Learning to love the locals-- a fabulous week

This week was something entirely different from the rest of this trip, but in a very good way. Let's start at the beginning shall we?

Sunday was our fieldtrip day, giving us Monday as an exam prep day for what many people feared would be the hardest of our exams. Since we're just now starting the New Testament, we are starting to have our fieldtrip emphasis on the period around the year 0. Therefore, our tour this week was on Herodian Jerusalem--pretty much everything that was in Jerusalem which we still have from the time of Herod the Great. When we left, pretty early in the morning, our first destination was the kotel tunnel. This tunnel goes along the length of the actual western wall--they started digging down there a few years ago, so now you can walk from one end of the Western side of the temple mount (which is huge by the way) to the other, mostly underground. The tunnel is hugely controversial, mostly because there are houses on top of it and people are afraid that the foundations of their house will be weakened, but also because some of the Jews who were originally digging it started to head UNDER the temple mount itself, something which was hugely taboo for the Muslims. It was a pretty big deal for a while. The wall was beautifully made, and as we walked along it, we were encouraged to touch as much as possible. Remember, for the Jews, the spirit of God left the Temple upon its destruction, and came to inhabit the wall. According to tradition, the holy of holies of the original Temple was exactly where the stone of the dome of the rock is now. So when we reached the point which was directly closest to the holy of holies, there were perhaps twenty women praying at the wall just like they do at the traditional parts of the western wall. They were all very traditional, rocking back and forth, and praying with their beautiful little books. I would have liked to have stayed and watched. We exited the tunnel on the opposite side of the city, and from there, headed to one of the few discovered homes of people from the time of the destruction of the temple in 70 a.d. It is deep underground, unsurprisingly, as Jerusalem is a tel after all, and there are only a few stones on top of each other dividing the rooms of the house. They found a spear head and right next to it the arm of young girl, detached from her body. It is striking evidence of what happened there 2000 years ago. They showed a very badly acted movie based on the people who lived in this house during the Jewish revolt and the Roman destruction. It was such a ridiculously crazy time--there were Jews trying to incite their fellow Jews to fight, and as the Romans besieged the city, these Jews (Zealots) went around and burned the food storage of the people. Many people ignored the problem, others ran to Alexandria, everywhere there was fear and chaos. When the temple itself was destroyed, no one could believe it. It had been one of the 7 wonders of the world, it, like the titanic, was unsinkable. We went to other houses from this period, all of them priestly, aristocratic (Sadducee) homes. They were full of beautiful mosaics, mikvahs (or ritual baths) and stone pots because stone does not transmit impurities. Every one of them had been burnt to the ground in the deluge. From there, we went back to the temple mount, and we went through the archeological museum there. It is ridiculous how many peoples of different periods have built things there-- from the Mamluks (Mongolian looking Muslims) to the Byzantines, to the crusaders and templar knights, and all the way back to Solomon. The most interesting there was the pile of stones from the original temple. They had been a part of the temple wall but had been pushed over by the Romans. There is a large stone which had been the very pinnacle of the mountain and which smashed the pavement of the road below it when it was pushed over. In Hebrew, it says "the place of the sounding of the trumpet" and it is where the priests would stand to blow the trumpet to announce the beginning of holidays or the Sabbath. We had a fabulous little talk about Christ's experiences on the temple mount before we finished. When we left, I went to an extremely interesting, and controversial, place. Called the third temple institute, it is the organization dedicated to recreating everything which was in the original temple exactly as it had been so when they were able to (as in, when the Dome of the Rock was gone) they could immediately step in and rebuild the temple. The people there could be alternately called fanatics or dedicated, depending on your perspective. It was fascinating--they showed us the priestly clothing, the recreated alters and menorahs and other things used in the temple and even offered their explanation for how they hoped to solve impossible situations; most prominently, the lack of the ark of the Covenant. According to them, the ark was hidden under the temple mount during the destruction of the temple, and it is there still. They just have to get to it. It was amazing meeting people working so diligently on such a thing as this. I don't know if I've ever met anyone so dedicated to something so incredibly controversial. Our tour guide was a girl who, instead of going into the army, was doing national service by working in the institute. She said she had come into it slightly skeptical, but she now saw this as one of the most important things anyone could be doing.

