Galilean paradise
I'm sitting on a bench in the pleasant evening air right now, looking out at the Sea of Galilee. No breeze is blowing, and the waves are very gently lapping at the shore right in front of me. I can see scattered lights all around the edges of the lake, and a few more that appear to be floating up in the middle of the sky - but I know that those are actually lights at the top of the surrounding hills. From this vantage point, I can see most of the entire lake, which is mostly black except for the occasional green or red lights demarcating a boat that's anchored out. The stars are extraordinarily bright up in the cloudless sky. I feel like I did as a child whenever we'd have the boat out on the river at night, silently plying our ways through the waters. This is probably the most content I've ever felt on this pilgrimage.
After we checked out from the Sisters of Nazareth convent this morning, we traveled eastward and downward until we hit the fabled Sea of Galilee. Like the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee is significantly below sea level - here, it clocks in at about 500 feet below. Unlike the Dead Sea, this is a freshwater lake, and it's a popular attraction for boaters, jet skiers, and swimmers. They were out in abundance today, taking advantage of the gorgeous weather.
All throughout my Christian life, whenever I've heard anybody preach about the Sea of Galilee, they always seem to find it necessary to mention how small this "sea" really is. After having heard that for years, I was almost expecting something about the size of a retention pond in the middle of somebody's neighborhood. But actually, it's fairly impressive in size - about seven miles wide, and eleven miles long. It reminds me a lot of the size and terrain of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, which I had the good fortune to stumble across during my travels last August. But still, for a lake this size, one might wonder how Jesus and his disciples could have encountered such an awful storm so unexpectedly. Well, we thankfully didn't get any examples of this today, but apparently when the weather gets bad around here, if a storm is coming up from the south the hills all act as a funnel, and a storm can pummel any boats in the middle of the lake with sudden ferocity. Jesus must have been pretty tired to be able to keep sleeping through a storm like that, but we all know what he did about it as soon as the disciples woke him up.
The first place we stopped along the shore was in the small village of Magdala. As you might expect, this was the village from which Mary Magdalene hailed. We visited a construction site of a house for pilgrims that's being built by a priest from Jerusalem. He had arranged for us to stop there so that we could get a rather exclusive look at an amazing discovery that they've made as they've been digging in the area. (As often happens around here, whenever somebody starts breaking ground for anything, they'll come across some kind of ancient structure.) What they uncovered here was, well, earth-shattering. Over this past year, they have slowly been unearthing a bona fide first century Jewish synagogue. Nothing like this has ever been found - in fact, Luke's description of a Sabbath day worship service in a synagogue is the only written record that we have of how things were done in synagogues of that era. Archaeologists have been discovering new things about this excavation almost daily, and none of it has been published yet. What I saw today is not yet visible for the general public, and so now I recount it as well as I can for all of you.
Based on coins and pottery and the like, this synagogue appears to have been operating between 20 and 70 AD, and it's been amazingly well preserved. Mosaic patterns in the floor are still easily recognizable, and paint colors on the walls still stand out. Three rows of benches line three of the walls, with a small stone altar in the center of the room. The altar is very ornately decorated - and this priest was eager to bring us there today because tomorrow the Israeli Antiquities Authority was going to be coming by to bring that altar to Jerusalem for more careful study. They're very excited about the altar, because it appears to have been designed to be a smaller replica of the altar in the main Temple in Jerusalem. But what truly makes this synagogue extremely significant for us as Christians is where it is and when it was being used.
We know from all the accounts of Jesus' life that he was a functioning rabbi, and that he went around teaching in synagogues. We also know that his main area of ministry for the first couple of years was throughout Galilee, with particular emphasis on the areas closest to the Sea of Galilee. Well, if this was a synagogue that was right on the coast, and it was open and flourishing in the 20s and 30s AD... you know what that must mean. The room in which I was sitting today, right on one of those same stone benches, was almost certainly a place in which Jesus of Nazareth preached. When you turn the clock a little bit forward from then, there are even more implications: During the 40s, 50s and 60s, Christianity was just getting started, and almost all Christians were Jews as well. Jewish Christians regularly met in synagogues to worship. Since the earliest Christians would certainly have been people who had known Jesus and seen him preach, a popular Jewish Christian community would have been right there in Magdala - and this synagogue would have been a place where they would meet (a fish carved into the floor of one of the side rooms confirms that supposition). So if Christians were meeting there and celebrating the breaking of the bread (that's the early term for what we now call "Mass"), that would mean that the stone altar we were looking at would be the oldest known altar on which Mass had ever been celebrated.
