I am pretty sure that it has never taken me this long to finish blogging about a vacation, but, in my defense, my thesis is due in three weeks (during which time my Master's student will also finish her thesis and I will have an undergraduate student to train), I leave for the US in four weeks, my thesis defense is in five weeks, I have a conference in six weeks, and I go to Alaska in seven weeks. Needless to say, things have pretty much been crazy, and I start to hyperventilate a little if I think about it too much. But, I decided that I needed to finish blogging about Israel if I was going to post about my weekend in Strasbourg, so here we are.
After our lovely
visit to the Dead Sea, Jessi and I had some more fun hanging around Tel Aviv. We went to the beach with pretty much the cutest baby ever, we had the best hummus that I've ever tasted in my life, and we baked an
incredible strawberry cake. And, yes, all of these superlatives are well-deserved.
On the first day of Passover (Good Friday), we were invited to Brian's boss's house to celebrate
Seder with her family. Brian's boss lives north of Tel Aviv, so we decided to rent a car and visit Caesarea on the way up. We were told that it would be closed due to Passover, but we decided to stop anyways. It turns out that all that "closed" meant was that no one was taking our money and there were not many people other. Otherwise, we pretty much had the place to ourselves and didn't have to pay! Not bad!
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| Random columns. Apparently there were extra. |
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| Power plant smoke stacks in the distance. |
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| I love the color of the Mediterranean. |
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| Mosaics! |
I find it really incredible how well-preserved this ancient city was: the way the mosaics were still intact and the colors were still brilliant, and they way all of these arches were still free-standing. We even found the arches on the front of our guidebook, so, of course, Jessi and I had to take a picture with them.
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| Arches! |
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| They had horse races in the flat, open space in the distance. |
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| I can race horses, too! |
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| Cover of the guidebook, right here. |
From there, we took a few minutes to go to a beach that happens to have an old aqueduct that is very well-preserved. We enjoyed the time wading in the sea (although I was stung by a wasp on my foot!) and enjoying the novelty of being on a beach with an aqueduct.
From there we had to hurry to get changed into our Seder best, but I got this Patton family photo before we went in to the Seder. It was really nice of Brian's boss to host us for the Seder, and I really enjoyed seeing this tradition and getting to know the family a little bit. I think the best part of travel is meeting people and developing connections, and the Seder was perfect for this!
