Aloha.

So, I was missin' Hawai'i a bit...

Hey, it's Elizabeth, my bedfellow!

I hope you can see where this is going...

So, I've been missing science classes....

We needed an experiment...

...and a snack.

Happy Valentine's Day!

This is the awesome, creepy Valentine I made for my secret Valentine. Yes, that is a bag made out of a corset. Yes, I made it myself. No, he didn't get it. (Like, understand it. No, I didn't decide to keep it....although, I might have to try to steal it back....)

I find that some things don't need explanations. This is one.

So is this!

This too!

But maybe this does. Creepy Valentine that my roommate got. Great pick-up line, yeah?

City of David Field Trip

Yo!

End of Hezekiah's Tunnel - the fake Pool of Siloam.

This is backward...(BLOGGER!!!!)...but here we've arrived at the end of the tunnel.

I got left in the tunnel....alone.....with a camera. It's really dark inside.

Hezekiah's Tunnel!!! So great. This is how the water gets from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam.

Remains of a house at the City of David excavation site. Can you find the toilet?

Olive wood carvings in Omar's store. I like 'em.

Back to Valentine's!! This store went all out!

That was all a bit mixed up. The past few weeks and the next few weeks we are in the classroom all the time. My hebrew script is getting awesome. I can write secret notes in class. We go on field trips every Monday, so tomorrow we'll go and you'll probably hear about it by the end of the week....hopefully sooner.

It's getting warmer! Yay!

Oh, I forgot that most of you haven't heard this. A couple weeks ago I lost my passport in the city. I'm not an idiot. I had it with me for a reason, but somehow it got away from me. For about a week I had to retrace my steps in the city, tear my room apart, and generally go crazy trying to figure out how to get a new one. Luckily I know a man who works for the US Consulate and he was very helpful in telling me what I needed to do...but it wasn't coming together until one morning about 5 days after I lost it. Suddenly I had a ride, new passport pictures and the time to go get a new one. Keep in mind that's $100 down the Jerusalem drain! So, I got to the Consulate and after waiting and waiting, I got to a window, handed the man my application and photos and as he was gluing the picture to the paper, he paused and said, "I think we have your passport. Someone turned one in here this morning." What?! Whoa! So, a few tense minutes later, I was called up to another window, where they handed me my passport and assured me that THIS NEVER HAPPENS!!!! So, I'm being looked out for!! It's a miracle. There is a God in Israel! And His timing is quite amazing, even if you have to live through a few very stressful hours or days.

All for now. Take care and be good!

I like takin' pictures and I've been holding out on you guys, so feast!


Old pictures, but you wouldn't know, would you? I love the sky.

Absalom's Pillar. Can you believe this is what we do for homework? Dan, Bentley and I went a-wandering.

We found a little whole to crawl down into...but getting out is a multiple person feat.

We waffled quite a bit on whether or not we should let Dan come out of the hole...

Church of the Holy Sepulchre....from a view that mostly just cats see. We found a way to get on top of the Old City. It felt like Aladdin!

This was by far the best olive grove we found.

EGYPT

My cairns!! At the border, crossing into Israel from Egypt.

At a mosque.

3!0!5! Roommate love over the Nile.

Don't hate me.

Oh, what a kind pharaoh!

Again, don't hate me. Luxor was really quite dreadful.........who am I fooling?!

Queen Hatshepsut locked her step-son in the palace for years and assumed his rule. Crazy woman. Good thing there's no resemblance, huh?

You know, a trck full of camels. Small kine.

The nerve.... Ummm...flashback to Egypt!

Flowers are....

what my camera...

does best.

SPELUNKING IN MICAH'S CAVE ~ I could barely fit one shoulder through the hole I'm sticking out of, let alone two......but I didn't even try. "Stuck" is probably my least favorite word, not to mention feeling.....

Heehee. . . Now you know!

Argh! My other video deleted! Check out facebook until I can re-upload the other one.

So, happy winter! Enjoy America!

I've come to the conclusion that....

