Hello friends and family!
We are doing well this evening. Our entrance into Israel has been, well, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” It has been absolutely wonderful to see and do things that cannot be replicated elsewhere. However, the first morning we were here, my purse was stolen out of the trunk of our rental car, yes, with all of my ID, credit cards, passport, and also Susannah’s passport, as well as our airplane tickets home. It also had the new mouthpiece that I had just gotten three weeks ago for my sleep apnea (insurance didn’t really like paying for it the first time, so this will get interesting, I’m sure!). So, trying to recover from all that has colored our time here, on top of being up for a little over fifty hours before finally getting to crawl into bed here at Kibbutz Ginnosar. Now, here are the details.
When we landed in London, we did indeed have a good opportunity to take “the tube” into town and spend several hours at the British Museum. We all wish we had been more awake, but even so, it was thrilling to see the actual artifacts that we have seen pictures of in books for years. Even Susannah was saying “Hey, I’ve seen that in my books!” We saw the Rosetta Stone, the Lachish Letters, the limestone panels from the Assyrian palaces (with the notable siege and destruction of Lachish), and so much more. How cool is that?
Our plane was delayed about an hour between London and Tel Aviv, so we landed at Ben Gurion Airport about 7 a.m. local time last Saturday. It was a beautiful morning, sunny and a balmy 70 plus degrees. I can’t believe Ben Gurion Airport these days. It is absolutely beautiful! When I first traveled to Israel in 1978, our plane had to stay at the end of the runway for security reasons, and when we disembarked, soldiers stood all around us with machine guns trained on us as we shuffled across the tarmac to an ugly building slapped together out of corrugated metal sheeting. It had no air conditioning, so we had to swelter while we waited. Now, one disembarks on a lovely jetway, and the airport is an architectural masterpiece with lovely pale golden limestone blocks and gleaming stainless steel everywhere. Water fountains “rain” in a beautiful cascade out of the ceiling in the main atrium, and there are portions of old mosaic floors decorating walls, as well as modern artwork. It is amazing.
Well, Randy was waived right through the passport control in a matter of seconds. I’ve suspected that I am on a “list” for some time, and indeed, I had to stand for several minutes while the passport control officer said nothing but clacked away at her computer, all the time with a troubled furrowed brow. She finally stopped, hastily stamped my passport without a word, and I was through.
As we picked up our rental car, Susannah was tugging at me, saying she was seeing palm trees. It’s all quite exotic for a child of the pacific northwest! There was a wonderful, heavy scent of jasmine blossoms in the air, and indeed, there were some jasmine vines lazily hanging nearby in the rosy early morning sunlight. I reflected how this part of the world can be such a paradise when it is not ripped apart by violence and war.
Well, I’m getting long-winded, so I’ll try to condense the rest of our time for your sake!
We drove north to Caesarea Maritima, where Randy and I had been ten years ago, and I had dug for a season there. It is thrilling to see what has been excavated since then, and Israel has done an admirable job of displaying it for sight-seers. Some exquisite frescoes and mosaic floors are under cover from the weather, but nicely signed with wooden viewing platforms and trails so that they can be enjoyed. The beach was lovely, and there were local folks fishing from the shore. Susannah played in the water a bit, and we walked over more of the site. What a thrill to see a wonderful site getting the attention and preservation it deserves. What a greater thrill to show it all to my daughter, who skipped along and loved every bit of it. I was pregnant in my second trimester when I excavated there ten years ago. The dig team nicknamed the then “unknown” baby “Little Caesar.” Now, here were Randy and I walking along paths that felt as if we had been on them only last week, and “Little Caesar” frolicked alongside with wide eyes, now very well known to us as Susannah.
So, we returned to the car, which was parked by the Roman Theatre of Caesarea (there is a gated entrance to the site there). Much to our horror, we discovered that my purse had been taken out of the trunk of the car! How were we to know that Mazdas required us to lock the trunk separately from the doors of the car?! Yes, we were upgraded to a Mazda instead of a Fiat. Anyway, the purse was gone, snatched from a car trunk with a push button lock. Randy immediately ran to the entrance gate of the park to report this to someone.
Now, I know you won’t believe me unless you experience it yourselves, but Israelis just don’t like to make an effort to give out information, and they can be quite blasé about the concerns of others. So, Randy found few people paying him attention initially. A bus load of tourists was squeezing through the gate, so the ticket booth man was occupied. The only person that Randy could grab to talk to was some Israeli in his early twenties dressed in a toga and a fake laurel wreath on his head. Apparently he was paid to “add atmosphere” to this very Roman capital of the ancient region.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. What a picture! Here we had a potential financial catastrophe on our hands, and Randy could only find a faux Cicero to talk to! His English wasn’t very good, either, and I could tell by the look on his face that he had no idea why Randy was gesturing wildly and yelling about his wife’s purse. I figured, “Forget Toga Boy. I’m going to the woman with the uniform, the gun, and a look on her face that means business!” So I elbowed aside a couple of tourists to talk to the security guard.
