Today was a free day, and I actually slept in a lot later than usual. Then me and my roommate Katie headed out with Lindsey and Kendel. Kendel is super good with computery stuff, and he has pretty much every single thing there is to see in Jerusalem plotted out on googlemaps. So we just found one thing we wanted to see, found things close to it that looked fun too, and figured out all the streets so we knew exactly how to get there.
We started out by going to this Ethiopian Church. It was a Christian church, but the style kind of reminded me of the Hindu temple in Spanish Fork, with lots of colorful rugs and paintings and candles and incenses. It was probably the most colorful church I've ever seen. There was nobody else inside but a sleeping guard, so we actually hung out there for a while because it was really cool inside, temperature wise, and a peaceful place to talk and reflect on life. It also had this really amazing painted dome ceiling, with saints and angels all around it.
Right down the street from the church there is this street called Me'a She'arim. It is a Hasidic Ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. They had up all these signs that tell you that you have to be super modest and that they don't like groups to come through and disrupt their neighborhood. A few people who have gone there told us that they got some dirty looks if the girls were wearing pants or if there were a lot of them, but we were all in skirts (except for Kendel) and since there were only 4 of us people were pretty nice. We stopped at a bookstore to look for a journal for Katie, and it was cool to see all the books they had- 100% of them were in Hebrew. There were also a lot of little stores and fruit stands, and we even saw a shoe-maker's store, where this guy was sitting at this intense sewing-machine stitching a black leather shoe. All of the little kids' sidelocks were longer, thicker, and curlier than any I have seen anywhere else in the city. They were sweeeeet!
On the way there we had stopped for falafels for lunch. Falafels are pitas filled with fried chick pea stuff, some hummus, french fries, chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, and then onions or pickles or a couple other things. They're pretty good. This is the second one I've had out in the city, but I don't know if I'll get many more. On the way back we stopped for fruit and I got some mangoes and apples. I ate a mango earlier tonight and it was SOOO good. So I'll probably get a lot more of those.
We had FHE tonight, and our FHE dad had put together this scavenger hunt that took us all over the inside and outside of the JC, and ended in this hidden room in the wall with a bunch of gummies. It was pretty fun. After that, just some reading, homework, a movie, and now I'm just about ready to go to bed.
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