oh i just can't wait to be king!

so, this friday after class my friends from the ulpan Sarah and Alexis and I packed into a car with our kibbutz friends Mike and Leslie and we drove to Cesarea.
(Sarah and Leslie at the entrence to the ruins)

look how pretty!

Cesarea is a rich people town, but also is home to these freaking awesome ancient ruins. you know how much i love history stuffs, so this was right up my ally. i loved it.

(this is mike in the pantheon- the roman amphitheter)

apparently, in something BCE, King Herod of persia built this really cool city about half way from the top of israel to the bottom. its on the sea, and its a beautiful beach. he built a deep water port with techniques very advanced for the time. then he died, and it got taken over moreso by the romans, and then there was a war and christians took it over, and there were a bunch of jews, and then muslims, and all this stuff happened. this is sarah on this wire horse drawn chariot. it was to show where they used to chariot race, and then they changed it to satisfy the 'blood thirsty spectators' and turned it into where slaves faught lions and aligators and other killer animals. crazy.

there was a gorgeous roman temple that was torn down to build a beautiful christian church that was torn down to build a beautiful mosq which was destroyed by earthquakes.

basically its a really old city that is now in ruins on a really beautiful beach.

we were there for a while but it got really hot so we went to this nice little town called tzikron yitzhak (remember isaac) named after a rothschild family member. mike knew all this stuff and told us all about everything. it was really cool. the rothschild family were like the first big bankers in europe so the were really rich and they used to buy a lot of land in israel for the zionist movement. so there are a lot of towns with people names, and they are all in memory of a rothschild family member.

the rothschild family apparently bought a large plot of land and paid to have people brought to live there. the people wanted to make wine, so the rothschilds paid their living expenses while they grew the grapes and tried to make wine, but it came out really gross and completely bombed, so the rothschild family paid to bring in people to teach them how to make good wine as well as paid their living expenses, for a few more years, until the carmel winery took off. now it makes good wine and does really well. isnt that a nice story? i think so.

today was shabbat, so i woke up at noon and went to the pool for several hours. now im here and then im gonna go to dinner, and there is a free movie on the kibbutz. its a really nice theatre actually, and the movie is State Of Play, which i wanted to see in the states but never got around to it, so im excited.