The place is located in some white chalky cliffs by the sea.
You start up on the top of the cliff, where you can get some magnificent shots of the Mediterranean coastline near Haifa.
You have to take a cable-car down to the grottos.
Naturally, there are big rocks below.
But the view from inside the grotto is amazing. I only wish I were a better photographer.
Frustrating as it is to not have gotten my massive article download, I'm excited by the prospect of getting my camera back to Palestine/Israel and getting better pictures. These are my best from Nazereth.
The produce shots I got at Carmel Market are better, but I couldn't resist this stack on the road up to the Church of the Annunciation (I can hear Alberto, our tour guide now: AN-NUN-CI-A-TION!) I couldn't resist this handsome guy I met on the road, either...
A lot of people have religious experiences in Holy Land. The only place I came close was at the Church of the Annunciation. It was really the only place I felt genuine love for God. The art was simple, but sincere and it moved me. Below is a Madonna donated by Japan:
The Annunciation to the Blessed Mother by the Archangel Gabriel.
Mary Magdalene washing Jesus' feet. The Latin reads, "Your sins are forgiven. Go in peace."
A Madonna donated by Egypt.
A Greek Madonna.
I found this image commemorating a meeting between Pope Paul and Patriarch Atenagoras to be particularly moving, as there isn't much in Jerusalem to express any sentiment of Christian unity. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is particularly bad in this regard.
Here's more detail on their faces. The birds are perhaps Orthodox, as clearly they weren't too kind to poor Pope Paul...
We had so little time in Nazereth. I really would like to spend the day next time. It's such an Arab city. It looks like an upscale version of Fuheis.
This one caught the eye of the political scientist in me.
I never saw a single Palestinian flag in any of the Arab parts of Israel. But Palestinians express identity in several ways through religion. I imagine this sign was up for Ramadan. I'd like to get a clearer idea of the way religion expresses identity for Arab Israelis.
I took these shots of Greenland from the air on the flight home from Tel Aviv. They all punch up to larger sizes for more detail (less than a meg each, though). Let me know what you think.
Living with Craig all these years has made me a little more interested in aesthetics. The most aesthetic thing about our crappy apartment is making Turkish coffee in the morning. So I played with that process this morning. First, our kitchen is dark. Now, this camera is magnificent at letting in light. In fact, it's overexposing my outdoor pictures—I have to play with the manual and figure out how to avoid that problem. But in the dark kitchen, it has a slow shutter time. As a result, kitchen pictures tend toward blurriness, as it is very difficult to keep the camera perfectly still during that long shutter time.
This problem can be solved by using a tripod. Note the picture below of the bukraj is nice and clear. The word is Turkish, I think. It's what we call a Turkish coffee pot in Jordan. They call it other things elsewhere.
The only really nice thing about our cesspool apartment is the roughly three square feet of marble countertop. The Middle East on the whole is big on marble countertops. Most older houses have them. Anyway, you add three heaping tablespoons of Turkish coffee and two level tablespoons of sugar and mix them up like so:
I probably should have had "action shots" showing the spooning. I was lazy. I'd never make it in advertising. Plus, the focus should have been on the contents of the pot. Anyway, you then add water. I didn't get an action shot there, either. You live; you learn.
I did try for the action shot when lighting the stove (no pilot light—just a match), but I didn't angle the remote correctly and missed my shot. I was, again, too lazy to reshoot.
You will want to stir the coffee once as you start boiling it and again just as it starts boiling. Note that the grate on the stove makes a pleasant background for the photo. This apartment doesn't totally suck after all!
Invariably, the coffee will boil over. Just as it does, snatch it from the fire, stir and then put it back on again. You repeat this proccess twice more. Thad Tierney once told me, "Oh! You make Christian coffee!"
"Christian coffee?" I ask.
"Christian coffee!" he says. "Muslims only let it boil once. Christians do it three times for the Holy Trinity."
I had no idea that I made Christian coffee. My mom never told me the theology behind it when she taught me how. Of course, she's from Bridgeport, Connecticut, so whichever one of my dad's relatives taught her may never have explained this logic to her either. But there we are—a tutorial on Christian coffee from the Jewish state, inspired by an Irish guy from Wisconsin, who's still not as big a Packers fan as I am but apparently has a thing or two to teach me about the Middle East! It's a small fuckin' world!
Pouring, of course, has its own set of dilemmas. The autofocus targeted the rim of the cup. This is undesirable when empty, as the eye is drawn to the cup itself, rather than the contents. As a result, the image appears blurry.
There are ways of targeting the autofocus and them moving the focused object out of the center of the screen and maintaining that first focus. As is, the camera tends to retarget. I need to learn that technique. Like I said, I've been lazy.
Then, of course, pouring technique is everything. Note that I have a coffee stain on the back right of the cup. Sloppy! I'd make a terrible geisha. But note the fact that as the surface of the coffee rises, you mind the unfocused body of the cup less and less, as you are seeing an increasingly focused surface of the rising liquid. I imagine the proper solution is to pour a little, refocus, pour a little, refocus, etc. It sounds like a pain in the ass, especially when you're making your first cup of the day.
The final product follows. Again, we would want to see the final picture served up with a tall glass of mineral water and perhaps a cookie. But my desire to drink my coffee won out over my need to have my coffee.
And that was my most boring post ever! Well, maybe not. I just wish it was. Sigh.
