Touring Fool

I'll try to catch up to this week with this post. Been a long and exhausting week/weekend. Last week I was moved to a new area, a trench between two walls. Sounds lame but turned out to be incredibly interesting because the inside wall was covered on one side with plaster (all of the stone walls were at one time or another covered in plaster to hide weaknesses and to make the cities really stand out against the backdrop). The one side happened to be facing the other wall meaning that the plastered wall was built earlier in the Iron Age IIb stratum. The other was added later by another group who updated the city and wanted to fortify the city walls. All of this is inside the later 1st century major city wall that surrounds most of the site.

Anyway, very interesting... I'm learning how to see the different stages of the city by just looking at the ruins, something I couldn't do the first week. If I could upload pictures from here it would be easier to see.

This weekend we rented a car and drove down to a place called Bet Sharim, which was the most human of the ruins I've see. The city is a place sacred to Jewish people for it was a site of refuge. What's left of the city are large tombs and in the tombs of course hundreds of human shaped sarcophagus, remnants of the dead. The sarcophagus were actually carved from the same stone as the caves themselves... very cool.

After Bet Sharim we went to Ceasaria, a Roman port city on the Mediterranean. The city was by far the largest I've been to so far. There was a huge ampetheater and a large stadium that went right up to the beach. There were tunnels all over the city that led to the sea that acted as a sewage system and helped fight tidal distruction. Had a great lunch on the beach at Ceasaria and continued up the coast in search of a nice free beach to swim. I was directed,by a coffee barrsta to go to a town called Nahariya just north of Akko. The beach was perfect and so was the water. The water was so warm and the sea was breaking hard which made it kinda fun.

This week coming to a close... we are finishing up a few things but mainly we will be picking up to close down the site for the season.

I leave Friday for Paris... super excited.