Day 28

A long morning of classes today... All interesting stuff, but we're all exhausted about half way through and it makes it hard to focus. Lunch, then we went on a tour under the JC. It was so cool! The Center is on the side of a mountain, so it is built like a set of stairs, like this:

Underneath all of those is the basement, which slopes down with the mountain. There were a million pipes and wires, and it was so interesting to see how much it takes to keep this place running. We had to wear hard hats, because the ceiling was really low in some places. There was one area where a bunch of students had written their names on the walls and pipes, and our director let us write our names there too. It was fun to try to guess what part of the Center we were under, because it is seriously like a maze down there.

After the tour, I went to the Rockefeller Museum with a couple of other people. We have to visit there and write a short report by Friday, and there was only a small handful of us who hadn't made it there before Egypt. They had a lot of clay and iron artifacts, and some really cool rooms where they reconstructed parts of buildings so you could tell what it would have looked like in the past. There were some crazy old skeletons and skull fragments, including one from the Galilee Man, who is part of the species that came right before man. They even had a tomb that they had found intact and reconstructed it at the Museum. It was cool to see tangible objects to go along with a lot of what we have been studying in our Ancient Near East class.

I had Hebrew class in the afternoon, where we learned the birthday song and the alphabet song. Aleph bet vet, gimmel daled hey, vav zain chet tet, yud kaaf chaaf, lamed mem noone... that's only half of the song but that's all of the letters that we have learned so far. We have a midterm next week, so I'll be practicing the letters a lot.

The University of Utah Singers were here yesterday to do a concert. They ate dinner with us in the Oasis, and then we could watch their sound check since there are rarely extra seats in the concerts for us to use. We heard them practice some of the different songs they would be singing, and they were really good! It would have been cool to see their whole performance.

Just finishing up the paper for our Islam class- someone submitted theirs to have the professor's input and found out that our citations have to be a lot more detailed than we thought, so I have to go back and fix some of mine before I print it off. Luckily the class isn't til 4 pm so there's lots of time after morning classes to get everything finished.