I've mentioned something like this here before, but the aspects of this pilgrimage that mean the most to me and are the most enduring in my memory are not places like the grottoes in the Church of the Nativity or the Basilica of the Annunciation, despite their extreme cosmic significance. I'm moved the most by places that bear some kind of resemblance to how things looked, sounded, smelled and felt so long ago. Today was one of those days. This was a place that was in the middle of being excavated - we were surrounded by dirt mounds, construction equipment and porta-potties. It hadn't been dressed up or fancied up in any way. I knew that everything I was seeing was in the exact state in which it had been found. What an incredible privilege it was to be allowed to walk into the synagogue itself, and to walk on the very same floor, and to sit down on the very same bench!
The priest who was giving us the tour led the group over to another area of the synagogue to explain more things, but all I could do was remain there on that bench, looking out upon the small worship space that these first century Jews had used. As I continued looking at the pillars and floors, I transported myself back in time, and I was still sitting there on that bench, but now surrounded by pious Jews on my left and on my right. People were showing up for a Sabbath day celebration, and among them was Jesus himself. He was greeting people in animated Aramaic, asking one person how their daughter was doing that he had healed the week before. His disciples were sitting along the back wall, and the worship service began. When it came time for a reading to be done, the chief rabbi pulled out a scroll, scanned the room, then saw Jesus. "Jeshua bar-Joseph!" he called. Then more Aramaic: Would he do the reading? I saw Jesus stand up, then he was handed the scroll. He unrolled it, took the pointer, and put it on the proper passage, then began reading...
... and then, less than two thousand years afterwards, that same spot on the bench that had been occupied by a pious Jew was now occupied by Bryan Johnson, a man from the suburbs of Chicago. And this man was still listening intently to everything this Jesus had to say, and seeking to live his life accordingly. Could this be for real?
Every place to which we have driven or walked in these last few days has been a similar experience for me, if not as intense. It seems like almost every place that has been pointed out to me had some kind of connection to where Jesus and his disciples walked and talked, preached and healed. At some we were able to stop and get out, but at others all we could do was drive by, since we'll get the chance to visit them in another day or two. One of the latter was the actual hill where Jesus had preached his Sermon on the Mount. Aside from the church at the top, the hill is completely unchanged, and it was easy to picture crowds gathering on the sides of the hill to listen to Jesus preach.
We had Mass at the Church of the Primacy of Peter, which was where Jesus asked Peter point blank, "Who do you say that I am?" Whenever I read that part of Matthew from now on, I'll be able to picture the beautiful setting that they had as they overlooked the Sea of Galilee. After Peter correctly responded to Jesus' question that hewas the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus told him that he would be given the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, and that he would be the Rock on which the Church would be built - that Peter would be the first Pope. Today those same keys are held by Benedict XVI, who could just easily be called Peter CCLXIV. Our Mass was held in an outdoor theatre, and all through the Mass I could see speedboats and waterskiers racing by. For the last three days now, we've had our own private Mass (celebrated by Mundelein priests for Mundelein seminarians) in very public settings, and in every case two or three bystanders have stopped in and joined us partway through the Mass. They haven't always spoken English, but they were Catholic and they knew precisely what was going on, and they came forward and received Communion alongside us, emphasizing the unity that all billion of us share around the world.
We stopped very briefly after that at the spot at which Jesus had multiplied the loaves and fishes for five thousand people. Since that figure of five thousand counted only the men, it would not be any exaggeration that there would have been around 18,000 or more men, women and children present - which was the bulk of the population of the surrounding region at that time. The unique thing about this particular site was that it was the earliest recorded devotional site that Christ's followers started reverencing - records for this one go as far back as 28 AD, which would put it at about a year after Jesus had died and risen. You can't get any more Category One than that!
Like all the other sites, there was a Byzantine church there that had been torn down by the Persians in the seventh century (interestingly enough, the Persians sought to destroy every single Christian site they could possibly find when they invaded... but they left Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity alone because they saw imagery of the Magi on the walls, and they were all dressed like Persians!). But unlike the others, nothing was built up in its place by the Crusaders. Instead, it laid in ruins for the next 1400 years, until an exact replica of the Byzantine church was constructed in the 1980s. We always hear so much talk about what an extreme minority the Christians are here in the Holy Land, and how it's continuing to dwindle. But if you need any proof that ultimately Christianity will never go away, it's things like this that say it all - for 1400 years, it was nothing but rubble, but now it's been built up again, and people are still coming to it from countries all around the world.
The other interesting that happened when we pulled up at that site was that there were three buses in the parking lot with signs saying that they were part of the Jeff Cavins tour of the Holy Land. I realized with a start that I know two of the people who were part of that tour group! Two of the women from the St. Irene's CCW, who have been so graciously sponsoring me over this past year, told me that they would be coming to the Holy Land in January with that group. We'd been planning on trying to meet up in Jerusalem when I get there next week, so imagine my surprise when our groups were crossing paths up here in Galilee. I found the priest who's leading the group and I asked him about the women from St. Irene's, and he said they were there, but he had no idea where because there were three buses' worth of people. I never did find them, but if we manage to meet up in Jerusalem I'm sure we'll have a good laugh over that. But for that to happen I'll have to be able to access the internet sometime soon. Might tonight be the night?
After the multiplication of the loaves site came something to which I'd been looking forward for a while - our boat ride out onto the Sea of Galilee! The museum at which we stopped before getting on the boat had inside it an actual first century boat that had been unearthed from the shores of the sea a few years ago. A fascinating video outlined the precarious process that had gone into picking it out of the mud without destroying it (2000-year-old wood doesn't exactly hold up very well). But looking at that boat gave us a better idea of what kind of vessels Jesus' disciples would have been using to fish, and what kind of little boat was being tossed about on the waves during the storm that whipped up on the lake.
Fortunately, the boat for the thirty of us was quite a bit newer and more sea-worthy, even if it had been designed to look more "ancient". As we pulled away from the dock, they raised an American flag on the main staff while "The Star Spangled Banner" played on the boat's loudspeakers. I guess it didn't matter to them that we had guys from Mexico, Columbia, Bolivia, Uganda, Tanzania and Poland with us as well. Today we were all Americans (well, that's what got us across the checkpoint from Palestine quickly the other day, too). I was disappointed that we didn't go very far - I had these ideas that we were going to literally cross the Sea of Galilee, where our bus would meet us on the other side. But all we did was head out a ways, then one of our guys gave a reflection about Jesus calming the storm, and then one of the boat's drivers showed us how to toss a net over the side of the boat to catch fish. None of us were able to catch anything that way... let's hope that as priests we'll be better "Fishers of Men".
Had we gone over to the other side of the lake, it would have been very advantageous, because that was indeed our next destination. During the time of Christ, the other side of the Sea of Galilee was known as the Decapolis - Gentile territory! We made the quick drive around to Gerasene, which was where Jesus had driven a legion of demons out of a possessed man. The demons didn't fare too well after that happened, because the first place they went (only with Jesus' permission, of course) was a herd of pigs, which promptly went racing down the slope and into the sea, where they all drowned. This obviously caused the locals great consternation, and so they kicked Jesus and his disciples out of the area. This was one of the few times that Jesus had ventured into Gentile territory.
The drive there was so short, it made me wonder why Jesus had to cross the lake in a boat in the first place - and it also explained why John's gospel has the crowds actually getting there ahead of him. In that case, walking really was faster than boating. When we rounded the northern part of the lake, we passed over the mighty and fabled Jordan River, which at that point was actually narrower than Big Rock Creek. All that was at the sight of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac was an old church in ruins. You guessed it - built by the Byzantines, destroyed by the Persians. I don't even need to read the information signs on these places anymore!
It had been a long day full of many adventures, and at that point it was finally time to head back to the western shore of the lake so that we could check into the Pilgerhaus, which is where we'll be staying for the next four nights. This place is luxurious, to say the least. It's full of suites that open up to the outside, where there are plenty of sidewalks surrounded by palm trees and well-manicured lawns. Combined with the balmy weather, it feels like some kind of paradise. This reminds me of the kind of place my parents would check me in to if we were all staying somewhere together... if I were traveling on my own there's no way I would stop at a place like this, since I'm usually looking for nothing but a bed and a shower.