Monday was essentially dreadful--in theory I studied all day, in reality, I wandered around studying everything else and occasionally studying the right subject. Tuesday was dominated by preparing for the final in the evening. It went remarkably well, and then I was free of finals for another month and half! Woot! As nothing of any consequence occurred on Wednesday, I'll skip right to the good stuff on Thursday morning. After classes, a few of us had agreed to go do service in the old city with an organization called the Good Samaritan center. It is right in the middle of the Christian quarter. I'd noticed it before, but I'd never thought to go in. When we arrived, we were shuttled up a flight of steps in a building which was obviously built over a period of years and different needs and styles, so the whole place, much like the old city, was an amalgamation of haphazard walls and misaligned rooms. We were led into a nicely Middle Eastern room where we waited for a while before having an hour long introduction to the program from its saintly director and founder, Raja. He told us of all the troubles which plague the Christian quarter of the old city where he had grown up and where he hoped to spend the rest of his days. There was a lot of drug abuse, alcoholism, broken families who, though they lived in the same house, would never speak to each other, poverty, children who had free reign of the internet from a young age and who were consequently filling their minds with the dirt of the world, mistreated mentally retarded people, and 450 elderly who were frequently without family or, if they had them, were frequently neglected by them. It is all of these people who Raja tries to help in whatever way he can. He started by bringing meals to the elderly who were unable to cook for themselves and had no one to do it for them. He provides services for taking people to the hospital in wheelchairs when they need it. With the help of many volunteers, he assures that the elderly have a blood sugar and pressure check every week, and that those who live alone are visited by someone every day. He knows each of their needs and he will work to find a way to solve them, for example, one woman we visited had no bathroom she could use, even though her family had one upstairs, and so she had to go outside. Raja has been working on repairing the neighbor's bathroom on the condition that this woman would be allowed to use it. He knows everyone in the Christian quarter personally. He watches over the children to assure that those who have drug addict parents are looked after, and those whose parents simply don't care about their whereabouts are being safe. He is just about to start a program where he'll have volunteers teach the parents how to use a computer so they can monitor their child's doings. The organization has even adopted seven girls who are completely neglected, and he assures they have somewhere the live, food, friends, and he even goes to the school to assure that things are going well there. To teach the children the bible which most of them don't know, he has put signs up all over the quarter which are scriptures in English and Arabic, and has the children memorize them for prizes. Every year, people get Christmas presents from the organization of things like some chocolate, new toothbrushes, soap and towels (this year, we provided all of that for them). He even started putting trashcans in the street so the people would stop throwing their trash all over the road. It worked perfectly, and the Christian quarter is much cleaner than the majority of the rest of the city. I am astounded by this man, and I hope to emulate him in some way. He has completely transformed this part of the city from what it was before.
Anyway, to continue. We visited three different homes. In the first was the oldest man in the old city--he is 105! I've never met a person over 100 before and he was 105! He could easily have been 80 with how mobile he was. His wife and he spoke excellent English, though they had difficulty hearing. They're house could have been taken straight out of the 1920s. It was adorable. The next house was much more saddening. We went upstairs to a tiny apartment where the bedroom was also the sitting room and the only other rooms were the kitchen and bathroom. The old woman living there had a deep, gravelly voice and she hobbled around on swollen feet. Her daughter, I think, had a deformed arm and a prominent limp; though she insisted on giving us the good seats and even getting up to give us the culturally demanded chocolate. The horrible thing was that next-door, a new family had moved in and for three years they had been doing renovations during the day. It sounded like someone was using a jackhammer in the middle of the room. The woman looked like she was on the point of tears with all the noise, and she complained of pain in her head and the back of her neck. I could barely hear myself think and I'd only been there 20 minutes. Raja had tried several times to convince the people living there to do renovations for less time each day or at a different time of day, but nothing had made a difference. We sang them a couple songs, and by the time we were ready to leave, the old woman was smiling and clapping along. It felt good to make some good of her day. We then went to probably the most pitiful house we had been to yet, and the sweetest woman. Her name was Aida and she had been the seamstress for Queen Noor of Jordan. She lived in a single room, smaller than my bedroom at home, where she had a narrow bed covered in some of the bed sheets she had sewn, and a tiny couch we squeezed onto. Next to her half sized fridge, she had the smallest camping stove I had ever seen, where she was making coffee which she offered us. I was amazed by her face. She still puts on makeup every day, though she is probably over 80. Her hair was nicely died brown, and her eyes, surrounded by kohl, seemed to jump out at you. They were the image of sweetness. She was so tiny, I don't think I've ever seen someone that hunched and skinny before. Wearing all black, it was like her head was a little bobble on top of a stand. But she smiled so sweetly, and she refused to sit while we were there, though we are all young. We sang to her too, and she smiled pleasantly the whole time. Then she slowly shuffled over to the fridge and tried to find us some chocolates, even though she had hardly any food in there. She was unsuccessful, but we assured her it didn't matter. She insisted on telling us some of the stories of some of the things she had made through Raja acting as our interpreter. I didn't want to leave her there all by herself--she is the woman who I spoke of earlier who has no toilet, though her family lives right upstairs. This sort of thing should never happen. No one should be shoved into a hole because they're too difficult to take care of. We had to go so Raja could get back to his work, and we were returned to the center. Later that day, I was able to get out and meet some of the families across the street from the center. Though I speak only a little Arabic, and only a couple of them spoke English, we had a really fun time being together. I love the girls here, they're generally really sweet. They smile easily and laugh with sparkly eyes. I also learned about Islam from the father, Samir, who promised to try to take us to the Dome of the Rock. He read some of the Qu'aran to us.

