger than a rabbit. I checked the bible. Leviticus 11 : 5 “The hyrax, though it chews the cud, does not have a divided hoof; it is unclean for you.”

Ah. They are not Kosher. Oh well 🙂 The bible mentions them quite a bit actually.

Arabic inscription on some stone up here.

Some amazing views from up here.

Lastly, just before we went home we stopped off at a friendly Arab restaurant on the north part of the Galilee just close to Tiberias.