First Week!!! (Annie)

Hey everyone!!! It's so cool that I'm finally in Jerusalem writing to everyone back home! I never thought about actually being in Jerusalem so to be here looking back on the last few days is crazy to me! I hope  everything is going well for everyone in their lives.

                I think I'm still in stun mode from arriving here. It really hasn't sunk in yet that I'm in Jerusalem. Every morning I wake up at around 4:45 to morning prayer and get up around 5:15. Muslims pray five times a day and the mosques have  a call to prayer where somebody recites the Koran through massive speakers. There are three mosques near the Center, so we usually hear the prayers well. I actually really like hearing it, even if it is so early in the morning. I've been trying to adjust my sleeping schedule while I am in my semi-coherent, jet-lagged state to where I get up earlier. My body's whacked out so I'm trying to take advantage of it. But I might have ruined my training because this morning I woke up at five and then fell asleep and slept until EIGHT THIRTY!!!! WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!! Tomorrow I will wake up at 5:00 so help me!!!

View of Jerusalem. Dome of the Rock is on the right

                From the center we have breathtaking views of Jerusalem and the Old City. It's easy to find the Old City; all you have to do is look for the Dome of the Rock, which stands out with its shiny golden roof.  We live in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian side of Jerusalem, and we are about a twenty minute walk to the Old City. On Thursday we took a tour around the Old City for the first time. Is it weird that it reminds me of Latin America? There are vendors lining the streets in little shops selling clothes and food and shoes and all of that good stuff. Guys catcall on the street and it smells like Latin America. Maybe a little different, but pretty darn close. It's like déjà vu.  

                The only problem is I CAN'T SPEAK THE LANGUAGE!!!!! ARHGWUJHGAE;IOHGVKJ!!!! In East Jerusalem they speak Arabic and in West Jerusalem they speak Hebrew. Fortunately pretty much everyone we need to talk to speaks English, but it is still frustrating to not be able to read the signs or understand people when they're talking to each other. Hopefully I'll get used to it. I guess I'm too used to Latin America, where I basically can understand and speak freely.

                Today is the Sabbath, which is a little weird. In the US the Sabbath is on Sunday, but here it's Saturday. After church we walked to the Garden of Gethsemane. It wasn't really anything like I expected. I guess in my mind I imagined it to be a natural garden with lots of olive trees, quiet and shady and peaceful. But in reality it is a gated off square of land with paths and mostly bare ground, except for about six olive trees. It wasn't bad, necessarily, just different than what I was expecting. It was really cool to be in the place I have read  about in the scriptures. There's a lot of meaning in Gethsemane for me, since my favorite gospel topic is the Atonement.

                In other news, I have a received a very important job here at the Jerusalem Center: I am on the Mail and Linen Committee. This basically means that I have the crucial responsibility of checking off people's names when they drop their linen off to get washed. It also means that I sort the mail. Obviously society would collapse without me. In my opinion it's pretty much the best job ever.

 PS: The reason all of my paragraphs are weird is because my internet is in Hebrew, and so the blog maker is trying to format it in Hebrew, which reads from right to left. I attempted to fix it. Obviously didn't do much. Have fun!