The next day was fabulous. We went over to another family's home and stayed for a while, playing with their adorable children. The oldest girl, Aya, is good friends with a girl from our center who I admire hugely. She made us dinner while her parents were out to a concert (we would have gone if we had arrived when we said we would, but we had some hold ups) and they have a beautiful little girl and a five year old boy. They had SO much energy, it was astounding. We stayed with them for hours and went caroling at some of the houses of the people here. It is strange in their culture to do that, but they appreciated it. It is sometimes nice to be a foreigner because you can be as weird as you want and it's ok. We stayed at their house until ten--they kept feeding us! Oh, by the way, the 15 year old boy I forgot to mention (it was his birthday) played Runescape the entire time we were there. It is taking over the world!!!! AAACH!!! I loved getting to know those children. By the end of the evening, they had warmed up to me completely and pulled me all over the place to show me all their toys and all the stunts they could do. The older girl speaks English really well, but the two younger kids speak no English. It didn't seem to matter though, they rattled of descriptions of their day and the items in their rooms all the same. My Arabic came really in handy there. It was a fabulous evening. Today was another wonderful Sabbath--I went to the garden tomb again, which I always love doing. And tomorrow, we're going snorkeling in the red sea down at the southern tip of Israel, and then on Monday, we're off to Galilee for two weeks. Yay!

Petra, Amman, Jerash, and everything else you could ever want. :D

First day--Driving to Jordan.
This is what I wrote the evening after we arrived at the portal to Petra:
We left this morning at six o’clock, and it wasn’t long until we were crossing the checkpoints on the West Bank side of the Jordan/Israeli border. There were people with huge guns everywhere, as there is all throughout Jerusalem, so it wasn’t surprising. The border crossing into Jordan was quite easy; easier and quicker than going into Egypt—though I heard that it will not be that way coming back at all. We’ll see.

Once we were in, we had to take a different bus (because our bus for Jerusalem has Hebrew on it) and we met our tour guide. He’s a very tall man who speaks remarkable English, even for a tour guide. But, like all tour guides, he talks the entire time we’re driving so there is really no time to just think. Our next stop was at Mount Nebo, the place where Moses looked out over the Promised Land which he would never see and also where he “died.” Of course no one has found his tomb.

Unfortunately, the famous church there is closed for renovations, but the view from Mt. Nebo was stunning — overlooking the Dead Sea (which, by the way, I went swimming in a couple weeks ago), the Jordan river, and, if the day had been clearer, even the Mount of Olives where our Jerusalem Center is located. There was also this really cool stone with inscriptions in various languages about Moses on it which has a hole positioned so that on June sixth, in the morning of every year, the light shines through the hole and exactly onto a depiction of the sun they’ve carved into the rock on the ground. After Nebo, we drove for only a short while before stopping at a city named Madaba, which is surprisingly quaint for a Middle Eastern city. Not really comparable to Ein Karam, I visited yesterday, but still fabulous. There we saw the oldest map in the world of the Holy Land in a mosaic on the floor. It is mostly destroyed, but what is left depicts the Dead Sea and Jerusalem in tile as it was back in the first few centuries after Christ. A much needed lunch followed, and then we were off again. This time we drove for a while through the heart of the desert of Jordan. There was very little to see in any direction except for the occasional Bedouin on a horse or a donkey, herding goats or sheep. Yes, there are Bedouin and yes they still live in tents. Actually, the country of Jordan has a total of 70,000 Bedouin in the state among a total population of 6 million. There were Bedouin living in the caves of Petra until only recently when the government kicked them out so Petra could become the tourist destination it is now. But finally, we came to the coolest site of the day—a Crusader’s castle. Granted, most of it had been destroyed after the Crusaders left, and had been rebuilt by the famous Saladin who conquered all of the Holy Land and much of the Middle East in about the year 1000, but it was still an honest-to-goodness castle with many of the rooms completely undamaged. It sits on a lone bluff amongst the barren hills of the desert, and it had served Saladin as his main fortress from which to stage his attacks. I truly felt like a medieval princess running around in there. The only setback was that my camera died after Mount Nebo, so I could only get pictures of myself there from other people kind enough to take them. The sun was setting and the half moon just got brighter and brighter as the sky darkened. Jupiter was right next to it making for the perfect trio of the castle, the moon and the king of the planets. I honestly wished we could have stayed there all night mulling astronomy or the like, but, alas, Petra called. Though one really can’t complain when Petra is doing the calling…. It was only a half hour drive in the darkness to the city where we were to stay the night, Wadi Musa. The next day, at 5:45 a.m., we set out to see one of the modern Seven Wonders of the World. (It was actually built from 200 BC to 200 AD, but it is called a “modern wonder” because it was not appreciated until just recently).

After we arrived in Wadi Musa, I went with some friends down to the main street of the town. The entire place is devoted to tourists so all the shops were pretty much the same. But the people were nice, and I enjoyed speaking to them in Arabic. Afterwards, we got some ice cream from a Swiss hotel, we passed by a large number of our group dancing in the street to an Arab man beating a drum, and we finally meandered back to the hotel. I was psyched for the morning.
Morning. I went down to breakfast (on the coolest elevator in the world by the way--it has only three side so you can see the wall falling past on the door side) and was greeted by a very iffy set of eggs and the most ridiculously loud birds squawking in a tree outside. We rushed off, shoving our bags in the busses, and soon we were flying down the street on our way toward the extremely non-descript hills ahead of us. Seriously, from afar, you would never guess that a wonder like Petra was enclosed in their white, barren walls. No wonder it was only known to the Bedouins until the 18th century. We parked amid dozens of other tourist busses and jostled down the wide road which leads to the Siq. A Siq is about one of the coolest things in the world. Over thousands of years, the waters of the desert, what little there were, carved a knife-thin canyon through the bare rock hills of Petra. This was capitalized on by the Nabataeans (c. 100 BC) who carved it to be more consistent and then used it as the main (really only) thoroughfare into their city of tombs. I was anxious to go into this Siq because I had seen so many pictures of Petra’s famed Treasury building (remember Indiana Jones?).