You can tell how involved a person is in what they're doing by how much they blog. I, for example, posted something new almost every day in the beginning of my Jerusalem time...during which I wasn't too concerned about making friends and building relationships with the people around me. However, I've repented and gotten a lot more involved with the Zion community we're building and suddenly spend very little time blogging. So, rest assured, that when you don't here from me, I'm probably having a time too awesome to stop and sit down and write about. Horrible, I know. I just need to be more disciplined and make more frequent reports.

This week we sat in class a lot, but on Monday, we went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum and Memorial on Mount Hertzl in West Jerusalem. There are few experiences quite like that. Even though this happened years and years ago, you still get this sense of, 'I really need to do something about this.' It was a very powerful experience. The grounds are covered in karob trees, each of which is planted in memory of those who helped Jews escape from holocaust terrors. There are thousands of and thousands, and more are planted every year, as more stories are uncovered of these heroes. The architecture of the museum is very symbolic, giving you a feeling in the entrance that there is no way out and then finally opening up at the end to a beautiful view of pine trees and thriving Jewish communities on neighboring hills. The displays are very powerful, focusing on people and events, portraying life in the ghettos and concentration camps - there was a large collection of shoes from Auschwitz prisoners, actual cobble stones, street lamps, and a rail line from the Warsaw Ghetto, bunks from the concentration camps and lots of pictures and models. Near the end of the tour (oh, our tour guide was a young-ish Israeli woman who was born in Jerusalem and raised in New York), they bring you into a room of records, where they are trying to compile a complete list of all the holocaust victims. They have somewhere between 2 and 3 million names with information, but that's not even half of the 6 million they want, so they're always asking that if you have any information about holocaust victims, that you share the information with them. It reminded me so much of Temple Square and the Family History Library.......

We also went inside the Children's Memorial, which honors the memory of 1.5 million children who were also victims of the Holocaust. This was a very interesting and striking memorial - a single dark room with a very high ceiling. The only light in the room is provided by 5 candles, which are encased in glass and mirrors in the center of the room. The outer walls of the room are covered in mirrors of various angles, transparencies and distances from the center, which gives the effect of millions of stars or lights representing life of various sizes and brightnesses all over the otherwise lightless room. This helps you to shut out everything else for a few minutes and think just about these children whose lives and childhoods were cut short by these events. It was very touching.

After leaving the museum we proceeded to the top of Mt. Hertzl, which is named to honor the father of the Zionist movement, who was not, in fact, a very religious Jew but simply saw a great need for the Jews to have a place for themselves just like the French had their place and every other ethnicity had theirs too. There is a lot of interesting history here and learning about the Jewish National Home, from the perspective of both Israelis and Palestinians has been one of the greatest exercises in patience and understanding of my life. I'm convinced that I'll come away with absolutely no opinion on who is rightly entitled to this area, because honestly, neither side deserves it more than the other. Both have been victimized and neither one actually set the bounds of their territory - foreign governing powers took care of that for them. And it continues.....

Later that night some of us went to see the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Mozart, Beethoven, and completely spectacular violin virtuoso on the Beethoven, and the world premier of a piece by an Indian composer. Very modern and angry sounding, with dramatic oration in Hebrew. Very neat experience.

In other news, I've been trying to get over my cold. And it hailed the other day and it's been freezing. So, I haven't been out in the city at all this week. Lots of class and stuff.

Church was awesome today. Afterward a few friends of mine and I went in search of a huge old church in which to sing. The first two we tried, which by all reports have amazing acoustics were closed, so we wandered a little further down the Mount of Olives and found Dominus Flevit. I think it's a Franciscan church. That's what the monks looked like anyway. It's a small church, built on the site where Jesus wept. But it has a lovely vaulted ceiling and rounded walls, so we walked in with a tour group and just started singing hymns like we were supposed to be there. SOOOOO COOOOOOOOL!!!! I love doing that. So, let it be known that Cooper Johnson's music has been sung in a Catholic church in on the Mount of Olives. Woohoo!