Day 8

Last night we had a forum by Brian Steed, a lieutenant in the US Army stationed here in the Holy Land. It was neat, he talked about some of the conflicts in the Middle East, specifically Israel, and how they relate to some of the things in the scriptures and how the prophets and leaders dealt with them then.

This morning two of our classes were cancelled, so we had free time til lunch. After breakfast I went with a group to some of the sites on the other side of Mt. Scopus. First we went to the Roman Orthodox Church of the Ascension. The church itself was amazing, and the grounds were so peaceful and there were beautiful flowers and gardens everywhere. One of the guys had this small, flexible tripod thing. We wanted to get a picture of all of us sitting on the steps with the tower behind us, so we all got settled on the steps, he set up the tripod (which took like 10 minutes), got the timer going, came and ran to sit with the group, and we all smiled and looked at the camera.... as the tripod bent over backward and the camera took a picture of the sky. We all started laughing, he went back and set it all up again, and took the picture.... as a bunch of Russian nuns came over to chastise us for laughing in the monastery. We ended up with a group shot of angry nuns and apologetic looks on all of our faces, and they weren't very friendly with us after that.

The Ascension church is on the very top of the hill. If you walk out of the Jerusalem center and go up a little bit, you are on the right street to go right to it. Of course we didn't decide until we had all the way down past the Garden of Gethsemane that we wanted to go there first, so we had to walk all the way back up this other really steep hill. The road is not very wide, so you have to climb single file and cars honk and go zooming by, close enough you could reach out and touch them, even at the farthest edge of the road. Even though it was only about 9:30 it was still REALLY hot. We are just imagining how hot it will be when we get to Egypt next week.

We walked back down the hill to another Roman Orthodox Church, dedicated to Mary Magdalene. It has all of these cool gold orbs on the top, kind of like St Peters Basilica but not nearly as elaborate. But they're very shiny so you can see them from lots of places in the city. This one had really beautiful grounds too.
Just up the hill from the Mary Magdalene church was Dominus Flevit. It has an incredible view of the city, which makes sense because it is supposed to be where Jesus wept over Jerusalem.

One really cool thing that we did today that I hadn't done as much before was reading scriptures at each of the places we went to that tied in to the site. It really helped to emphasize that we are standing in the spots where some of the most amazing events in the scriptures took place.
We headed back to the Center for lunch, and then we had Hebrew class. We learned 3 new letters and a song. I like the songs, but I'm excited to start learning ones that have more than 2 or 3 words that just repeat over and over. They seem really simple, but these are the songs that they really sing before certain meals and ceremonies.

We had our Judaism class again today. I like the professor, I think he's really interesting. It's cool to get a true Jewish perspective on their history and beliefs, since I don't think I've ever really met a practicing Jew before. Even though they understand a lot of the principles in the scriptures differently than we do, it still helps them make more sense in context of the history. Today he talked a lot about how the Israelites and other people in biblical times understood the concept of God, and then it was a little easier to see how the people could learn from the prophets and still have all of the idols and graven images that they had.

Dinner was Mexican food, some of the best Mexican food I've ever had. The chef was like, it's Palestinian Mexican food! The chips were especially incredible. They said we can get some of the recipes of food they make here when we leave, and this dinner will definitely be on my list of recipes to ask for. Later we had a Cinco de Mayo fiesta. Don't ask me why they are celebrating it on the 6th. But it was really fun.