At first it was unremarkable but for some of the huge, square-cut tombs along the side. There are also a lot of staircases which lead nowhere, carved by the Nabataeans. Apparently, they would build these staircases so the person who stood on the top of them was standing closer to heaven and therefore on holy ground to commune with the gods. That is one theory at least. For every random staircase, there is an equally random rectangular block carved out of the wall to represent the Nabataean's head god, Dushara. I thought the name was pretty fabulous myself.
Probably the coolest parts of the Siq were the water channels on either side which were built to carry the much needed water into Petra's heart. They are just little gutters dug into the side of the rock, with even the occasional curve to slow the water's movement. So, with all of these pieces in mind, you are now picturing the Siq of Petra but for one most important part: the rock which I said was just white, well as we walked, it went from plain white to gold, to orange, to red with streaks of silver and yellow and white and orange which swirled up and down the canyon sides and met in blobs or seemed to fall in streaks. The colors were astounding. I would have come all the way to Jordan just to see this! As it was early morning, the walk was cool and slightly dark. It was much longer than I thought it would be, but I was so overcome by the beauty of the Siq I wished it to continue even farther.

Eventually though, our guide stopped us, had us line up into five parallel lines to march forward with our heads down. I was too impatient to not look, so I tilted my camera up to look ahead of me and I peeked in its screen. There in front of me was the Treasury: huge, magnificent, orange, and framed by the Siq's walls. I gasped and put the camera down, now almost bursting out of my skin in excitement. When he told us to look up, there it was, stretching above us just as magnificent as you can imagine. Personally, I think the guide revels in the gasps of his group, and I'm sure he wasn't disappointed. After taking a few pictures, while half running to get closer of course, we left the thin Siq and stood in the huge plaza before the Treasury. If you've never seen a picture of it, go look it up. < http://www.crviewer.com/targets/061115/061115.htm > It is quite something to see.

Our guide explained exactly how it was designed and when, though I must confess I wasn't really listening. Instead, I took off up the Treasury steps and walked around examining the pillars which were wide enough that it would take several people holding hands to encompass them, as well as the colorful inside of the Treasury itself. Lest you might have believed that most abominable film, Transformers II, there is no life source thing behind the wall, and there certainly is no tunnel which leads to the Holy Grail. Unfortunately... : )
We found several other caves (all of which, unfortunately, smell like urine) and I took numerous pictures. The sun was just beginning to hit the rocks above the Treasury and turn them golden when we finished our group picture and continued down through the valley of Petra. There is so much to explain, there was so much to see, I could literally write dozens of pages about it. Seeing as I have so much else to write, I'll limit myself to a couple things.

There were tombs everywhere, some grand, some relatively small and most remarkably well preserved for sandstone. Really, I could almost imagine the people who had lived there when it was still a sacred place and when it had been filled with trees and flowers. There were Roman roads everywhere -- Rome made this a part of its empire -- and they were some of the best preserved in the world. There is also a huge stone-cut Roman theater just like the ones you see from pictures of ancient Greece and so forth. Amazingly, the theater was built in such a way that they even had to knock down a few of the tombs; something the non-Romanized Nabataeans would never have allowed. We ran around, looking at everything we had the time to see and following our guide as he steadily lead us down the valley.

Soon we stood at the end of it under the shade of one of the few trees in Petra, and he pointed to a narrow path of 1,000 stairs which leads up to the Monastery. Actually, I think it was more like 900 stairs but 1,000 sounds more epic. And that it certainly was. The first 200 were fine, but after that, I was certain I was going to faint. After I passed that stage, I knew my knees were going to give out, or my shoulders would suddenly fall out of their sockets, or my back was on fire, or I was simply going to die from exhaustion. But I didn't stop, and we kept pressing forward past all of the Bedouin vendors and up to the Monastery.

This place is well worth going to -- it is actually the largest rock cut structure in the world, therefore being even MORE epic than the Treasury. When we finally reached it, I stood for a moment in awe at seeing such a beautiful, symmetrical structure cut out of rock which was so rough and tumble right next to it. I soon became distracted by a little Bedouin girl with flies on her face whom I spoke to in Arabic for a while (but we mostly spoke in English...I think people become irritated trying to communicate with me when I understand so little). She promised to show me the spring where Moses had hit the rock and the water had come out. I had heard the spring was up there, but we weren't planning on going to it. I didn't really trust her, but she was only six and I kept good hold on my camera.

