Yesterday we took the bus down to Masada to see the ruins. For those of you who don't know the back story, it was the last refuge of the last Jewish rebels to hold out against Rome. They holed up in this cliff-top fortress while the Romans, ever the engineers, built a giant ramp up to it and breached the walls with fire and a battering ram. Rather than go down in defeat and be enslaved by the Romans, the men killed their wives and children, then drew lots among themselves to find out who would kill the others and then kill himself. When the Romans finally entered the city, everyone was dead. It's a highly symbolic place for Israel, and also a really cool archaeological site.
We walked up the Snake Path, which is mentioned by the Roman author Josephus as a very scary and strenuous trip. It's all safe and groomed now, but it does still have 700 stairs (what's up with me and things that have 700 stairs?), which is a hike. Poor Stephanie, still recovering from the same cold I had, was pretty tired.
We got up there and barely had time to see everything. It rained just as we were getting to the coolest part of the ruins (who knew it rained so much in Israel?), but we soldiered through. We hurried a bit, so if I ever went back, I'm sure there'd be more to see. I don't know how the tour groups get through it in an hour or two. We were there all day poking around houses and guard towers and cisterns and suchlike. Fun times.
The museum at the base of the hill was kind of boring, but it did have the 10 ostracca (fragments of broken pot) that the last 10 men wrote their names on to decide who would have to kill himself after killing everyone else. Very eerie.
Today got off to a slow start (the people in my dorm apparently sleep all day, but I feel bad banging around while a half dozen other people are still in bed). I'm headed to the last few monuments I haven't seen in Jerusalem (Temple Mount, some churches on the Via Dolorosa) and then off to Center City for laundry and souveneer shopping and shipping. Yay! Tomorrow will hopefully be the Galilee and Nazareth, then off to the airport on Friday to go on to Bombay/Mumbai!
We walked up the Snake Path, which is mentioned by the Roman author Josephus as a very scary and strenuous trip. It's all safe and groomed now, but it does still have 700 stairs (what's up with me and things that have 700 stairs?), which is a hike. Poor Stephanie, still recovering from the same cold I had, was pretty tired.
We got up there and barely had time to see everything. It rained just as we were getting to the coolest part of the ruins (who knew it rained so much in Israel?), but we soldiered through. We hurried a bit, so if I ever went back, I'm sure there'd be more to see. I don't know how the tour groups get through it in an hour or two. We were there all day poking around houses and guard towers and cisterns and suchlike. Fun times.
The museum at the base of the hill was kind of boring, but it did have the 10 ostracca (fragments of broken pot) that the last 10 men wrote their names on to decide who would have to kill himself after killing everyone else. Very eerie.
Today got off to a slow start (the people in my dorm apparently sleep all day, but I feel bad banging around while a half dozen other people are still in bed). I'm headed to the last few monuments I haven't seen in Jerusalem (Temple Mount, some churches on the Via Dolorosa) and then off to Center City for laundry and souveneer shopping and shipping. Yay! Tomorrow will hopefully be the Galilee and Nazareth, then off to the airport on Friday to go on to Bombay/Mumbai!
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