Life: Back to last monday - the search for Keriath-yearim

In the past six days i have seen and done far more than i could hope to record in any size less than a small book, so i'll keep the stories abbreviated and selective. The next three or four days i'll likely post every day about the three day long field study we just got back from last night, so i'll tell the stories day by day.

Jumping back to sunday, the school was quiet and the two of us, Ben and I, were itching to get away from this wonderful school and beautiful city of Jerusalem because we had been ingulfed here for the entire week with nothing else to occupy our time. There are a small number of people here, mainly grad. girls, who have been in Israel for longer than these few months, so we went to ask them where we should go to hike around. They debated among themselves as to where we should go until all four of them agreed upon Abu Ghosh. They told us to get ready because they were driving us there in five minutes and we had to be ready to go. Having no idea where we were going - honestly, what is Abu Ghosh? - or what we were doing, we packed water and some sloppily made penut butter and jelly sandwiches, grabbed a few maps from our physical settings class, which later proved to be utterly useless, and ran to the gate.

After a fifteen minute car ride they dropped us off at a gas station in the middle of nowhere telling us only that if we went left there were good hiking trails and if we went right we could have some of the best hummus in the country. We went right. The first store we went into had nothing we were looking for, but a nice lady told us where we could find this amazing hummus and some falafel balls for our pita. We then headed back up the road toward the hiking trails.

The hiking trails proved to be more ellusive than expected, so we made our own trails for a while. Eventually we ended up on something that looked like a trail that took us around the mountain ridge to the other side of the valley. Over there we met a grad student from a local school who told us that Keriath-ye'arim was nearby. Keirath-ye'arim was a place where the ark of the covenant spent 20 years after being caprtured by the philistines and returned. David honored and highly esteemed the men of Keriath-ye'arim because of their treatment of the ark. The grad guy pointed to a ridge a few mountains away and told us that he was pretty sure Keriath-ye'arim was somewhere near there...

Of course, there couldn't be an easily accessable trail anywhere in sight, that would made sense, and, i suppose, that's what the map is supposed to be used to accomplish. Rather than searching around for hours around the mountain-side for a trail we weren't sure existed, we decided to go straight down. The thing about mountains here, is they go straight down. They're not mountains side per-say, but more like cliffs. And there are massive quantities of thorn bushes everywhere.

So we scaled the side of the cliff through the thorn bushes into the valley below before heading up a path on the other side. A few minutes later an suv started up the trail, which was relatively wide. We weren't sure who it was since we weren't entire sure where we were or if we perhaps shouldn't have been there. They turned out to be a family who offered us a ride around the side. By this time we were ready to pass out so we gladly consented. Not until we got into the car did we realize that the little girl, maybe 10 years old, was sitting on here dad's lap driving the car along the continuing cliff edge. That was a little freaky, but hey, we're alive : )

They dropped us off at the top and the short of the story is that we still had no idea where we were, it was getting dark, and no one we called could tell us how to find this Keriath-ye'arim place. It turned out that we had hiked in a huge circle and ended up back in Abu Ghosh near the amazing cafe where we bought the hummus and falafel balls. Logically, we bought more food, lots more food. Dr. Wright was able to tell us where the church was that honored the ruins of Keriath-ye'arim, which we was closed but some nice old ladies let us into anyways. Then we caught a ride with an arab "bus" who was actually a taxi driver in one of the ten person taxies on his way home but gave us a great rate anyways.

All in all we spent somwhere around nine hours wandering around who-knows-where and came out of it without too many scratches.

Some Pictures: