Israel Day 7: 23 Nov Sunday

Day 7 began with breakfast at the hotel, then we had a little service and took communion together at one of the smaller meeting rooms in the hotel. We then set off for one of the Ahava stores at the Dead Sea. We stayed there for about an hour and I felt so pressured into buying stuff. There were just too many things to look at and at the end of the whole shopping "event", I felt that the 1 hour given was not enough time so I ended up doing impulsive shopping, which did not make me feel very good, happy or satisfied about spending so much money.

Our next stop was Masada. It is sad to hear and see that the Dead Sea is slowly drying up and what used to be 1 big Sea has now split into the upper and lower parts, if you can figure it out from the photo below.

Masada was amazing. What an engineering feat in that kind of arid desert environment. If you look carefully at the photo below, you will see towards the upper left corner 2 rectangles that have a black portion at the top. Those are actually seats. At nights, they have laser/light shows that are projected onto the steep rock faces opposite.
One of the other amazing things was the bath house, below. People of the olden times were really ingenious in using what they had to do things we so easily do with electricity and advancement of technology today. They used natural resources like concrete, tiles, marble, columns, very natural things. I agree with Eugene when he says that the people of the olden times were a lot more ingenious and innovative than us people today.
This is the view of the cable car going down from the top of Masada. We were waiting for the next cable car to take us down.
When we were back at the bottom, we were all so hungry. And Eugene kept us entertained with his antics...

We rushed over to Qumran for a cafeteria lunch (which I found MOST delicious because I was REEAAALLLY hungry) before Eli took us on a walking tour of what was excavated. He also pointed out to us the caves in which the dead sea scrolls were stored and subsequently discovered.
By the end of the day, it was very windy and drizzling a bit. We went back, tired. But it was a good day out. After dinner, Eugene and I ventured out to the newer shopping cinema complex near our hotel with Beatrice, Livia and Estee. It was full of young people and eateries and it was really mainly a cinema complex as it had few shops to shop at.

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