Friday Five - Travel
And now it's time for the Friday Five:
1. Where were you born?
Mengo Hospital, Kampala, Uganda, Africa. Cool, huh? (My parents were there for three years while my father taught Bible at a local school. We moved back to Canada a few weeks after I was born.)
2. If you still live there, where would you rather move to? If you don't live there, do you want to move back? Why or why not?
I don't remember Uganda, of course. But from what I hear, the country has been so devastated by various dictatorships, and now by AIDS, that much of the beauty my parents and brothers remember has been lost. I must admit I've never really felt a pull to go there -- I was always much more interested in going to England, where my father comes from.
3. Where in the world do you feel the safest?
Oddly, I felt incredibly safe walking alone through downtown Tel Aviv at eleven o'clock the night after my Bible school class landed in Israel -- much more so than I've felt anywhere in Canada. That was way back in 1994, of course, and my sense of security may just have been pure ignorance of the potential dangers, but I really wasn't worried at all. Whereas if I'd been in downtown Toronto at that hour, I'd have been petrified.
4. Do you feel you are well-traveled?
Before 1992, I was hardly travelled at all, at least not outside Ontario. But then in my early twenties I went to Mexico, Israel and Great Britain, all within the space of four years; and I spent a year going to school in New Jersey as well, during which I visited New York and Washington. And since my marriage I've been out to British Columbia (which I'd always wanted to do) and also to Florida. Which is good, because now I've got kids I'm not likely to be travelling again for the next twenty years or so. :)
5. Where is the most interesting place you've been?
Israel, hands-down. Oddly, though I'm a Judeophile, I'd never felt the typical Biblicist's eagerness to see "the Holy Land", and was only mildly intrigued by the prospect of going there. Probably because I was expecting a lot of tourist traps, and big ugly cathedrals parked on top of every site of real Biblical interest. However I soon discovered that it was only the New Testament sites that had been so defaced, and not even all of those; and there were still a lot of really fascinating sites from Old Testament and inter- / post-testamental history. Especially the rabbinical tombs at Bet Shearim, which were pure Indiana Jones stuff. (Although, I am almost entirely sure that we were not actually supposed to go in to that particular part of the tombs, as there was a chain across and the stairs leading up were insanely precarious. But the guy supervising the site did wave us in after we'd stood behind the chain and whined for a while, so...)
1. Where were you born?
Mengo Hospital, Kampala, Uganda, Africa. Cool, huh? (My parents were there for three years while my father taught Bible at a local school. We moved back to Canada a few weeks after I was born.)
2. If you still live there, where would you rather move to? If you don't live there, do you want to move back? Why or why not?
I don't remember Uganda, of course. But from what I hear, the country has been so devastated by various dictatorships, and now by AIDS, that much of the beauty my parents and brothers remember has been lost. I must admit I've never really felt a pull to go there -- I was always much more interested in going to England, where my father comes from.
3. Where in the world do you feel the safest?
Oddly, I felt incredibly safe walking alone through downtown Tel Aviv at eleven o'clock the night after my Bible school class landed in Israel -- much more so than I've felt anywhere in Canada. That was way back in 1994, of course, and my sense of security may just have been pure ignorance of the potential dangers, but I really wasn't worried at all. Whereas if I'd been in downtown Toronto at that hour, I'd have been petrified.
4. Do you feel you are well-traveled?
Before 1992, I was hardly travelled at all, at least not outside Ontario. But then in my early twenties I went to Mexico, Israel and Great Britain, all within the space of four years; and I spent a year going to school in New Jersey as well, during which I visited New York and Washington. And since my marriage I've been out to British Columbia (which I'd always wanted to do) and also to Florida. Which is good, because now I've got kids I'm not likely to be travelling again for the next twenty years or so. :)
5. Where is the most interesting place you've been?
Israel, hands-down. Oddly, though I'm a Judeophile, I'd never felt the typical Biblicist's eagerness to see "the Holy Land", and was only mildly intrigued by the prospect of going there. Probably because I was expecting a lot of tourist traps, and big ugly cathedrals parked on top of every site of real Biblical interest. However I soon discovered that it was only the New Testament sites that had been so defaced, and not even all of those; and there were still a lot of really fascinating sites from Old Testament and inter- / post-testamental history. Especially the rabbinical tombs at Bet Shearim, which were pure Indiana Jones stuff. (Although, I am almost entirely sure that we were not actually supposed to go in to that particular part of the tombs, as there was a chain across and the stairs leading up were insanely precarious. But the guy supervising the site did wave us in after we'd stood behind the chain and whined for a while, so...)