"Shalom Y'all"

Today's title is taken from a decorative tile kinda thing that I saw in the Old City. I thought it was funny.

Well, yesterday we had our first free day. And instead of sleeping in, I got up at 6:30 to eat breakfast, and then left with a big group to go to the Old City Wall at 8. So we spent the day up on top of the wall to the Old City. For about 3 or 4 bucks you can go up to the ramparts and walk along them and see the city from up there. We started out with like, 40 people, but as people were walking it kind of dispersed, so that I ended up by the end of the day in a group of about 9.

We walked around the north side of the wall first. It was fun. I dunno, there's not much to tell but we got a lot of really fun pictures (which I promise I will post asap!!). It was sunny, which was nice. In fact, today was the first not really nice day since I've been here. Now, it's rained a couple of times but the majority of every day has still been pretty decent, with sunshine and everything. Today it was a little bit colder and no sunshine. It had rained Saturday night, and was still raining when I got up at 6:30 yesterday, but it had cleared up by the time we set out and it was really nice all day.

After the north wall we went down into Zedekiah's cave. It's the largest cave in Israel, and it's where they quarried the stone to build Solomon's temple. We took a bunch more sweet pictures and sort of tried to play sardines, but that didn't really work out so well... Hey, at least no one got lost, anyway.

Then we went up on the south side of the wall, over by Dormition Abbey and the Dome of the Rock. Oh, sad story by the way, my camera ran out of battery about 80% of the way through the north wall, so I still have to wait on getting the rest of the day's pictures, anyway. I think the computer committee is going to set up like a photo database on one of the computers, so I should be able to get all the ones I want.

So, by the end of today I was beyond exhausted. I mean, we walked around for like, 8 hours straight. Ooh, and the very last thing we did, we went to Omar's olive wood shop. It was pretty awesome. He does nativity scenes and stuff like that, but he also does all kinds of Mormon stuff. Like, he's got Joseph Smith, and Emma, and Joseph and Hyrum, and Nephi, and Captain Moroni, and he did a couple of Greg Olson paintings in olive wood. And they're all really good. I mean, his stuff is amazing. And he gave each of us a BYU Jerusalem Center key chain.

So that was yesterday. We also watched Prince of Egypt last night, and we'll probably watch it again before we go to Egypt, and I am also way excited to watch The Ten Commandments on Saturday (we leave for Egypt on Sunday).

Today I went to the Dome of the Rock. I hate to say it, but this was a bad choice. I definitely should have stayed home and recuperated from yesterday. The Dome of the Rock was cool, though. It was neat to kind of look away from the Dome at the open plaza, and imagine that the old temple is behind you instead of a mosque. Because there would still have been the same kind of open courtyard in Jesus' time. So that was kind of cool.

This morning I only had one class (I had Arabic this afternoon). It was our Judaism class. Kind of a weird class to be in, I'm not gonna lie. Because it's like a religion class, but not my religion, you know what I mean? Very interesting, though. We've been learning kind of about the history of Judaism. My teacher makes a distinction between the Israelite religion (which is what we have in the Bible) and what started to evolve in the Second Temple Period- from about the end of the Babylonian captivity to like, the time of Christ. Which I can definitely agree with. in Arabic we're just kind of learning some conversation, you know. It's a pass/fail class.

Well, that's all for now. I really am trying to get pictures up as soon as I can.