Picture-taking and shop shop shopping!

So after breakfast, since it's our free day (yeah, it didn't even register in my mind that it's Sunday), I went with some friends on a slow-walking tour of the Old City and some of East Jerusalem. We started in the Muslim cemetery, which slopes down from the Temple Mount into the Kidron Valley. Long story short, it's a sprawling stone cemetery that is extremely visible from the center, and it was really cool to walk through. Great views. So we went into the Old City through Lion's Gate and continued to spend a lot of time taking pictures. Great lighting, interesting structures, beautiful views and striking colors...I took a lot of pictures. Some are good.

We revisited a few places and then went to a few that were new to us. We headed to the Temple Mount, where the Dome of the Rock sits, but there is only one gate that haoles, I mean non-muslims, can enter through, so we tried many gates, getting turned away by Israeli soldiers at all of them. Finally we went in the right way, which is through a plaza where sits the Western Wall, which in itself was cool to see...Sidenote: All these sites we've visited, especially the religiously-connected ones, are awesome and even if they don't stand for exactly the same Gospel or convey the same Spirit or feeling our sacred sites and things convey, it's been a really neat thing to witness the devotion of so many people to their own faiths. They stop what they're doing and pray five times a day, the symbols of the faiths are numerous and all over the place, and the women are so modestly dressed - it's just expected here - a very different world than the one we live in. It's a wonderful thing to experience.....So, we went through the Israeli security and got on the Temple Mount or the al-Haram al-Sharif with about 15 minutes to closing time. Enough time for pictures with the Dome of the Rock and then scat.

I got to experience the amazing and incessant pushiness of shopkeepers trying to sell us scarves and camel-skin sandals, both of which I intend to buy, but hey, if you have no shekels, you have no shekels. People have to survive. A very different experience came when we visited the shop of a man who specializes in LDS olive wood carvings. Absolutely beautiful work. Fantastically expensive. But it's fun to walk into a store on the Arab side of town and see Captain Moroni and Emma Smith carved out of wood. A very nice man named Omar is the owner and artist. His kids went to BYU. He actually gave us each a key chain with the Jerusalem Center logo carved into it. So, I'll be going back eventually. After the money changer and stopping to buy some bread quickly, we went back to the center for a study-filled afternoon.