I took these pictures close to the Gaza Strip. The director of the center, Eran took us on a bike ride to his favorite biking place. The buildings you can see in the top picture are of the Gaza Strip, but not the city of Gaza.

A few Orthodox Jewish boys.

When I take people pictures, usually someone will go stand amid the people and I'll zoom past him/her to get the pictures I want. In the top picture I just included Jordan as he was posing so I could get pictures of the boys.

The top picture: Syria is behind me. This was our first trip to Galilee. While we were up there the teachers wanted to take us to a place where they used to take students go to talk to the UN soldiers on the border between Syria and Israel. One of the teachers took me and one other girl to where they used to be to make sure it was ok to bring the rest of the group....but no one was there. It is kind of a crazy story...I'll tell you all about it later!

The bottom picture I took in Jezreel (1 Kings 21) overlooking the Jezreel Valley.

when you look at the pictures....you might want to start at the end...since it really is the beginning of my trip.

Another site in Jericho. This is where Herod had another palace, and these kids followed us everywhere trying to get money. My favorite picture is the second one where the guy standing on something is talking to the kids. Firas is one of the security guards here, and was assigned to go there with us. He was trying everything to get those kids to leave us alone...and at this point he was letting them have it. It was kind of funny to watch.

A few pictures from the top of Jericho

These pictures are from Jericho. If you look at map 15 in the back of the Bible you can see about half way up the mountain a monastery (in between the leaves of a palm tree). We walked up there, and that's where these pictures are from. We were told that up higher there was a monastery from the crusader times (on top of the highest mountain, the top looks squared), we were told that we weren't going to go up because they don't take people up there. Then all of the sudden we were told that we were going to go up, the head monk...I don't know what you call him, but he said that he hadn't ever met a group like us and that he really liked us and wanted to take us up to the top. So we went. We found out later that it had been about 10 years since they had taken a group to the top.