Field Trip Mania!!! (Annie)

     This weekend we went to all sorts of places and excursions and they were all fun so I will tell you about all of them! Sorry about the late post, this week has been extremely busy and I've been writing this post in my extra bits of time for a few days now.

    Friday all eighty of us headed over to the Western Wall to go to the beginning of Jewish Sabbath. Sabbath for the Jews starts at sundown Friday night and goes all through Saturday until an hour after sunset. The Western Wall is basically a kind of synagogue, so a lot of Jews go there to worship on the Sabbath. It was really fun to see Sabbath at the Western Wall. The Western Wall is divided into two sides, one for men and one for women. The men's side is a lot bigger than the women's side, and I have no idea why that is (and most of the Jews I've asked don't know either). Anyway, all the boys headed off to their side and the rest of us went down to the women's side. It was pretty funny to see the differences between the two sides. On the left side the men dance and sing and look like they're having a blast. On the right side the women pray and talk. The reason the two sides are so different is because the men lead the worship and the women follow, which makes sense to me. Personally I was just jealous of the men since it seemed like they were having a pretty great time over there. It was interesting to see everyone worship. We were stopped by a Jewish lady who heard us asking questions and asked if we wanted her help. It was very nice of her, and she answered a lot of our questions about Jewish Sabbath. Then at the end she invited us to go the Sabbath dinner with her at a famous Jewish rapper's house! I was like YES SIGN ME UP but we weren't allowed to go because we can't be in East Jerusalem after dark. Dang! But it was still pretty cool to be invited to something like that. Also, Neil totally looked like a Jew! He was wearing the right colors and kind of has the right coloring and everything so a lot of people mistook him for a Jew (until he started talking). Finally! Neil fits in somewhere!

     On Saturday after church we went to the Garden Tomb, which is where some Christians believe Christ was buried for three days after the crucifixion. It is relatively quiet and peaceful and a lot of people sing hymns while they are there, so it's generally a pretty nice atmosphere. However, whether it is actually Christ's tomb is debatable, since the tomb doesn't date to the first century. To me, though, that is not that important as much as actually thinking of the Savior there. We got a tour of the Garden from a British guy (all of the guides there are British for some reason), sang a few hymns, and saw inside the tomb. Seeing the tomb took a while, since only six people can fit in there at one time and around two hundred people were trying to get into it. It was a really nice Sabbath day activity and I'll probably go again sometime. Afterwards we walked home in our massive group of eighty people. I find it extremely amusing to walk around here because since we are so easily identifiable with our foreign features and extremely modest clothing, and all the time we get people calling things at us like, "Hey Mormon!," "I love you Mormon!" and "Hello! Hello! Hello!" (which children repeat over and over until they get some kind of response). I think it's kind of hilarious.

     Sunday we partied it up in Tel Aviv, which is the official capitol of Israel. Tel Aviv is right on the beach so we decided to take a beach trip and see the city a little bit as well. The beach was beautiful, and the water was amazingly warm! Shawn got really excited when we got to the beach, because we saw surfers in the water and he wanted to go surfing. So we find a surf rental place and rented two boards and went surfing for three hours in the Mediterranean Sea! It was really fun, even if Neil and I didn't exactly know what we were doing. We've all learned before in Hawaii, so it was just a matter of getting the hang of it. Afterward we finished surfing and playing at the beach we headed into Tel Aviv to see the city. They had one section of the city was obviously designed for tourists and was also deserted; apparently tourists don't like tourist traps. Neither did we. So we went into the "authentic" part of the city, and there we saw the real Tel Aviv. Believe it or not Tel Aviv is a real city! And it's just like any other city! And it's also super dirty and has lots of bad smells! After a few hours going around Tel Aviv lets just say I'm glad I'm living in Jerusalem and not Tel Aviv, even though it's right next to the Mediterranean Sea.

      On Monday we headed south for another field trip. In the southern part of the Holy Land there is a desert called the Negev where there are many Bible cities to see. It was also, shockingly enough, hot! I melted like nutella on hot pita bread the whole day. We saw Beersheva, which is a Bible location where Abraham received revelation from the Lord, built a well, and where the Israelites stopped before going into Canaan. However, the location we went to isn't the ancient Beer-sheba. The real Beer-sheba is where present-day Beersheva is located, a few miles away. Where we went was an important trading village along the Patriarchs Way, a few miles away from the current Beersheva. We saw the village and a lot of it has been restored so that it actually resembled a living place. We had to wear hard hats, which was a problem for me because I was also wearing my huge floppy hat and balancing both of them on my head was a challenge (the person behind me learned to catch my hard hat as it fell because it happened so often). We saw the city and how it pertained to the Bible and then we went into this enormous cistern inside the city walls. It was super deep because the city is built on a tell, which basically is an area where people destroy the previous settlement and build their's on top of it over and over again, making the area appear to be a tall hill. Some tells can have a lot of layers. We went down into the cistern, hence the need for hard hats, and made our way through the creepy underground tunnels to the exit.

     Afterwards we went to Arad, which is an ancient Canaanite city from the Early Bronze Age. There is also an Israelite Temple located in the upper part of the city. The city dates to at least 2400 B.C., so it is at least 4,400 years old. Can you imagine anything that old? It is mind-blowing! It was almost surreal being there and seeing everything. That's another amazing thing about Israel: civilizations were born here, and the history is rich, complex and old. There's always something else to add to the history, something new to discover, something more to learn. It's like stepping into ancient times for just a moment.

     So I'm going to finally finish this post up! I'm going to Turkey on Sunday (SO excited) and next week I will not have internet access, but expect a nice long account of our Turkey trip on the way back! Before I leave I'll try to get some pictures up. Have a fantabulous day!