She led me down a short canyon to where there was a metal plate in the ground with a lock on it. She seemed pretty irritated that the lock was there because that was supposedly the spring, but she did show me that there was a stream coming from it, and that there was a jug of water nearby. There was also a flock of goats which she kept throwing rocks at when they got too close. It was rather entertaining the way they ran away bleating, even though the throws were far from the mark. After our little escapade, I walked up to a tall pinnacle which has a tent at the top which declares, in rather large letters, "View of the end of the world." The view was rather spectacular -- it was all desert, mountain and the inevitable rock stretched out as far as the eye could see. It was almost like being on the top of Mount Sinai again.
It seems I haven't written about Sinai yet. Brief description: it was a really, really hard walk, with its own 900 stairs, and at the top we watched the sun rise and sang church songs. I talked with the Bedouin for a while, we had a Testimony Meeting which was awesome, and I rode a camel down because my knees were killing me. I tried to get the beast to run, but a camel will be a camel and he lumbered on as contentedly as ever. Well, that is except for when he tried to bite me twice. At the bottom at St. Catherine's monastery, we saw what is supposed to be the descendent of the burning bush, and then left. It was awesome. Anyhow, back to Petra. When I came down from the end of the world, I climbed up into the large room of the Monastery -- so called because when it was discovered by the monks hundreds of years ago, it was temporarily used as a Monastery. Originally, it was a tomb like almost everywhere else. The entire room echoed a lot, so I started to sing a really haunting tune which reverberated off the walls. A friend of mine joined me, and, since we couldn't find any other song which we both knew, we sang Silent Night. A crowd gathered outside the Monastery and clapped when we finished, demanding an encore. I let my friend, who is a voice major, sing a beautiful Aria. After the descent, which was rather questionable on my highly protesting knees (I sound like an old lady...), we had a quick lunch in a pink restaurant (meaning, the walls, the seats, the table cloth and napkins were all different shades of pink). Then we had some free time. Most of the people climbed up to the "great high places" which is even higher than the Monastery and which really is only a flat rock where they used to sacrifice year old camels. I didn't go for fear of massacring my knees, so instead Tara, who is one of the most wonderful people I've met, and I wandered around several temples and ancient tombs. We soon found another group of our friends, and we were greeted by a little Bedouin boy who poked his head out from around a rock. He was only two years old. Soon two other little boys came and joined him and they played with our cameras, taking loads of pictures. Don't worry, I didn't take it off my wrist... which made for some very interesting pictures and a camera smeared with dirt. They were utterly adorable, and when we were leaving, they followed us. Some of the people in the group played a game where they would swing the little boys between them, and they were giggling so that they were almost doubled over. It was utterly adorable. I may have more pictures of them than of the tombs.... There are also some very awkward pictures of my shirt taken by the little boy who snapped pictures any direction he could. When we finally left, it was afternoon. I was loathe to go, but I was excited for the way of our escape--horses! If you know me, you may know that I have a fear of horseback riding, but this was different. After I waited my turn in line, I got on a beautiful gray horse and the Bedouin man who led me allowed me to trot. It was great fun, but for the life of me, I couldn't get the horse to go any faster. I guess camels and horses both really know when the person on their back have no clue what they're doing. That was one of the most fun moments of the day. When we left, we drove all the way to Amman, which is a huge city and capital of Jordan. We stayed there the night.

The next day was fun, mostly because we went to one of the best preserved roman cities in the world. Called Jerash, it was built at the time of Hadrian who built the famed wall that divides England and Scotland and a gate which still is visible in Jerusalem. The city is astonishing. Most of the roads and stones are still visible and many of the columns still stand making the entire place look like a field of Roman columns. There was a giant theater, larger than the one in Petra, where we heard a retired Royal Bagpipe Band play, and we sang some hymns. There was also a temple to Artemis and I think there was one to Athena, though don't quote me on that. There were also 3 Byzantine churches whose mosaics are still visible, and a wonderful fountain from the Roman era. Of course it doesn't work anymore. The entire city must have been quite something in its heyday. One of the best things by far was the show we saw in the ancient hippodrome. It was, quite honestly, a chariot race. That is right ladies and gentlemen; I sat in an ancient Roman Hippodrome and watched as Jordanian men drove three Roman chariots around in a circle as fast as the horses could go. It was spectacular. I am not at all surprised that chariot racing was the most popular race of all – the people had races five days a week with15,000 citizens attending every time. There were only a total of 30,000 people living in Jerash.
Oh, I got a little ahead of myself. Before we saw the chariot race, a legion of Roman soldiers came out and demonstrated the tactics, the orders given and the weapons and armor they used to fight. Did you know that Romans would march into battle in blocks and that the only person expected to fight was the person in front? He would fight for eight minutes, than he would fall back and the person behind him would take over and so forth. That way, every soldier spent most of the battle resting or getting their wounds looked to. I think that's pretty rad. And when you see the soldiers arrange their large, curved shields so that they're protected from the front and on top, it is pretty easy to tell why Rome was able to dominate most of the known world.
Anyway, after the chariot battle, the gladiators appeared. Most of them weren't that impressive, and their fights were slow enough to see that the defense came before the attack, but there were a few who were awesome, including one where the guy ran into the stands and had to be dragged back. Then we voted using our thumbs whether he should live or die. I'm not telling you my vote, but he died. The biggest and muscle-iest of the gladiators slit his throat and they used a gag where real looking blood spewed all over his shirt. A little gruesome, but effective. Then they dragged him away.

