Almost Lalibella

One of the most popular tourist stops in Ethiopia is Lalibella.  It is famous for it's rock-hewn churches that have been dug into the ground.  Many of them are carved deep down in the rock in intricate cross shapes, and they are hundreds of years old, most dating back to before 1000 A.D.  It's a fascinating place to go.  But with two small girls by myself, it was not manageable for me. 

However, my friend Koleta knew of an old rock hewn church not far from Addis.  So we drove out to it on that Sunday afternoon drive yesterday!  It wasn't as elaborate as the churches in Lalibella, but it was an awesome experience!  And I'm so thankful to have gotten a little taste of this part of Ethiopian culture and history!




Inside the red curtains is the "holy of holies", only the priests can enter.


Kiryn thought she discovered this tunnel. : ) 


Here, Kiryn is expressing, "Mom! I wanted ONLY GIRLS in this picture!"

And, now we're happy again.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Commonplace Essays with Writing & Rhetoric

It bears repeating.  The Writing & Rhetoric series by Classical Academic Press is really amazing.  My 5th and 6th graders are in Ch. 5 of the sixth book. They are learning to write commonplace essays, which are six paragraph essays refuting bad character traits.  They wrote their first essay this week.  We were behind schedule, and weren't going to finish for class. I was fine with that and wasn't rushing them, but they both wanted to finish their essays for class so badly they stayed up late Thursday night in order to finish it. This is their first attempt at a commonplace essay. I was SO pleased with the results. They had minimal help with these! :) (These were typed as they were written. Any mistakes are not typos, but the kids' grammar and spelling errors.) :) Against Boasters by Kiryn Preedy (10 years old) Boasters cover up weakness by puffing up their deeds and can cause real harm. When boasters exaggerate things they have done, they don’t kno...
Read more

The Trivium: Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric

Image
Last spring,  I went to the Great Homeschool Convention in Fort Worth, TX with a big question. For a couple of years, I had been studying the liberal arts on my own. I'd read pretty widely and thought I understood the first three arts, the trivium.  As I began to try to understand the quadrivium, I had read The Liberal Arts Tradition by Clark and Jain, as well as Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott. I still didn't even begin to understand what the quadrivium was about. I went to the conference ready to ask people for their thoughts on how to teach the quadrivium. I left pretty unsatisfied. I got varying answers from "teach sol-fa for music" to "let them take a drafting class" to "teach them what home means."  I knew I would not make any progress at this point without a guide.   A few weeks later, I heard that a new class was being offered by the CiRCE Institute. It would be The Atrium with Andrew Kern on the seven liber...
Read more

Picking Up Meryn!

Image
We made it to Ethiopia after a long day of travel!  We had a morning flight to Delhi, then a 15 hour layover, so we got to spend the day with some good friends in Delhi for the day.  We even got to sleep a few hours before going to the airport at midnight.  We had a very smooth process getting checked in and to our gate.  Kiryn was an amazing travel companion. I'm so thankful to have her with me. We left at 3 a.m. from Delhi, arrived a bit late in Addis, but had no line for a visa or immigration, got some money from the ATM, got our bags straight off the belt and found our driver outside.  Certainly, mercies from the Lord to make everything so easy. I'm not used to traveling alone... We got checked into the hotel, and hurriedly got a little unpacked, showered and changed, and I made all the 25 or so Thank You cards with tip gifts for the nannies to take to the care center. I got all of our gifts together for Meryn's nanny, Aynalem.  As soon as we went ...
Read more