"I Swam Where Jesus Walked"

Lol, I didn't come up with that, one of the girls in our group did.  She wants to make it a t shirt.  Too bad we're not actually allowed to swim in the Sea of Galilee...  Also, there's two posts that I just put up.

Today we had church with the Galilee Branch.  They meet in this teeny tiny little building, so we actually had to go in 2 groups.  My group went at the regular time, 10:30.  It was really nice this morning and I was glad because it meant we could go out on the balcony they have that overlooks the Sea of Galilee without it being totally miserable.  It really is a pretty stellar view.  It was a really nice meeting.  Susan Madsen (author of the I Walked to Zion series) and her husband are serving a service mission there and she spoke, along with one of the girls from our group.  There are only about 10 regular branch members, and between them they speak English, Russian, Spanish and Hebrew.  And they totally have hymn books in all four languages, and they even have those things where you put up the numbers of what you’re going to sing in all four languages (coz foreign hymnbooks only have selected hymns, so their page numbers are different).  It was pretty awesome. 

The building is so small that we couldn’t stay for the other meetings, so after Sacrament meeting we actually hung out for a while, but then we went to the Protestant site of the Baptism of Jesus.  So we went to the baptismal site in Jordan, but just like there’s the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and then the Protestants pretty much run the Garden Tomb, they have their own baptismal site, too.  I think that Jesus was more likely baptized at the one in Jordan, because I’m pretty sure John the Baptist lived in the wilderness outside Jerusalem, but this one is a much purer water source, so this is where all the 8 year olds in the Israel District come to get baptized.  One of Bro. Huff’s daughters was baptized there when they were here 9 years ago.  I have to say, it was certainly a much more appealing place than the other one.  They had inscriptions all around the wall of Mark 1:9-11 in all different languages.  And there was definitely one in Hawaiian Pidgin.  It was awesome.  Like, instead of, “This is my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” it said, “You my boy!  I really get love an aloha fo you an I stay good inside cuz a you!”  Yep.  I took a picture.  I’ll post it sometime.  :D

Then we came back and actually got to eat lunch for the first time on Shabbat like, ever.  Nah, that’s a lie, I guess we did in Egypt, too.  But it was still kind of exciting, since they only give us breakfast and dinner back at the Center.  And tonight we had a *fireside* which consisted of all the teachers telling us how they much.  It was pretty entertaining, if not, you know, exactly what I would have chosen to spend my evening talking about in light of recent events.  But hey, good times.

Yesterday we went to Gamla and Qazrin.  Gamla is also known as the “Masada of the North”—Masada was the last stand of the zealots against the Romans, I think in the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 135 AD, but don’t quote me on that.  So Gamla was kind of the last city to hold out up in the Galilee region.  It’s called Gamla because the hill that it’s built on is shaped like a camel hump, and the word for camel in Arabic is “gamal.”  Honestly, it almost looked like something out of South America, just the way the hills were situated and all.  I don’t know if that makes a lot of sense, but if that gives you kind of a feel for it, great.  We also hiked up to this waterfall.  It’s like the highest in Israel, and it was pretty sweet.  Gamla is also supposed to be like a vulture sanctuary, since they’re endangered, I guess.  But I didn’t see any vultures.

Qazrin is a Talmudic village.  A lot like Neot Kedumim, honestly.  Except they had more of the old building kind of aspect and not the activity part.  Talmudic, by the way, refers to around the 3^rd century AD when the Talmud—the full set of Jewish scripture—was being compiled and written down and all that.  I’m like, 90% sure I’m not getting that mixed up…  Anyway, they had this reconstructed house that was set up to look like it would have in that time.  And there was this crazy movie that we watched.  K, there were like, 8 screens around this room that we were in, two on each wall.  Mostly, only 7 of them were playing (I’m not sure why they really had the 8^th one, to be honest).  Sometimes they would play the same thing on all screens.  Sometimes half of them would show one scene, and half another.  Sometimes two of them would show words or phrases in crazy text that related to whatever the narrator was saying.  And sometimes they would show the same thing from like, a different angle on each screen.  And like, there were other combinations of those, but basically the AV department at this place just went a little slap-happy or something.  It was nuts. 

Then yesterday afternoon I took one large nap (I did that today, too, actually) and then last night we watched Hitch and played card games til 1 am.  I cleaned up at Rook.  When I first saw Mike and Ken and some people playing that at like, the very beginning of the semester I was like, “Dude, I don’t remember how to play, but I used to love that game when I was a kid!”  And all I could remember was how much I had loved it.  Now I remember why.  I’m really, really good at it.  Lol.  We didn’t play that one for very long…  We actually ended up playing Go Fish, which was pretty entertaining, lol.  (Got any threes?—name that movie!)