After that I was able to take pictures with some of the guards, and the guy on the chariot even took me for ride! It was INCREDIBLE. You would not believe how fast you feel like you're going and how easy it would be to fall off. I held on for dear life and laughed the entire time. Someone took pictures of me which I'm hoping they'll put on Facebook. In my chronic idiocy, I brought my camera but left the battery in my hotel room.

After Jerash, we went to Amman, to the LDS Branch Meeting House in Jordan where the Branch President discussed the progress of the church in the Middle East and so forth. I skipped dinner in favor of going with my professor and a few other kids to an ancient tomb, which was sacred to the Christians and, after the rise of Islam, became a Muslim shrine.

This was the first of two times I had to wear a full black dress over my clothes and a black hood on my head. I looked just like a death eater. It was amazing. Though rather hot. According to legend, there were seven people faithful to Allah who were being persecuted. To protect them, God put them to sleep in this tomb, a cave for 100 years and when they woke up they went outside and talked to the people who were there. They convinced them they were who they said they were with the coins in their pockets and so forth. Then they died the next day. The tomb was awesome because they had collected all of the bones found there and put them into one of the crypts which they put a glass window in. If you flashed you're camera, you could see the bleached bones inside. We went out that night to a mall which could have been plucked right out of a poorer part of the U.S. and got ice cream.

The next day we went to a beautiful mosque called the Blue Mosque where our tour guide taught us about Islam. I had to wear the black dress again and a scarf on my head. There are some pretty rad pictures of it online.

<http://www.atlastours.net/jordan/abdullah_mosque.html> The mosque was the biggest in Amman until recently. Then we went to the ancient part of Amman which is now called the citadel. I, unfortunately, was sort of out of it and I didn't really comprehend a lot of the explanation.

The view of Amman was beautiful. It really is the white city -- everything is faced with white and all the buildings are similarly built -- rectangular and flat topped. There was a temple to Hercules on the top of the citadel. By the way, this was also the place where David sent Uriah, the husband of Bathsheeba, to be killed. The coolest thing there by far was a little museum. It had artifacts from every period in Amman, I took tons of pictures. But what made it so special was that they had the COPPER SCROLLS inside. If you're Mormon, you've heard of these scrolls because they discount the argument that Jews of ancient times did not write on metal plates. They are actually a part of the Dead Sea Scrolls and, even more incredibly, they're an honest-to- goodness treasure map. They give directions where to find several treasure troves of things from the temple. Unfortunately, the clues as to where to find them are worded like "turn left at the large tree" or, "go past Ugg's house." Of course, I'm not being accurate, but you get the idea. The clues are basically useless to the modern treasure hunter. After this, we had a while at the hotel where we stayed the night, and I went to a place called "Mecca mall." It was fabulous because it was probably the biggest mall I've ever been in except for the one in Provo -- it is five large stories tall! We wandered around and I got a Mrs. Fields cookie which was like a miracle. Minus the many veiled people and the Arabic over the loudspeakers, you would never have guessed it wasn't in the U.S.A. Most of the time, the stores’ names were even in English!
The next day we left to return to Israel. First though, we stopped at Bethany beyond Jordan where Christ was baptized in the River Jordan (at least they think it was here -- it is hard to tell). It was amazing, I stood in the water and got some of my own. We had a really neat meeting about baptism and John the Baptist. And I especially loved going through the Greek Orthodox churches located there.

Crossing back into Israel took most of the rest of the day because it seems the Minister of Tourism hadn't gotten the word down to the people stamping the passports that we could be allowed in! We had to sit there for hours and wait. It wasn't as bad as it could have been -- this border crossing into Israel from Jordan is said to be one of the most difficult in the world. As we left, clouds were gathering and I (recently) discovered that during the next day there were monsoon-like storms in Amman. This wasn’t the only reason the timing was good -- there was a lot of fighting in Jerusalem’s Old City the day after we left, including gas bombs which injured some Israeli soldiers, but by the time we returned, everything had calmed down. God is good.
This week has been ridiculous. All finals. I've studied enormously. Thankfully, I have only one final test left which I'm not too worried about. If I study as much as I need to, I'll be fine. But I did manage to go out twice this week anyway.

I went to a couple of churches on the Mount of Olives, and then on Friday, to Mary's tomb (which is amazing, by the way), the Grotto of Gethsemane where Christ was supposed to have been betrayed by Judas, and a whole bunch of tombs carved into the hillside of the Mount.
It was a good week in all, and today has been a wonderful Sabbath. Sabbaths are by far the best days here.

The worst and the best

I'm on my way out the door to Jordan, therefore, I have not had the chance to proof this for errors... though if you were to look at some of my earlier posts, you wouldn't think I proofed them at all. Nevertheless, hope you don't mind. I'll be back in four days! :)

Sunday, October 25, 2009 2:24 PM

This week encompassed essentially every emotion possible—anger, sadness, flashes of hate, grief, great joy, plenty of pain, excitement, laughter and silliness, and so forth.
Why the first of these? Monday was the day we went to Yad Vashem—the Israeli Holocaust Histotry Museum. I’ve studied the Holocaust on and off for years. This is mostly because I find the storiy of how people were able to survive astounding. They were thrown in the most difficult circumstances known to man, in most cases without more than a shred of hope, yet they still made it through somehow. With this background knowledge of the holocaust, I went into preparing to go to the museum thinking I pretty much knew the major points already. But reading the fifty page assignment our professor of Zionism gave to us, I realized how incredibly out of the loop I’d been. Concentration camps were just one part of it—there were Nazis who marched around Eastern Europe gathering the Jews of every town they visited, marching them to a pit where they would have them strip and get inside, and then shoot them all. There were death camps, which, if you were brought to them, within about four hours you would be dead. There was no separating of the fit and unfit in these camps—they were all just murdered. There were ghettos where the Jews were smashed in so tightly, the disease and starvation would do most of the work for the Nazis. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning with Yad Vashem.

