Classes In Jerusalem

So today wasn't the most exciting when thinking about the tourism things to do, but today was the first real doy of classes. I can tell that the classes here are going to be a great learning tool, a great opportunity to learn the culture of the scriptrues. We had a quiz today and 10 questions later we learned that this is not going to be our normal religion class. We have one term to go through the entire OT, and not only do we need to learn the scripture text, but also have to know the geography of the whole story. I really do like the idea of taking advantage of the resource as we are here, and I look forward to when I get home being able to visualize the actual site as i read about it. All of our classes are based around the place in which I am going to live in the next few months, and the field trips are a large part of the curriculum as well.

We did venture into the Old City on our own today for the first time today and while a little intinidating at first to be on our own in the city, the group I was with has a lot of fun. The top picture is me on top of the Austrian hospice looking over the Old City. We really just went into the Old City to the Church of the Holy Sepulchure and spent almost two hours there looking at all of the amazing icons and Byzentine style mosaics and adorned the whole place. It was really crowded of course, I have yet to actually go into the tomb site, but I got to walk up Cavalry (stairs at right) and see the altar that was built up there for the site of Christ's death (right and bottom). It was sortof fun to look at the mosaics on the ceiling and play the 'which prophet is this' game while trying to look for clues in the picture. Jonah was quite the site! But it was very humbling to see all of the people that treat all of those sites with great reverence. So many different divisions in the Church itself, and so many different types of belief, and yet they are able to keep a tense peace because of the sacred ground that they all want to share. It is actually odd how the feelings there in the small chruch mirror the larger feelings of the city as a whole.

On the way back there was these really annoying Palestinean boys who were trying to sell us these little things of gum or candy or something, but they would just stand in front of one of us in the group, yelling something over and over again wanting us i'm sure to buy what he had, and he just woudln't go away! I need to learn the Arabic for 'no' and 'get out of here' becuase we really were not communicating very well! Lucky for us this Arab behind us told the boy off for us and we went away, but then he had this friend that he called to and he started to do the same thing, except he had a rock that we would pretend to throw at as when we said no. I don't know if you will belive it, but I didn't flinch at all when he pretened to throw the rock, and so I think that is why he left, but man I just wanted to drop-kick the kid! One of them did actually throw a rock that almost hit one of the girls I was with, that was irking if nothing else, but yeah. I think that we are going to get to know how to deal with things like that pretty fast if we are going to be walking that way often!

Well, church is tomorrow. We have sabbath with the Jews here, and then we get Sunday as our day off, so this will be interesting, but I think that i'm going to like this idea in the long run.