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After catching a little rest and learning about life on Anti-Paros, we headed back across the Mediterranean, stopping at one or two other islands on our way back to Israel. According to our original plan, Edward, having the better camera, was supposed to give me copies of the pictures he'd taken on our trip. Unfortunately, he didn't come through on it and left me practically without any pictures of Greece. I managed to take a few pictures later on while passing through the Greek islands during my ferry boat trip home from Israel to Piraeus, Greece. I used a cheap 110 pocket camera that I bought in Cairo for twenty five dollars. Even though I'd smashed it and broke the plastic casing on it while riding on a horse in the moon light one evening, it still seemed to take halfway decent pictures. Running an Arabian horse full speed through the desert, around the Great Pyramid of Giza, was a little too much for it. To keep it from flying into the sand, I'd put it in my back pocked where it took some pretty hard blows from the saddle...

In retrospect, I'd made my voyage to Egypt to closely look at the inside and outside of the Great Pyramid of Giza that's spoken of in the bible, most notably in the book of Isaiah. I was also able to stay with some Egyptian Christians while I was there and learn a lot about Egyptian culture. On my second side trip out of Israel, I made it to most of the places where the apostle Paul had visited and spread the Gospel on his three missionary journeys into Greece. To my surprise, I could find no protestant Christians in Greece, only those of the Greek orthodox persuasion which closely resembles Catholicism and one Jewish synagogue. On our way out of the Greek islands, Edward and myself got back on the Ferry boat line to ride on one of the largest and nicest ones in the Mediterranean at that time, the "Paloma" which was on its way to Haifa, Israel.

Once we docked at Haifa, the port we originally left Israel from, we bussed it back to New Jerusalem. After walking with Edward to make a couple of phone calls, down Ben Yahuda street which is a trendy outdoor restaurant hangout for locals as well as tourists, we parted company to go about our separate ways. I called him afterwords a couple of times, trying to get some pictures from him; that was my last exchange with him.

Through various interactions with people along my travels, I was introduced to the president of Bethlehem Bible College in Bethlehem. He'd been helping some Palestinian students and arranged for me to rent a second story flat with two of them in a West Bank village, called Beit Sahour. The rental flat was right across the road from "The Shepard's Field," which is believed by the local population to be where the Magi's bearing their gifts visited Joseph and Mary. It was just a mile or two south east of Bethlehem, and the last place I rented in Israel before bringing my journey to the Middle East to a close. It was also where I learned a great deal about the living conditions of the Palestinians, baptist Palestinians in particular.

This time, to help pay for some of my rent, I did some painting for Bishara, the college president, at his home. His house had decorative wrought iron windows that he wanted painted along with a couple of door frames. A professional painter named Romeo had been doing most of the work until I came along to help out. The windows were a scroll design with a lot of curves and angles to paint. Romeo was good at it and there was no way I could keep up with him. I liked the design of the windows. It's where I got the idea for the header on my blog.

Another thing I did for Bishara was help transport people from the airport in Telaviv to Biet Sahour. I rode in a van owned by the college with one of the students in my flat named Hader, who did the driving. My job was to give Hader some support and keep foreign passengers comfortable. After a few days of transporting people, Bishara let us use the van one evening to go and visit Hader's younger cousin in the Old City, the original Jerusalem. Unable to afford an expensive rental car, I felt privileged to have free access to a van and be able to go where we wanted to go. It gave me a sense of what it's like to belong to the community instead of being an outsider, riding in buses and cabs...