We're Back!

For 27 days in January, we wrote new blog posts every single day. If the reader has seen any world news at all since then, he will understand why we were interrupted. We took a little break from blogging when the internet was turned off for a week. Then things got a little warm for foreigners here, so we took a little trip. Lets call it a Home-School-History-Class Field Trip, just for fun. The city in which we live has been a city for thousands of years. But it wasn't the only city back in those early days of citification. We visited some sites in a nearby country that have also been around a long, long time. Lee Anna has read a good bit about Ancient Rome in her first grade material, so she was pretty excited to see a real-live Roman city up close and personal. These Roman ruins were just a half-hour's drive from where we stayed. In the picture below, we're in a cool little amphitheater that probably seated 2500 or so. We're sitting there on 2000-year-old seats, watching a couple of Arab guys playing Scottish bagpipes. These Arab Scotsmen were playing some traditional Arab-Scottish tunes like "Amazing Grace" and "Yankee Doodle." No, we don't really understand all that, either, but it sounded pretty cool.

The hippodrome below was the home of Roman chariot races, back in the day. Lee Anna and Sawyer ran around it, but they didn't have chariots. So they got tired.

This is a big arch. I think I read that it was built to honor the Emporer Hadrean when he came for a visit. Wow.

The rest of the photos are from the citadel in the city. They've had some sort of fortress on this hill since before King David was a shepherd boy. Lee Anna and Sawyer loved climbing on the old rocks...

...but Little Sister was not to be outdone.

These are some really big columns. You can see a section of a column on the ground in the foreground of this picture. Lee Anna wanted to know why they don't just put them all back up! I'm not sure modern machinery is strong enough for that.

In the background of this picture one can see our "city of refuge." The buildings are almost all made of white stone, and it's built on a bunch of hills. It was a pretty place to hang out for a few weeks.

At the citadel, there's a small museum. In the small museum, we stumbled upon some parts of the the Dead Sea Scrolls! Lee Anna had read about them in her school books this past fall, and when she saw them she said, "They found those the year G.G. turned 2!" That was how her Mama had put into perspective how recently these old, old Scripture texts were discovered.

The twins sitting with the fingers of Hercules:

And this is our favorite. You'll have to click on the picture to see what's happening here. Go ahead, click on it, then come back. Okay, what you're seeing is Sarah Claire sitting on a bench, listening to some more Arab Scotsmen playing bagpipes. The rest of us walked to the other end of this big courtard, but SC just sat there and watched. We called to her repeatedly, but she didn't budge. We're 75 yards away, and she's just mesmerized. Maybe she was trying to figure out why these guys in a medieval Arab palace were playing American music on Scottish instruments.

Hopefully, current events will allow us to continue blogging again, though we probably won't make every day!