"Where from, Barbie?"

Yes, I did actually get called Barbie today. By one of the merchants in the city. Lol. The weather was really warm today, so I think that resulted in an overall more boisterous mood than usual, because we also got meowed at (literally) on our way into the city. Kinda gives new meaning to the phrase "cat call".

Yesterday I walked where Jesus walked. We went on what's called the Kotel Tunnel Tour. Kotel is another name for the Western Wall. It was pretty darn sweet. Because it's not just a tunnel, and it's not really like, underground caves or anything. They take you through like, the archaelogical excavation site underneath the Muslim Quarter that's where the old temple wall stood. And in one section of it, you're actually standing on the original stones that made up the street from the time of Christ. It was pretty amazing. It's funny, because you get here and start listening to your tour guides (or teachers, in my case) and realize that at pretty much all the sites you're visiting, the place where Biblical events is actually several hundred feet underground. So it was really neat to be able to not only see *approximately* where something is thought to have happened, but actually stand on the exact same stones that our Savior might have walked over 2,000 years ago.

They haven't been able to excavate the actual temple site, because a Muslim group owns it, and they're afraid that if anything is found, the Israeli government will sieze the land and turn it into kind of a state park, if you will. So there's a lot of controversy over it. Our tour guide was pretty indignant that the Muslims would let all this history just go to waste, and they're denying the very existence of Herod's temple, but our teacher explained to us kind of the Muslim point of view after the tour. Our guide was a pretty cool guy, though. His name is Yeshua (I think...) and his mother was American, but he was born here, in the City of David (which is kind of the area where the original Jerusalem was back before Solomon's time). He teaches history at a high school in Jerusalem, and I guess does these tours in his spare time.

Other than that, I really haven't been doing too much. I kind of wore myself out at the beginning of this week, so I've been trying to catch up and get ready to go to Egypt. I keep missing the groups that go over to Hebrew U (where I would be able to post pictures) and don't hear about it til afterward, so my apologies. Maybe there will be wireless in the hotel in Egypt...

All my teachers are trying to get through the Egyptian part of the cirriculum before we go there. I don't think we're going to make it all the way to Moses in the one class period we have left in Old Testament, but we might get through Joseph, at least (and I am so going to listen to Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat the entire way there!) and in Ancient Near East, we got through the Middle Kingdom in class today. I am getting way excited to go back to Egypt guys! We watched a National Geographic on it yesterday and seeing all the places I've been to just gets me even more excited to go again!!