In Israel

Our vacation started so intensely that I haven't had time to post. We managed to pack a few weeks' worth of activity in the first two days, and continued at a decent pace for the rest of the week. Now in Haifa with a flu (yep, it's a bummer!) I finally have a chance to sort through the several hundred photos taken so far, and post a few impressions... while the rest of my family is out exploring...

Ok, so here goes... The whole concept of time in Israel deserves a separate essay, at least. Time here takes on so many additional dimensions and qualities: length, speed, density... Sometimes it flies, sometimes it stands still. Sometimes it stretches: we flew in on Friday, and by Sunday afternoon it felt like that was a few weeks ago, and even the morning of that same Sunday felt like distant past... And everything is either 2000 years old, or 5000 years old, or somewhere in between - when you place your palm or brush your fingertips over the stones that have seen people and events too mindboggling to contemplate, it seems that time thickens to a consistency where you can almost touch it.

First stop, Zippori. I've never seen so many different kinds of mozaics all in one place: Roman, Hellenistic, Jewish... Below is the most famous one, often referred to as "the Mona Lisa of the Galilee" (although in reality she is probably Aphrodite, based on the fact that she is beautiful and has a little boy with a bow and arrow in the background).

And finally, the floor of a synagogue, 5th century AD, with mosaics including, among others, a Zodiak design, as well as the binding of Isaac, and inscriptions in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

I cannot possibly post all the images here, you'll have to wait until they are in my Picasa album. Just one more: we are walking down a Roman street. Talking about time... see the ruts from the ancient wheels?

They were then, and we are now, and this was here...

To be continued...