Day 6

Yesterday was a crazy busy day. We woke up early and went on a fieldtrip. We went to 5 different spots to get views of Jerusalem and other important places in the holy land. The first one we went to was Deir Mar Elyas, a monastery with a good view of Bethlehem. Then we went to a couple of towers around the city, and the last place we went was Nabi Samwil, which was dedicated to Samuel the Prophet. It was one of those places where it was kind of like a Moslem/Jewish/Christian place, each had connections to it over the years and now they all more or less share it. It's cool that they can do that for at least some of the sites, since so many other ones cause disputes and rifts between the different religions.

When we got back we got to go out in the city. I went with 2 of my roommates and a couple other people. We did the other half of the rampart walk we started the day before, the Northern side, which goes around the Arab quarter of the Old City. We walked through the quarter for a little bit, then back to the Center. We stopped on the way at this wholesale market, where you can buy big packages of candy or drinks or whatever. Everyone at the Center refers to it as "the Costco place", even though it's not really like Costco since they don't have samples or pizza and smoothies.

We have a ton of reading due for classes tonight and tomorrow, like 170 pages altogether plus 15 chapters in the Old Testament, so everyone spent the night reading and studying, as well as this morning and afternoon. We had classes again this morning, for the first time since Friday. It's kind of cool how sometimes we'll go 3 or 4 days without classes, but then you forget you have all the homework due all at once and it's easy to put it off when there are so many more fun things to do outside.

Highlight of yesterday: There was a shepherd wandering around with his sheep at Mar Elias, and while we were all out looking around, he came up to me with a little baby lamb and let me hold it! Then everyone wanted to hold it and so we passed him around but after a while the man started coming up and asking for money for the pictures. Our professor gave him 30 shekels (about $12) but then he started saying that he wanted $10 per picture. He said a lot of the people are like that, they want money for every picture you take.