Nevertheless, I think I'll be able to handle staying here for four nights just fine. As I sit here on the seashore gazing out upon the lights of boats in the middle and houses on the opposite shore, I am filled with peace. One might wonder why I'd want to ruin such stillness and calm by illuminating my face with a computer screen... but as I sit here knowing that I'm typing to all of my loved ones back home, I feel like you're all sitting here with me. And that truly makes this a joyful moment.
After we checked out from the Sisters of Nazareth convent this morning, we traveled eastward and downward until we hit the fabled Sea of Galilee. Like the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee is significantly below sea level - here, it clocks in at about 500 feet below. Unlike the Dead Sea, this is a freshwater lake, and it's a popular attraction for boaters, jet skiers, and swimmers. They were out in abundance today, taking advantage of the gorgeous weather.
All throughout my Christian life, whenever I've heard anybody preach about the Sea of Galilee, they always seem to find it necessary to mention how small this "sea" really is. After having heard that for years, I was almost expecting something about the size of a retention pond in the middle of somebody's neighborhood. But actually, it's fairly impressive in size - about seven miles wide, and eleven miles long. It reminds me a lot of the size and terrain of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, which I had the good fortune to stumble across during my travels last August. But still, for a lake this size, one might wonder how Jesus and his disciples could have encountered such an awful storm so unexpectedly. Well, we thankfully didn't get any examples of this today, but apparently when the weather gets bad around here, if a storm is coming up from the south the hills all act as a funnel, and a storm can pummel any boats in the middle of the lake with sudden ferocity. Jesus must have been pretty tired to be able to keep sleeping through a storm like that, but we all know what he did about it as soon as the disciples woke him up.
The first place we stopped along the shore was in the small village of Magdala. As you might expect, this was the village from which Mary Magdalene hailed. We visited a construction site of a house for pilgrims that's being built by a priest from Jerusalem. He had arranged for us to stop there so that we could get a rather exclusive look at an amazing discovery that they've made as they've been digging in the area. (As often happens around here, whenever somebody starts breaking ground for anything, they'll come across some kind of ancient structure.) What they uncovered here was, well, earth-shattering. Over this past year, they have slowly been unearthing a bona fide first century Jewish synagogue. Nothing like this has ever been found - in fact, Luke's description of a Sabbath day worship service in a synagogue is the only written record that we have of how things were done in synagogues of that era. Archaeologists have been discovering new things about this excavation almost daily, and none of it has been published yet. What I saw today is not yet visible for the general public, and so now I recount it as well as I can for all of you.
Based on coins and pottery and the like, this synagogue appears to have been operating between 20 and 70 AD, and it's been amazingly well preserved. Mosaic patterns in the floor are still easily recognizable, and paint colors on the walls still stand out. Three rows of benches line three of the walls, with a small stone altar in the center of the room. The altar is very ornately decorated - and this priest was eager to bring us there today because tomorrow the Israeli Antiquities Authority was going to be coming by to bring that altar to Jerusalem for more careful study. They're very excited about the altar, because it appears to have been designed to be a smaller replica of the altar in the main Temple in Jerusalem. But what truly makes this synagogue extremely significant for us as Christians is where it is and when it was being used.
We know from all the accounts of Jesus' life that he was a functioning rabbi, and that he went around teaching in synagogues. We also know that his main area of ministry for the first couple of years was throughout Galilee, with particular emphasis on the areas closest to the Sea of Galilee. Well, if this was a synagogue that was right on the coast, and it was open and flourishing in the 20s and 30s AD... you know what that must mean. The room in which I was sitting today, right on one of those same stone benches, was almost certainly a place in which Jesus of Nazareth preached. When you turn the clock a little bit forward from then, there are even more implications: During the 40s, 50s and 60s, Christianity was just getting started, and almost all Christians were Jews as well. Jewish Christians regularly met in synagogues to worship. Since the earliest Christians would certainly have been people who had known Jesus and seen him preach, a popular Jewish Christian community would have been right there in Magdala - and this synagogue would have been a place where they would meet (a fish carved into the floor of one of the side rooms confirms that supposition). So if Christians were meeting there and celebrating the breaking of the bread (that's the early term for what we now call "Mass"), that would mean that the stone altar we were looking at would be the oldest known altar on which Mass had ever been celebrated.
