Israeli Museum and Canadian Hockey

Today Zach and I made our first long overdue foray into Jerusalem!  We took a day trip to the Israel museum and managed to make it there and back before Shabbat! (which was a score because public transit stops at about 3:30pm this time of year on Shabbat) so no cabs or super long walks :)

This is a great country to get to different places pretty cheaply.  The bus to Jerusalem is only about $10 round-trip so it makes it easy to see different parts of the country.  Another awesome thing is that everything is so close - Jerusalem is only about an hour away - and the farthest part of the country from us is about 5 hours.

The museum is pretty good - it's a lot different to see the thousand(s)-year-old exhibits and realize that you could drive just a few km and see where they found the stuff.  It somehow makes history seem a lot more real. I wanted to take pictures of the scale model they have of Old Jerusalem but they were very "discouragey" about taking pictures in the museum so I decided not to :)  The other exhibit that the museum is famous for is Shrine of the Book which has the dead sea scrolls and the Aleppo Codex display. Can I just say that the name Aleppo Codex sounds ridiculously awesome and if I did another degree I'd study that just so I could say it often.

I just finished reading a book called The Dovekeepers (Hoffman) that was set in 70CE which taught me a lot of the history (and/or lore..it's disputed) around Masada during the fall of Jerusalem. I love it when historic books that I've read coincide with going to the places mentioned or seeing them in a museum (yes I am that dorky - but I love it :)) because it makes me appreciate them a lot more.  Side note - I highly recommend this book.  It is a really interesting account of that time and place told from four different women's perspectives and written (I thought) beautifully.  Thanks Julia!!

We spent the second half of our day in classic Canadian fashion - pizza and hockey.  We finally tried the Dominoes up the street (which tastes surprisingly similar to Dominoes back home) and is non-kosher, and thus, allows meat and cheese on their pizza! (some things are hard to give up....) We have a subscription to NHL games online so we've been keeping up with the Jets.  This has been a surprisingly comforting/homey activity.  I like hockey - but I've never really followed it on TV voluntarily unless it's the playoffs.  But it's actually pretty fun and reminds me of home and I like that :)  Too bad we probably won't be seeing the Jets in the playoffs anytime soon......

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This is the Bridge of Strings built for the new light rail in Jerusalem (just opened a few months ago).   I like pictures of bridges :)