Mini Israel

Israel is a place of profound contradictions, with realities bordering on the absurd. Jewish pioneers hired local Palestinian laborers to work the kibbutzim; Christian monks fighting each other with brooms over allotted areas in the Holy Sepulcher; Yassir Arafat claiming that Netanyahu wanted to open the Western Wall tunnels in order to make the temple mount collapse. And, with no other discernible purpose than to encapsulate the strangeness of this place, some visionary entrepreneur decided to create Mini Israel.
Yes, Mini Israel, where you too can see 350 (yes, three hundred fifty) of this land's greatest sites built on a scale of 1:25 in the space of eight acres.

Perhaps more absurd is that I walked a mile along a highway to get to this place. In any case, I devoted an entire album on Facebook to this miniature monstrosity, but I had to take a blog entry to show you some of the mini-highlights.
Above is Mini Masada. This gem at the center of the park comes complete with both Jewish defenders warding off the Roman legions and a film crew, capturing the slaughter in Hi Def. Is there a mini-film in the making? How does that work on the big screen? I await with bated breath.
Believe it or not, it's a Mini St. George's! This is the place I'm staying, although I have yet to get up on the roof like these intrepid explorers.
The Mini Damascus Gate, the northern gate of the Old City where I now routinely enter the winding cobbled streets. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the model fails to portray the absolute bustle of the Damascus Gate area, being the core gate of the Muslim Quarter. Booths, stalls, and itinerant merchants make the outer plaza barely navigable; and just today, I found here for the first time in my life a pleasant young man working as a Muslim street evangelist.
Here is the Mini Western Wall, with Mini Al-Aqsa in the background atop the mount. The best part about Mini Israel is the moving pieces- the taxing planes at Mini Ben Gurion, the soccer players scoring goals at Mini Teddy Stadium, the boats floating about in the Mini Sea of Galilee. Here at the Western Wall, we get the particular joy of watching Mini Jews bobbing back and forth as they pray! If it wasn't a Jewish institution, I'd cry foul.
And at last, the Mini Dome of the Rock, atop the Mini Temple Mount with Mini Al-Aqsa in the foreground, and the Mini Jerusalem Archaeological Park below.

And there you have it, folks. Mini Israel. Highly recommended.