Nazareth, Israel

This past weekend I had the amazing opportunity to visit Israel for four days. It was a trip a few of us had been planning and for me, it is and will be probably the biggest trip I've taken personally. My reactions to Israel in a few words can be summed up like this: AMAZING. I loved Israel. Everything from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea to Jerusalem. It was incredible and almost impossible to wrap my head around. And  there's ton of history, but I'll try to keep it short, just enough to explain the photos.

Our hostel definitely had character, I mean this was the mural that greeted us:


The hostel also boasted a rooftop bar, where everyone hung out in the evenings


And from the top you could just make out the city-scape in the distance


To begin  our adventures we took off to Nazareth on Friday, keeping in mind we had to be back before Shabbat started and everything shut down. But it still gave us plenty of time to do our first explorations of Israel.

Though we didn't have any map of any sort of directions, we managed to wander our way to some cool places. And a lot of Nazareth was hilly, so most of the time we just saw something that looked interesting and figured out a way to climb up it.

Mt. Tabor in the distance

They think they're so cool.

Our first stop was the Church of Annunciation. We spent much of out time here, checking out all of the Mother Mary murals from all over the world.


The whole outer courtyard was filled with different depictions of Mary in great big art pieces. Some of them were pretty cool




This one from Canada is really neat and artful, and if I remember correctly, carved out of some sort of wood.






Inside was not only a church, but the remains of a room claimed to be a part of the house that Mary and Joseph lived and the room where Mary encountered the angel Gabriel, who told her that she would be the one to be the mother of Jesus Christ.



Upper level

After a bit of wandering we stumbled upon a bakery with fresh pita bread, and of course we couldn't resist, so we made a quick pit(a) stop. heehee.


 I mean, this was only the beginning. We pretty much ate pita bread and hummus for the next four days. I'm not complaining.



I thought this was going to be a cool church. Turns out its a hotel.

We stood out of the crowd so to speak in Israel, and it did cause a lot of attention. Primarily by school children, and these two boys were too funny. Though we may not have understood each other one bit, they insisted we took their picture and I was happy to oblige and both parties walked away smiling and laughing, but not sure at what.


We originally climbed to the top of Nazareth to visit this mosque, but we couldn't go inside and this was the best angle I could manage of it. It's not a great view I know.





Here's the school all the kids were coming from



Flowers! In November!

Keepin' it classy.

And the sunshine - amazing. Everyday it was hot and sunny, which I loved but couldn't really believe, after all it's November!

Day one of Israel was a pretty encouraging start. After navigating a few cities in my travels I was finally getting the hang of how to not get lost, map or no. Compared to Saturday and Sunday, we didn't do much in Nazareth, but it was good beginning. Each day we got up super early, stayed out fairly late and did a ton of walking. We most definitely made the most out of our time there.

Stay posted!
     -Natalie


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