When we arrived, it was a pretty warm day for this time of year, and I was already feeling a little exhausted. Our professor of Zionism took us on an hour long tour of the museum and memorials, focusing specifically on the way that Israelis over the generations have regarded the Holocaust. Remarkably, for the first twenty years after it, no one ever spoke of it unless they had been part of the few people who had resisted the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. This was because there was a pervading belief that if you survived, it was because you did something selfish or horrible to keep yourself alive—you may have bribed someone, or hidden behind another person who died in the holocaust. Essentially, the survivors were regarded as cowards.
This all changed around 1967, when the Israeli people began to realize the similarities of fear and so forth with the impending war with their Arab neighbors (later called the Six Day War). It was then that the definition of heroism broadened from those who had physically attacked the Nazis to those who had fought to live when all the Nazis wanted was them dead. This was said by a famous Rabbi, he declared (to paraphrase poorly) that because the Nazis wanted the bodies of the Jews, it was heroic to keep that from them, and to therefore win against them. That was about when the holocaust began to be spoken of again. That and the trial of a famous Nazi Otto Adolf Eichmann who had hidden in Argentina for years. When he was found and brought to Israel to be tried for his war crimes, the chief prosecutor, Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hauser, who is a national hero in Israel, starting his opening statement with, (and this is another poor paraphrase), “With my finger, I point the fingers of six million people in accusation.” It was then that the holocaust became almost the religious basis for secular Jews—it is the reason a lot of them are proud to be Jewish and want to live it fully. They still won’t let people like the Nazis win.

After this tour, a tour guide for the museum came to replace our professor as guide. She was short, wearing all black, and spoke with a British accent. She led us through the museum. This is not your typical museum. I’ll try to describe it to you the way I’ve described it to a couple of other people, but it’s difficult. Imagine a tall triangle, elongate it into a column, make it out of gray rock and then shove it through a hillside with part of it hanging off either edge. That is essentially the way this museum is designed. When you walk in, you go underground and you don’t go above ground again until you leave. At the entrance to the museum, they had a continuous reel of old movies playing about life for the Jews of Europe just before the Holocaust. It is a good reminder of how unaware they had been, and of all they lost. When we turned around, we could see to the end of the long triangular building, literally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. But to proceed through the museum, you have to turn to your right and enter a dark room full of the exhibits of the rising of Nazi Germany.
We went through that and crossed back across the hall to where we could see the end again, then entered another dark room where we learned about the beginning of persecution. We considered this all the way through the museum, continually getting closer to the end, but having to enter many rooms full of reminders and stories about those who suffered and died in the holocaust. There were a couple of things which stuck with me most: First a letter by a Nazi soldier who traveled around in the “Einsatzgruppen” throughout Eastern Europe, systematically shooting Jews, and, secondly at the very end of the museum where they have the names of three million of those who died contained in thousands of cases on the walls, leaving room for the other three million names they’re still gathering.

The letter of the Nazi soldier to his family was fascinating because for me, it explained how a seemingly normal person could become such a monster. He wrote something to the affect of, “It is considered a weakness to have trouble seeing dead bodies. The only way to fix it is to do it more often…” and then, We have great faith in our Fuhrer and that gets us through doing these difficult and thankless tasks.” While I still have questions about the process a person travels from goodness to evil, this letter answered a lot of them. It was because they trusted their “commander,” (Hitler) who had, after all, pulled them out of a broken state of a depressed economy and lost honor leftover from World War I. The soldier did it because of this trust and his desire to help what he saw as his country. This was at least his excuse for his actions.

The room with the names in it was incredible, partly because of a quote in the entrance. I wrote it down, “Remember that I was innocent and, just like you, mortal on that day, I, too, had a face marked with rage, by pity and joy, quite simply, a human face!”—Benjamin Fondane, Exodus. Murdered at Auschwitz 1944. This stuck with me for obvious reasons. When you walked into the completely circular room, you immediately were drawn to look up at the large canvases of faces that surrounds you. They created a collage of peoples who died in the holocaust. Then you look downwards toward the center of the room where a large stone pit was dug, much like a very wide well, with a pool of water at the bottom. This, they said, was put there was because water is a symbol of continuance in Judaism and we must continue to remember what happened. It was a striking chamber to be in—surrounded as we were by the thousands of black boxes stretching from floor to ceiling for several stories and knowing that each of those contained thousands of names of the dead. And why they were dead? That is still beyond me. The children who died should still be alive as grandparents now.

