Tuesday, November 1, 2011

October 26, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
October 26, 2011

Our cultural excursion this month took us to the Mennonite Tabernacle Museum in Lancaster, PA, with our CES director, Brother Muldowney. The Mennonite Tabernacle Museum has a full size mock-up of the Israelite inner sanctuary and other interesting recreations of the portable temple. We were asked not to photograph the inside of the building so I clipped the image of the motorized high priest and Ark of the Covenant from their internet brochure.

The rolling hills around Lancaster and the well-kept Amish farms made for a lovely countryside. The homes were mostly white, many with clothes hanging on lines stretched across the wide porches. Much of the corn was still standing, tall and thick in straight rows making rectangular blankets over the rolling hills. Busy men in black clothing looked like they were standing on the wagon tongues of farm equipment drawn by horses through the fields. We passed by a small white school building with boys dressed in black, some wearing flat topped straw hats, and girls in blue cotton dresses playing in the grass outside. There were several small black carriages handled by bearded men in black hats and pulled by ponies at a surprisingly fast trot along the roadway. The auto traffic swerves around the horse drawn equipment barely noticing its modern incongruity.


We stopped briefly at a railroad museum to watch some steam locomotives chug back and forth in a switchyard as they rearranged some cars for their daily tours about the area. Water vapor from the steam engines plumed up from their stacks and the smell of burning coal and grease tinged the cool air.
Here is a photo of one of the farms as seen behind the railroad museum

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