Religious Education

Hold onto your hats.  Isobel is blogging two days in a row!!

Today we went to St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery at Florence.  The monastery is named after St. Anthony the Great, a renowned third century ascetic from Egypt. About 40 monks and novices follow a regimen of prayer and work there.

There is a main church and a number of chapels, all done in in the ornate style of their churches.  We women are required to wear a long skirt (ugly ones provided) , head scarves, shoes (no sandals) and long sleeves.  The men just have to have long sleeves. 

The sanctuaries are very ornate with lots of gold and hand carvings and also pictures of the saints.  It is very different from the Protestant churches that I am familiar with.

 

 

 

This chapel had incredible woodwork.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The gardens were quite beautiful with fountains and lots of desert plants.





 

 





 



I learned that the cross is like this to show the sign above Jesus' head at the top and the part at the bottom indicates that of the thieves crucified on each side of Jesus, one went to Heaven and one to Hell and the tipped part indicates that.

 

 

 

 

There was a little store by the gate where you could buy religious books and also some of the monastery's produce such as wine and olive oil.  There was also some fresh baking but it wasn't clear if the monks made that as well. (I didn't see any sign of a bakery.) Even the store was run by a monk.  The only woman, other than visitors, that we saw was the one giving out the ugly skirts and scarves - oh and ugly shirts too if you had bare arms. You can see some pictures of women in the above pictures.  I won't tell you which one is me.  Dalton has a wonderful full length picture of me that I definitely won't share. 

 

 

It was an interesting experience of another church culture.

Keeping Active

The spirit has once again moved me to to blog so here is some of the news.

Our daughter and her family were here so we did quite a bit of touring around the area.  After all you have to keep a four year old and her mother active!  The weather was perfect the whole week.  Just over 20C.

We went to the Wildlife World first.  It was lots of fun with a boat ride, a train ride, a chair lift ride - not to mention many  animals to see.  We enjoyed feeding the giraffes.  Who knew Beth loves giraffes?!

And then there were ostriches and meercats:

 

As well as tortoises:

 

 

Next we went to the Children's Museum in Phoenix.  Sarah had a wonderful time doing all the activities.

Then we went to the Renaissance Festival again but with a child-friendly focus.  It was a good day and we found some neat rides for Sarah. 

Most of ther pictures we took had Sarah in them and I don't want to post them here.  If you know Beth, check out her Facebook.

We tried to go to an amusement park but despite its website (open every day!), it turned out to be closed, so we went to the Phoenix Zoo and it turned out that maybe it was a better place to go.  There were tons of neat animals.

 

 

We also went to Arizona Mills which is a huge outlet store mall.  You don't need to see the stores but they did have an aquarium that was enjoyed.

 

 

 

 

 



Since then, I have been to the Arizona quilt Guild Show with Dee from Airdrie.  It was quite large with a few  more vendors than our Saskatoon show but the number of  entrants in the competition wasn't much different.  It was held at the Mesa Convention Center.  We arrived about an hour after it opened in the morning and had to park in an overflow lot some distance away.  Need I say that there were a lot of people there?  We didn't buy much since the fabric was pricier than at our local stores.  We enjoyed seeing what the area quilters were doing though. Here are a few examples:

Today I quilted on the longarm quilt machine for the second time.  Dee recorded the moment.

 

 

We will be leaving here on April 1 and plan to come home up the western states and into the Lower Mainland until the weather gets better.  We hope that is before July!!  Get those hair dryers out and get that snow melted!!!