Nazareth

Then we went to Nazareth where George showed us two churches of the Annunciation. It is interesting to see the discrepancies that exists even among Christians. The first one we saw was a Greek Orthodox church. It is actually built over the well where Mary would have gone to gather water for her household. There were many people there gathering the water from the spring in water bottles. George said there is no way you'd want to drink it, but the pilgrims take it home with them as a holy relic.



After that we went up (again, literally) to the modern Church of the Annunciation. Since there is no way of knowing for sure where it happened both religions lay claim to their sites. This Church of the Annunciation was very plain on the inside bottom level, but the top level (where I assume mass would be held) there were pictures donated by many countries depicting Mary. I saw another Charles Madden sculpture. It was really neat to be able to identify an artist here. This was one of my favorite (visually) sites. All of the artwork was really interesting, and it was fascinating to see that each country depicted Mary as looking like she was from their country. A bit ego-centric, but Americans certainly aren't exempt from that silliness either.

In alphabetical order here are a few pictures that we took of the mosaics of Mary found out side the Catholic Church of the Annunciation.
China
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Honduras
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Nazareth (this is my favorite depiction, ever. Someday, when I have time and I've finished updating this blog, I'm going to turn her into a cross-stitch pattern and sew it. It will be stunning, in my not so humble opinion.)











Thailand
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Vietnam
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