I've mentioned something like this here before, but the aspects of this pilgrimage that mean the most to me and are the most enduring in my memory are not places like the grottoes in the Church of the Nativity or the Basilica of the Annunciation, despite their extreme cosmic significance. I'm moved the most by places that bear some kind of resemblance to how things looked, sounded, smelled and felt so long ago. Today was one of those days. This was a place that was in the middle of being excavated - we were surrounded by dirt mounds, construction equipment and porta-potties. It hadn't been dressed up or fancied up in any way. I knew that everything I was seeing was in the exact state in which it had been found. What an incredible privilege it was to be allowed to walk into the synagogue itself, and to walk on the very same floor, and to sit down on the very same bench!
The priest who was giving us the tour led the group over to another area of the synagogue to explain more things, but all I could do was remain there on that bench, looking out upon the small worship space that these first century Jews had used. As I continued looking at the pillars and floors, I transported myself back in time, and I was still sitting there on that bench, but now surrounded by pious Jews on my left and on my right. People were showing up for a Sabbath day celebration, and among them was Jesus himself. He was greeting people in animated Aramaic, asking one person how their daughter was doing that he had healed the week before. His disciples were sitting along the back wall, and the worship service began. When it came time for a reading to be done, the chief rabbi pulled out a scroll, scanned the room, then saw Jesus. "Jeshua bar-Joseph!" he called. Then more Aramaic: Would he do the reading? I saw Jesus stand up, then he was handed the scroll. He unrolled it, took the pointer, and put it on the proper passage, then began reading...
... and then, less than two thousand years afterwards, that same spot on the bench that had been occupied by a pious Jew was now occupied by Bryan Johnson, a man from the suburbs of Chicago. And this man was still listening intently to everything this Jesus had to say, and seeking to live his life accordingly. Could this be for real?
Every place to which we have driven or walked in these last few days has been a similar experience for me, if not as intense. It seems like almost every place that has been pointed out to me had some kind of connection to where Jesus and his disciples walked and talked, preached and healed. At some we were able to stop and get out, but at others all we could do was drive by, since we'll get the chance to visit them in another day or two. One of the latter was the actual hill where Jesus had preached his Sermon on the Mount. Aside from the church at the top, the hill is completely unchanged, and it was easy to picture crowds gathering on the sides of the hill to listen to Jesus preach.
We had Mass at the Church of the Primacy of Peter, which was where Jesus asked Peter point blank, "Who do you say that I am?" Whenever I read that part of Matthew from now on, I'll be able to picture the beautiful setting that they had as they overlooked the Sea of Galilee. After Peter correctly responded to Jesus' question that hewas the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus told him that he would be given the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, and that he would be the Rock on which the Church would be built - that Peter would be the first Pope. Today those same keys are held by Benedict XVI, who could just easily be called Peter CCLXIV. Our Mass was held in an outdoor theatre, and all through the Mass I could see speedboats and waterskiers racing by. For the last three days now, we've had our own private Mass (celebrated by Mundelein priests for Mundelein seminarians) in very public settings, and in every case two or three bystanders have stopped in and joined us partway through the Mass. They haven't always spoken English, but they were Catholic and they knew precisely what was going on, and they came forward and received Communion alongside us, emphasizing the unity that all billion of us share around the world.
We stopped very briefly after that at the spot at which Jesus had multiplied the loaves and fishes for five thousand people. Since that figure of five thousand counted only the men, it would not be any exaggeration that there would have been around 18,000 or more men, women and children present - which was the bulk of the population of the surrounding region at that time. The unique thing about this particular site was that it was the earliest recorded devotional site that Christ's followers started reverencing - records for this one go as far back as 28 AD, which would put it at about a year after Jesus had died and risen. You can't get any more Category One than that!
Like all the other sites, there was a Byzantine church there that had been torn down by the Persians in the seventh century (interestingly enough, the Persians sought to destroy every single Christian site they could possibly find when they invaded... but they left Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity alone because they saw imagery of the Magi on the walls, and they were all dressed like Persians!). But unlike the others, nothing was built up in its place by the Crusaders. Instead, it laid in ruins for the next 1400 years, until an exact replica of the Byzantine church was constructed in the 1980s. We always hear so much talk about what an extreme minority the Christians are here in the Holy Land, and how it's continuing to dwindle. But if you need any proof that ultimately Christianity will never go away, it's things like this that say it all - for 1400 years, it was nothing but rubble, but now it's been built up again, and people are still coming to it from countries all around the world.
