I realize that we are in a warm and sunny place and everyone who might be reading this is in a cold and snowy place, so I hesitate to describe the weather. However, in the interests of journalistic honesty -- it was a PERFECT, gorgeous day with blue skies and sunshine, 75 degrees F, light breezes off the water. We are so rarely on vacation in a warm place that this seemed really remarkable. I was down to a tank top and Jon had to buy a hat because he lost his PVF cap somewhere in the last few days.
I just don't like bargaining. I understand that this is expected, and that you will never get the best deal unless you are willing to haggle, but after about one round of it, I am done. I don't mind spending money on a hat if we want one. Besides, I liked it that we were buying something from a woman for a change. I asked her why it wasn't busy and she says there aren't many tourists now (it's winter and there was a war last summer, which put a damper on tourism) and no one has any money.
Akko is one of those places that has history piled on history, starting back with the first settlement in 3000 BCE, which is the Early Bronze Age. There have been people living here for 5000 years, through all those invaders (Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Crusaders, Islamic rule, Ottomans again ... eventually Napoleon who only managed to take it for two months before it went back to the Ottomans and then there was the British Mandate and then the Arab/Jew fights to control it). Jon points out that we are not planners, so we never do our homework before we get somewhere, so we have to muddle around and figure things out which wastes precious time. I point out that I am just not interested in reading about stuff until I actually see it. I would rather read about it afterwards, so I can imagine it all. Anyway, all I really want is an orientation movie or a museum that tells a cohesive narrative. Maybe if we had bought all the tourist passes at the visitor's center, we might have found such a thing. Instead, we walked through the Old City and marveled at how residential it is. People live in this place that is reminiscent of Jerusalem's Old City, with its tunnels and twisting alleys and Turkish Bazaar. Gradually the streets filled with groups of school kids on field trips, and the shops opened up.
We had falafel for breakfast at 11:00. Jon wanted to go to the place that was the most crowded, but I wanted to go to the place that we could sit down and there was one lone girl ready to make us our meal. Of course we went to the place with seats and the falafel was fresh and fine, with lots of yummy vegetables stuffed in the pita. And it was cheaper than the busy place.
By the time we decided to pay the 10 shekels apiece and go to the mosque, we couldn't go in because they were praying. So we bought tickets to go into another tunnel, one that was built to connect the port to the city by going underground, but it was really tame compared to our other tunnel and there was a boardwalk the whole way, and it was just about level.
Then it was time to go back to Haifa to pick up Benjamin. We found his apartment, no problem. Well, actually, we took a nap outside the wrong building for half an hour before Jon figured it out.
We went to a coffee shop that B thought might be good for lunch, and the servings were ENORMOUS. For once, we couldn't finish our salads and we had to ask for a take home container.
Finally, we were ready to set off for Tzfat (sometimes spelled Safed). We had tried to get in touch with Nir's friends who have a gallery there, but we had never heard back. We thought we would just go and see if they were at work, and Thursday seemed more promising than Friday. The mission was to find the youngest son of Yair because Nancy thought that Benjamin would like to know him. There was traffic along the way and we didn't get there until about 4:45, which is very late by Israeli business standards. But we parked and started walking into town, with very little idea of where we were headed. I had been there twice, most recently with our little group and Nir as our tour guide, Benjamin had been to Tzfat twice for a total of 3 hours on two different occasions, and Jon had been there once when we all traveled together by bus. I led the way, following my memory, and then when I ran out of ideas, we had Benj look up the gallery on his phone (duh). We were pretty close, but above our destination (Tzfat is on top of a mountain). We went down the steps into the Artists Colony and found most of the shops closed up, were accosted by one slightly desperate salesperson, I told him we were looking for Yair, he dismissed that, I repeated it, he said "Oh, Yair with the tallit!" and directed us further up the street.
We arrived just as Elai was locking up the shop. Just the person we were looking for. He was nice and polite enough to listen to us, even though he had no idea who we were, and gradually we managed to say enough to remind him why he might know us. He showed us around, introduced us to his next older brother (whose name I cannot remember now but he is a silversmith), told us about his oldest brother Eden who went to FIVE years of sculpture school and now works full time as an artist. The whole family works in this business -- their parents are master weavers and make incredibly fancy tallitot and other gorgeous Judaic stuff. They keep moving their shop and their work space as they renovate new parts of the building -- each time I have come, they are in a different place. This one is spacious and beautiful, with giant looms that can fit 6 people working in the room at a time. Anyway, Benjamin got to meet two of the Moore brothers and they invited him to come to see them at home sometime, and he probably will. They are extremely gracious and sweet. Elai told us to say hello to Nancy Kruger.
It was dark and we thought we should see something else before heading back to Haifa, so we decided to go to a kibbutz that B knows on the way to Tiberius. We picked up another lone hitchhiker who spoke more English than the last one, left him at a bus stop when we thought we were going to the kibbutz, found the gate closed, picked him up again and took him to Tiberius. We wandered around some Roman stuff, saw the Sea of Galilee/Kinneret and the fancy thing that measures the water level (-212.69 m) and learned that it is quite low for this time of year after the rainy season, and who knew it was so far below sea level anyway? Walked through some tourist streets, stopped for a smoothie, and then went home to Haifa.
We are behaving like tourists who plan to come back again, so we don't have to make sure that we see every single thing. As I think about my two earlier trips here, I know that I have only seen Israel with a guide, and I haven't really had to think about how to do anything or how to navigate. Of course we have Benjamin to make this so much easier and more interesting, and maybe some day we will just come to lounge around and visit people instead of moving around so much. But first we have to accumulate some people to visit. Not impossible. We have a small running start.
Finally, finally Jon figured out how to get the photos straight from his phone to this blog, skipping the step with his defunct computer -- but we can't sprinkle them artfully in the text so if you want to go back to the last day in Turkey, there are now photos piled up at the bottoms of all the posts. Not ideal, but better than nothing. As you will see, there are a couple of themes going: picnic tables and Benjamin Taking Pictures.
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