Moon Over Manger Square

Friday morning came, and we were just too pooped to pick. Denise seemed to be coming down with a cold and we both had stomachs that were ready to rumble. We slept in a little, and feeling better by the early afternoon, spent the rest of the day wandering around Bethlehem.

We visited the Church of the Nativity, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, and must have gotten there just in time, because as we were coming out, there was such a line to pass through the small Door of Humility, that as Denise was trying to capture a picture of me coming out, the anxious tourists pushing to get in told us to "hurry up". That's the spirit.

Through this trip, we've come to realize that we make good travel partners because we both have pretty high tolerance levels for the ridiculous. In fact, we often respond with fits of laughter. I've lost track of how many ATMs we've had to hunt down before we found one that took MasterCard, dispensed dollars, and was working (and even then it ran out of money after we used it), how many chargers, batteries, memory and sim cards for cell phones, cameras, laptops we've coordinated, along with cell phone service that seems to change as one crosses borders and checkpoints, and how many setbacks and missing "details" we discovered and kept ticking.

Seems like this is part of the Palestinian way of life though -- there is so much that one has to deal with on a daily basis, that even not so little things get automatically absorbed by thoroughly cultivated patience and endurance for hardship.

I like this picture because for me it represents a few things coming together: our escaping group guidedness for a leisurely afternoon in Bethlehem (feeling ok about taking a break when one needs one), me finally figuring out how to use the night setting on the camera to capture the moon (after many unsuccessful attempts to document the moon over Brooklyn), and remembering the sensation of knowing I was standing in an incredibly historic location when I told Hiba, who met us shortly after I took this, "yeah, we're in Manger Square, near the Church of the Nativity, see you soon".