Lovin' the city

I want to write about every day, so I guess I'll just have to play catch-up all the time. It's like the freestyle drill from swimming...random memory.


Oh, by the way, reading in Genesis about Joseph has made Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat stuck in my head all week. Good thing its a great musical.


Tuesday:
We started all of the rest of our classes, and we had 6 hours of it. It's funny because here we have breakfast 7-8 almost every morning. The first couple days we all got there at 7 because we were all awake at 4am cuz of jet lag. Now some people don't get there til almost 7:45 even hahaha. It's been a lot more difficult for me to wake up in the mornings now, but I still wake up at around 6:30ish. That's early...since seminary. So we had Old Testament for an hour, then started our Jewish class with teacher Ophir who is great, he was born in the US and is a native English speaker which is nice. That class is going to be very interesting, but we already have lots of reading to do. Another funny thing to me is that we have lots of required reading, then a bunch of recommended reading that I know none of us will do because we'd all rather be out in the city instead of reading. It's already becoming a problem that people play too much and not work. We'll get the pattern going though. But Ophir's class will be great. Lunch at 12, then we all had our 1st language class. Here presents a problem. Because there are 2 languages (Hebrew and Arabic) going at 3 times (1, 2, and 3:00), with another class starting at 4. So when I have my Hebrew class at 2:00, then there is not enough time to go outside at all :( It is very sad when you see the other half of the students go to the city but you literally can't. Besides that, HEBREW IS AWESOME!!! We read our first word: Bob. Hahaha yes, the name. We were all super confused at first. Our last class was our Muslim civ. class, taught by a Palestinian Arab man who is Christian. What the random? It is really hard to understand him speak though, so luckily he read a lot of what he spoke from our books. The rest of the time people would be taking notes on something, and the rest of us are like "What should I be writing???" That will definitely be a group study class. It's all SO interesting though! And being here when you learn it makes it that much more so. 


Tuesday night I went into West Jerusalem with some people. I found an ATM!! I do not have my checkbook here and only  brought a little in cash, so this was a huge blessing. I also got shampoo and conditioner, which was wonderful since I left my big ones in Utah and was using travel size ones. YAY! We also walked around looking for snacks...in the back of one store we saw some baskets of bread. On a roll we found a HUGE COCKROACH!! What the heck??? Nasty. Then we proceeded to be very cool and look at the Hebrew books and try to find alef and bet, the 1st 2 letters we learned haha. I found Captain Underpants and Twilight series in Hebrew. We also found a Yellow Box! It's like Red Box but yellow! It was a successful and interesting evening. On the way back we also saw an accident: a motorcycle ran into a car at an intersection. Because the drivers here are SO IMPATIENT AND CRAZY! I would die if I drove here, so I never will. Everyone in the accident was ok I think. 


Wednesday:
Class. Dr. Chadwick is sooooo cool. He knows everything and is hilarious to me. He also loves my last name and said when we go to Egypt he'd help me find a little Egyptian god statue of their god Sobek. For a souvenir. Yes I did know my name was an Egyptian god haha. We had an tour of under the center and all got to graffiti our names down there amongst the pipes and concrete. Went into the city for a couple hours just looking around the shops, not buying anything. Last night we had our 1st forum, an LDS lady from the US working with the Consulate here in Jerusalem. I learned apparently Jerusalem is NOT a part of Israel. So none of us know what country we are in at the moment hahaha. 


Today:
Old Testament. City. I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Christian Quarter of the city. That building is very beautiful inside. It's weird though, about 20 different Christian faiths will meet in different parts of it though. They built the church where some Christians believe that Christ was crucified (Golgotha), and also where His body was laid when the women cleaned Him up for burial, and possibly the site of the Resurrection though I don't remember that part for sure. This is not generally where Mormons believe it all to have happened. We are going to the Garden Tomb on Sabbath actually and I'm looking forward to that. 


Tonight we start our Egypt orientation by watching a  movie about it! Pretty sure it's a National Geographic movie, but hopefully it'll be interesting. And random comment, I LOVE The Prince of Egypt movie, but reading Exodus for class has made me realize how really inaccurate it is hahaha. I still love it though!