Haifa

This is another big city and my tolerance for cities is low. But we were 50 metres from the beach which makes up for the city noise. We spent some time on the beach, reviving from Jerusalem. But I must tell you about the changing rooms. It was just that really, a changing room with showers, one for women and one for men. A room with benches and pegs. So I dropped my bag on a vacant bench and went and had a shower, stripping off as one does. Walking naked backed to the bench the room is heaving with naked women and of course, people have taken over the gap where I put my stuff. I had to elbow through the crowd to get my stuff and then get dressed, literally cheek to cheek. I felt very exposed, but good to have on a beach.

This city boosts that it is home to the baha’i religion who have a stunning garden made of 18 steps down the hillside. We tried to get into the garden twice and only partially succeeded, well worth a visit if you are in the area.

Now James and Matthew are no longer with us, we are not eating out as much but we saw a nice looking restaurant so we went, most of the dishes were mega expensive , with a really hard sell which totally spoiled the evening. However we didn’t choose the expensive dishes (helps being mainly veggie) nor did we have the starters, cocktails, coffee, desert, etc, the waitress walked of in disgust in the end.

From Haifa we hired an underpowered, badly geared, automatic car that will be with us until we return to Tel Aviv and drove to Nazareth. Nazareth is another big slightly grubby city. We did the church of the annunciation where Gabriel told Mary she was pregnant, and a church that was possibly where Joseph had his carpenter shop. Although according to all our guides Joseph was a builder not a carpenter, the early translators got that wrong. We also did a living museum, built to look like a village in the 1st century. This I enjoyed, I always like living museums.