The other interesting that happened when we pulled up at that site was that there were three buses in the parking lot with signs saying that they were part of the Jeff Cavins tour of the Holy Land. I realized with a start that I know two of the people who were part of that tour group! Two of the women from the St. Irene's CCW, who have been so graciously sponsoring me over this past year, told me that they would be coming to the Holy Land in January with that group. We'd been planning on trying to meet up in Jerusalem when I get there next week, so imagine my surprise when our groups were crossing paths up here in Galilee. I found the priest who's leading the group and I asked him about the women from St. Irene's, and he said they were there, but he had no idea where because there were three buses' worth of people. I never did find them, but if we manage to meet up in Jerusalem I'm sure we'll have a good laugh over that. But for that to happen I'll have to be able to access the internet sometime soon. Might tonight be the night?
After the multiplication of the loaves site came something to which I'd been looking forward for a while - our boat ride out onto the Sea of Galilee! The museum at which we stopped before getting on the boat had inside it an actual first century boat that had been unearthed from the shores of the sea a few years ago. A fascinating video outlined the precarious process that had gone into picking it out of the mud without destroying it (2000-year-old wood doesn't exactly hold up very well). But looking at that boat gave us a better idea of what kind of vessels Jesus' disciples would have been using to fish, and what kind of little boat was being tossed about on the waves during the storm that whipped up on the lake.
Fortunately, the boat for the thirty of us was quite a bit newer and more sea-worthy, even if it had been designed to look more "ancient". As we pulled away from the dock, they raised an American flag on the main staff while "The Star Spangled Banner" played on the boat's loudspeakers. I guess it didn't matter to them that we had guys from Mexico, Columbia, Bolivia, Uganda, Tanzania and Poland with us as well. Today we were all Americans (well, that's what got us across the checkpoint from Palestine quickly the other day, too). I was disappointed that we didn't go very far - I had these ideas that we were going to literally cross the Sea of Galilee, where our bus would meet us on the other side. But all we did was head out a ways, then one of our guys gave a reflection about Jesus calming the storm, and then one of the boat's drivers showed us how to toss a net over the side of the boat to catch fish. None of us were able to catch anything that way... let's hope that as priests we'll be better "Fishers of Men".
Had we gone over to the other side of the lake, it would have been very advantageous, because that was indeed our next destination. During the time of Christ, the other side of the Sea of Galilee was known as the Decapolis - Gentile territory! We made the quick drive around to Gerasene, which was where Jesus had driven a legion of demons out of a possessed man. The demons didn't fare too well after that happened, because the first place they went (only with Jesus' permission, of course) was a herd of pigs, which promptly went racing down the slope and into the sea, where they all drowned. This obviously caused the locals great consternation, and so they kicked Jesus and his disciples out of the area. This was one of the few times that Jesus had ventured into Gentile territory.
The drive there was so short, it made me wonder why Jesus had to cross the lake in a boat in the first place - and it also explained why John's gospel has the crowds actually getting there ahead of him. In that case, walking really was faster than boating. When we rounded the northern part of the lake, we passed over the mighty and fabled Jordan River, which at that point was actually narrower than Big Rock Creek. All that was at the sight of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac was an old church in ruins. You guessed it - built by the Byzantines, destroyed by the Persians. I don't even need to read the information signs on these places anymore!
It had been a long day full of many adventures, and at that point it was finally time to head back to the western shore of the lake so that we could check into the Pilgerhaus, which is where we'll be staying for the next four nights. This place is luxurious, to say the least. It's full of suites that open up to the outside, where there are plenty of sidewalks surrounded by palm trees and well-manicured lawns. Combined with the balmy weather, it feels like some kind of paradise. This reminds me of the kind of place my parents would check me in to if we were all staying somewhere together... if I were traveling on my own there's no way I would stop at a place like this, since I'm usually looking for nothing but a bed and a shower.
Nevertheless, I think I'll be able to handle staying here for four nights just fine. As I sit here on the seashore gazing out upon the lights of boats in the middle and houses on the opposite shore, I am filled with peace. One might wonder why I'd want to ruin such stillness and calm by illuminating my face with a computer screen... but as I sit here knowing that I'm typing to all of my loved ones back home, I feel like you're all sitting here with me. And that truly makes this a joyful moment.