Bahai Gardens Recap

As per Amy's request, I'm going to keep my posts shorter and more frequent (hopefully!). So, to continue on my quest to recap the past couple of weeks, I'm moving on to my trip to Haifa with my friends Keenan, Josh, and Talia. This was early February, before the Eilat trip, but the day we chose to go up proved to be perfect weather. We went up on Thursday and Talia and I stayed with two of her friends at Haifa university (in the Talia dorms! =) ). We got up really early the next morning to get to the bottom half of the gardens early enough to see the Temple and the Shrine of the Bab, one of the leaders of the Bahai religion. The gardens were nothing like I'd seen before. They were absolutely exquisite, with an array of flowers, cacti, and trees. The Shrine itself was beautiful, although we were only allowed into one of the rooms. Going into the garden, I didn't know much at all about the Bahai religion, but I soon learned on the later portion of our tour that there were Bahai all over the world and that it stemmed from Islam but was originated in Iran (Persia) so all of the sacred texts and writings of the Bab were written in Farsi. In order to tour the part of the garden that ran down the mountain, we had to walk up a really long and steep hill. Along the way we came across a sculpture garden with sculptures of women and children at play. I don't know who the artist is or what the inspiration was but it was a nice place to relax and wander around, and all of the sculptures were beautiful. We continued along our way and stopped off once more before reaching the top of the gardens to look at some sculptures in the walkway of someone's house. They were all metal sculptures, some with Hebrew written on them. Although I didn't know what most of them said (according to Josh's cousin who was with us, there was something going on with a play on words in Hebrew) they were beautiful works of art.
The walk down the garden was tiring but definitely worth it. There are over 900 steps and 7 tiers to walk down until you once again reach the Temple and shrine where we started earlier that morning. There are 7 additional tiers below the Temple. During pilgrimage, the Bahai walk all the way from the top of the gardens, past the temple, to the bottom by the port. Our tourguide told us more about the Bahai as we made our way down, pointing out the long rectangular building with a teal/seafoam green room as the archives, where all of the texts are kept and translated into 100s of different languages, and one other round building with the same color roof of which I forget the purpose.
The trip to Haifa was a nice getaway, but it made me realize how much I enjoy living in Jerusalem. There is a much smaller international population (american) at Haifa University, and it is much further away from everything else that is going on. Granted, it is beautiful up there and closer to other places in Israel I want to visit, but I am quite content where I am.
Here's a slideshow of a few of the pictures I took at Haifa (I took over 150 in total). If you want to see all of them, and all of the pictures I've taken so far, feel free: http://picasaweb.google.com/reezespiezes