Israel day 15 - to Caesarea

Most importantly to report, Julie is fine.

Last night we left with a nice sunset, which marked the end of Memorial day, 

to walk quite a way to try to find somewhere to eat. It was the start of Independence Day, (the 65^th  Israel has celebrated), so many places were closed.  We finally found one, then a subset of the group walked the streets towards the centre Rabin square where many roads were closed and most of Tel Aviv appeared to be out celebrating in the streets.  There were kids everywhere spraying large cans of white foam over themselves, buildings and cars, including this police car with the policeman happy to watch on. 

Sellers of brightly lighted sun glasses, ear rings, rings and blow up hammers and axes festooned with the Israeli flag were doing very well. Here is the psychiatrist of our group not treating his wife nicely:

Fireworks every half hour broke out somewhere and vans blaring loud music cruised around.  We spent a little time in the square where a concert was taking place, then most of us decided to walk back, getting to the hotel around 11.15pm.

Today there were no studies, and the group left at 9.30am to travel back up north to Caesarea, a town on the sea established by Herod. It was very windy up there but no rain. We stopped first at a well preserved Byzantine mosaic floor (this is a miniscule part of the overall):

 Then drove to the ancient remains.  Second stop was a large aqueduct which runs for 9kms and has a drop of just 9 centimetres. How did the ancient engineers achieve this? 

We saw a brief film of the history of Caesarea then walked past the theatre which has been restored so that it is in use today, then to the remains of Herod’s palace (this guy was as egomanic as any leader in history we think) built over the rocks and into the sea, the large hippodrome and public bathhouses. A fun part of this tour was trying to photograph the many Israeli airforce planes which cruised south down the coast in formations every 5 minutes or so for Independence Day:

Then to the Byzantine part which featured more mosaics, then to a very well preserved Crusader walled fort. 

This is our kind of ruins:
Our bus driver found a place to eat which was actually open then back in the bus to the hotel for the afternoon off – well deserved bath for Julie and some major league baseball for Mal.

We are off to dinner at 7.40pm tonight to a nice restaurant, then hopefully an earlyish night with no speakers, no walking and no surprise visits somewhere!