I wasn’t feeling particularly great yesterday, but as today has progressed, it’s improving. Which is good, because we had quite an amazing day. Here’s a few seconds of us walking through a street market, just to give you some flavor. You might appreciate that I didn’t video any of the butchering or animal areas.

Just time for a few quick pics tonight.

• Our breakfast buffet looks notably different from my home breakfast traditions. I note za’atar, maybe for the eggs, and should point out the huge slabs of halva, under the tongs near the bottom of the photo.
• For dinner we went to the Walled Off Hotel and restaurant. This is a world famous hotel, not because of the food, but because it was donated by the famous anonymous artist Banksy, and sits immediately beside the wall.

Life in Israel and the Palestinian territories is complicated and politically charged, even in Bethlehem. In this space I will share only the simpler parts, like food and streets and scenery and the richness of human experience.

In these photos

• Walking to church this morning, up many stairs, to the Christmas Lutheran Church of Bethlehem, an Arabic speaking, German Lutheran Church.
• A street market seen from the church’s patio.
• A tiny, delicious coffee.
• An amazing treat called Knafeh from a neighborhood sweets shop.
• Olives
• Bethlehem panorama
• One of countless such streets/walkways that wend their way through Bethlehem.

We were visiting the Church of the Nativity, which honors the place where Jesus was born, and across the street there is a mosque. While our guide was explaining things to us, the Moslem call to prayer began across the street. This video captures the experience. I love it! It’s a complicated world we are trying to live in together.

With negligible sleep we are still able to muster smiles having arrived in Israel. It’s an amazing place, mixing 3 major world religions, whacky religious tourism, and whatever “wifi Jesus” is. Today we went to Bethlehem, and the political climate is pretty obvious, if you stop to read the sign. Note that the sign telling Israelis that’s it’s illegal and dangerous to enter here is a sign posted BY the Israelis. Finally you can see our awesome hosts helping us understand the lunch food.

After only 45 rain and snow and darkness delays I managed to get from the first photo here to the last one. Imagine if I were a farmer and these delays actually mattered!

We love our evening walks in the neighbourhood!

In today’s test we’re exploring multi image galleries. Today’s theme is riverbanks and bridges.

I suppose this proves that I can change the order of text and photos.

Apparently I took a summer break from this photo blog. Not that I planned to do that, it just turned out that way.

My intention was always to post things often, but the process of preparing photos was too cumbersome. So I’ve done a little work to simplify the process, and hopefully that means much more regular, and maybe less interesting, posts. And to do that, I’ll need to do some tests. So consider yourself warned. I think I’ll test with Autumn photos.