Ryan and Meaghan are married!

My brother Ryan recently got married to Meaghan - congratulations! The wedding was a series of performances by friends and family, interspersed with comic relief provided by Meaghan's older brother Shane and I, who acted as the MCs. Strangely I don't have any pictures of Ryan or Meaghan (I took a few, but they didn't turn out), but I do have some pictures of my cousins. This is my cousin Ellen, who has boundless energy for dancing despite her young age.

Cody, Eric and Kyle rockin' out.




Here's Shane and I dressed up as our MC characters, Ronnie Thrash and Rebel Rick the Rocker.

All the best to everyone out there,

Corey.

Alive and well in Edmonton

We are happily settled in Edmonton and the Oilers are on their way to the Stanley Cup finals. It should be crazy up here for the next month.

Do you want to know what the strangest thing about Edmonton is? It's the graffiti. Edmonton does not have "normal" spray painted walls, instead they use stencils and have images of people like Darth Vader and Ralph Klein's graduation picture. They are everywhere, in small 6"x6" squares.

If anyone still looks at this, I am slowly posting our pictures to http://www.flickr.com/photos/82321623@N00/ or by searching on Flickr for alberta_corey

That's it for now.

Flying home

Sadly, our journey has come to an end (but we promise to fix the blog up and put some different pictures on once we get home). The last 4 days we have spent on the Sea of Galilea - it was fantastic! On our way we stopped at this really cool Roman Fort from the 1200's called Montfort or Starkenburg (Strong mountain). It was a steep hike back to the car afterwards as we hiked down into the valley. Yesterday we biked for 60 km around the entire sea (well, it is really more of a lake). An interesting and tireing experience.

See you all soon.

This is the city wall of the prison-city Akka.














This is me and Alberta in an old inn in Akka.















This is a view of the Shrine of the Bab on Mt. Carmel in Haifa from the 11th terrace as the sun is starting to go down.

Last Day of Pilgrimage

Well, today is the last day of pilgrimage, which is quite sad. We've really enjoyed it here and made a lot of good friends, as well as meeting up with a couple of old friends. I had a fever for a couple of days, but it was when we had some spare time, so thankfully I didn't miss anything. The weather here is nice of course, in fact it's almost too hot for me sometimes. Our pilgrimage group included a young lady named Sothie that I met in India 9 years ago. Now we're both old and married. Her mother joined the four of us in going to various places around Haifa on a couple different occasions, including the cable car going up the mountain, the lower cave of Elijah and the Baha'i cemetary. Our pilgrim guide was a very kind lady of German background named Ursula. She has more stories and knowledge in her mind than anybody I've ever met. She always says: "And after that, if we have time, I'll tell you a few more stories." We spent part of another free day in the ancient prison-city Akka, where we saw the old gates to the city (both land and sea), and the Turkish baths. Akka is certainly a beautiful place for a prison, but at the same time it's easy to imagine how it might have been an unpleasant place to be confined.

Israel

Israel is absolutely beautiful. We arrived at 3am and hung out in the airport for a while before finding a hostel to leave our luggage for the day. After that we walked up over a hill,and there right in front of us was the beach. It was +25 that day so we hung out at the beach for a while and then walked to a museum, which was over 2km away. We were too tired to really enjoy the museum, but we will have some additional time in Tel Aviv before heading home.

Now we have been staying in Haifa for the last 3 nights and our days have been filled with Bahai activities as we are here on pilgrimage. Anyway, this cafe closes right now, so I have to go. We have not taken any pictures yet, public transportation and the general mood here feels safe.

Cheers

Scotland

This is Ancrum Craig, a beautiful B&B that we stayed at for two nights. It's in the Scottish countryside northwest of Jedborough.













This is Melrose Abbey, probably the most beautiful abbey of the three we saw. Robert the Bruce's heart is buried here.

Berlin

We have been very lucky with the weather for this entire trip, and this was true in Berlin as well. We stayed with our friends Anne and Nicci, and another of their friends from Canada (Thushari, who was visiting for the week as well). They showed us around their amazing city and were fabulous hosts. There is so much to see and do in Berlin, we did not even scratch the surface during our 3 days. We saw where the Berlin Wall used to be, the amazing German Parliament building, shopping centers, people and general big city life. Buildings that are architecturally beautiful are on every corner of Berlin, but the most amazing one is the German Reichstag. After East and West Germany united, the parliament was moved to Berlin, but the old parliament building desperately needed to be renovated, and this is the design that stuck.

On the Saturday night we went out with some of my friends from University (one of them a Canadian, another a German, but both studied German at U of C with me and are now living in Germany). It was really cool to see so many familiar people in one place and so the people were probably the highlight of our time in Berlin.

At the moment, we are in a Youth Hostel in Tel Aviv, the weather is beautiful, it is 20 degrees right now at 9:30 in the morning! Why didn’t I bring any shorts!! Curses…
It is time to go explore Tel Aviv now, but we should be able to update more often from here as we will have internet access from our Guest House.
(just to be clear, we went to Berlin and THEN to Newcastle, Scotland, Newcastle, London, 7 hour layover in the Budapest airport, Tel Aviv at 3am the computer kicked out just before Corey could post a blog on our time in the UK, so more on that and pictures later)