She wasn’t awfully impressed with our problem. She gave me that blasé look, and Toga Boy came up to her and said something in Hebrew that was probably, “What’s wrong with these people?” She answered him in Hebrew and laughed. Yes! She laughed! Randy and I fumed about that quite a bit the rest of the day. Anyway, staying with our immediate concerns, we pushed them to understand that something should be done. “Go to the police in Hadera. Can you find Hadera?”
“Yes,” we said. It’s a little town about two miles away. They told us that it was useless for them to call the police, because the police couldn’t come out to them, or do anything anyway. But we could go to the police if we wanted. “Great!” we said, “How do we find the police station?” “You just go to Hadera, and go to the main road, and you will find it.”
Okay.
Well, we didn’t “just find it.” We searched all over Hadera, and asked several people how to find the police station. We got similar answers. “You just go over there, and you will see it.” As they said this, they would wave a hand in the air like a fishtail. Now, what does that mean? Right? Left? Over where? Also, since it was Shabbat (Sabbath), nothing was open. Nothing.
Then, we thought we had struck gold! There was a police van, with blue lights flashing (they always flash them here, whether there is an emergency or not), stopped along a curb. This was it! Randy did a fast maneuver with the car, and pulled up behind a car that was behind the police van. I hopped right out, and ran to the van. I leaned in the passenger side window, and saw some guy in dirty regular clothes sitting in the driver’s seat. Huh? No uniform? Was he a driver for the real police? “Police?” I asked him. “Ken, ken.” (“yes” in Hebrew).
I started to tell him my purse had been stolen, passports, tickets, etc., and he slowly shook his head and pointed to a small shop. Aha, I thought. He wants me to speak to the real police officer. There was a police radio in the van, buzzing and broadcasting the usual police type chatter, so I figured this was really the police.
Then the “real” police officer came out of the shop with a couple of Cokes. He wasn’t in uniform, either, and didn’t look like he wanted to be involved in any police work. I chattered at him, too, but he just shrugged and got in the van. Then the car between the van and our car began to honk. Who honks at a parked police car? Well, apparently they were all old friends, because they ignored me and stood in a little bunch on the sidewalk chuckling. I just looked at Randy with my jaw dropped, and shrugged my shoulders. Randy got out of the car and joined me, and we became a matched set of ignored people. Then, another “old friend” pulled up to chatter. Now, he knew some English. One of the van officers apparently asked him to find out what could be my problem. I explained. He explained. They all furrowed their brows and rubbed their chins, and asked a question. “Mr. English” translated: “Oh, that is bad that you lost passports. Have you been to the police station?”
Yes, I’m not making that up. He actually said that! Randy and I tried to stay calm while we replied, “No, because we can’t find it! That’s why we stopped to talk to these people!”
“Oh, well you have to go to the station.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s, uh, it’s over there.” Again, the fishtail wave in some nebulous direction. “Just go over there and you will see it.”
“What is the name of the street it is on?”
“Uh, the name of the street.” A brief conference among the old friends, and then, “I don’t know the name of the street. Just go over there, and you will find it.”
So we went “over there,” and looked some more. It was about then that Susannah threw up all over the back seat. Well, the Mohr Mobile had had it. We gave up on the Hadera Police Station, if it does exist, and drove on to Galilee, figuring that we needed to get into our kibbutz guest room and try to cancel credit cards, etc., from there.
It was a relief to drive up into the Mount Carmel range, and through the pass that had been the battleground that had determined the fate of empires in the past. This pass is presided over by Megiddo, and the lovely sweeping plain of Jezreel is also called the Plain of Armeggedon. How calming it was to drive through gentle rolling farmland, leaving the frantic, crowded coast with imaginary police stations far behind us.
When we arrived at Kibbutz Ginnosar, we asked a woman at a registration desk what to do about the whole purse thing. “Oh, that is bad,” she said with some concern. “You must report that to the police. Go into Tiberias and report this at the police station.”
A police station! Just ten minutes’ drive away! “Where is the police station?” we almost yelled together.
“Oh, um, how you say? You just go into Tiberias, and stay on the main road. Go up the hill, and it’s on the – how you say? – left? Well, I’m not sure how you say, but just go over there, and you will see it.”
This seems to be a standard answer over here.
Goodness, this needs to quit for the night. We are doing well, having a great time, and we’ll write more tomorrow. Now that we have the purse thing sort of under control, we’ll write more about Capernaum, Tabgha, Bethsaida, and more.
Good night/ lilit tov.
Mary, Randy, and Susannah
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