When we left the museum, it slopes upward and the triangle column splits open like a banana peel, revealing the hills of modern Israel filled with comfortable suburban houses. The guide said that this was the future and ihat we had the choice in assuring that something like this never happens again, to anyone, anywhere.

As difficult as this all was, the hardest was yet to come. We went to the children’s memorial. It is not what you would expect; there are no graphic images of the dead, in fact, there are hardly any pictures at all. The building is entered through a short tunnel, and after passing a lit collage of some of the faces of these children who were murdered, you enter a completely dark room. All around you, the walls and ceiling is made of mirrors which reflect the lights of the candles they have somewhere. It creates the affect of there being thousands of little golden lights, some closer some father, strewn through the darkness. As you walk on the little winding path holding hand rails, a voice calls out the name of each child who died as well as their age and birthplace. We were asked to remember one name. I crouched down by the footlights and listened for mine, writing it down in my notebook. He was Vol Spres, 12 years old, Poland. Then he was gone, another of the 1.5 million names of the dead children being read. Our guide told us to never forget the name of the child we had heard because if we didn’t forget, then that child would never be forgotten. I stood in the memorial for a good fifteen minutes, feeling like I was in space, looking at each star from a perspective not clouded by the atmosphere. Why should they have died? The sadness was momentarily replaced with anger at the people who did this, and those who began it. But then it was gone, and I felt completely -- empty.

When we left Yad Vashem, we immediately went to a place which our professor calls the holy of holies of secular Judaism. I suppose it is appropriate that this place of hope is right next to the place of reminder. Together, they should show the observer what happened and should never again be, and then how they are trying to resolve it. That is at least what I think the designers intended. This is where Theodore Herzl, the father of Israel, is buried. It is also where the various prime ministers are buried. But I won’t go into it any more than this, there is just too much to say.

That was essentially my Monday, most of the day filled with Yad Vashem, and the rest filled with mt. Herzl and scrambling to prepare for tests and turn homework in. I didn’t go out at all the rest of the week because of having four different midterms, but at least they’re over now. On Friday, when I was finally able to get out again, I went with a group of nine people to the American Consulate here in Jerusalem. There are actually four consulates, but this is the main one. The US does not have an embassy here because they do not want to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. To do so would be to say that it was not going to be the capital of the Palestinian state that the US is hoping to help create, and that would be a poor diplomatic choice. But much of the consulate here is beautiful—the main building was actually a monastery, so it is old and the architecture is medeivel and quite stunning. Our group was being given a lecture on becoming Foreign Service officers. We have about six different people in our Jerusalem branch who work for the consulate, so two of them gave us this lecture. I’ve heard some of it before, but it was informative nonetheless. By the way, this week we also had a wonderful Arab culture night, featuring a performance of the call to prayer by two of the men who do it at Al-Aqsa mosque every day (the main worship mosque in the dome of the rock compound). They also did their prayers in front of us so we could see how they are done, and they “sang” (they call it “reading,” though there are notes and it sounds like singing) the chapter in the Qu’uran about Mary and Jesus. After that we had a wonderful Arabic food dinner, then traditional Palestinian folk dancing. It was fabulous.

Continuing now with the best day of the week by far. If Yad Vashem was the low point, this was certainly the high point, though it was so remarkable it is almost to compare a foothill to its mountain. For church, we had the primary program (for those of you who do not know LDS lingo, that means that the children were given parts to sing and tell us for our service). I smiled so much the whole time that my face hurt afterwards. They were so adorable. Then we went to the garden of Gethsemane, which is one of my favorite places in the world, as it is where Christ suffered for our sins. There were too many people there this time for it to be really spiritual, but I met some wonderful women from India who offered me a place to stay if I were to ever come, and a couple of very nice men from Uganda who promised to write me and tell me all about their country. On the way back we met a group of Palestinian children from the neighborhood. They were so wonderful and sweet, it was a real blessing to talk to them. But the best thing was that Elder Holland, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, came and had dinner with us at the center, and then gave us a fireside afterwards. I have never met an Apostle before, so I was utterly brimming with excitement like everyone else. He gave the most beautiful sermon, standing as he was in front of our stunning view of Jerusalem. It was about how Christ is ultimately a merciful being and how, in Christ’s kingdom, mercy will always trump justice. He said those words exactly. If any of you are interested, I took copious notes of the meeting. I met him a couple times, and he was so kind and sweet, just like a Prophet of God should be. So basically, it October 24 is the best day ever.

Today we went to a really remarkable stalactite cave as well as a quaint city named Ein Karem where there is a church for the birth of John the Baptist there as well as the visitation of Mary and Elisabeth. It was a wonderful day, but it happened a little too recently for me to want to write it all down. We also saw the Chagall windows at the Hadassah church, if any of you have heard of him. That was remarkable as well. It was a wonderful day all in all, no doubt about that.
While the week certainly contained every possible feeling, I am extremely glad that I experienced it. The only thing I would change, really, is to have some of you with me here to experience it. This whole place is just so remarkable—it is jaw dropping.
Oh, and by the way, I’m going to Jordan. In just a bit too. Literally. I’ll be in Petra rather soon, looking at all the red rocks and so forth. Envious? You should be. :D

Land of the bible. Plants and animals included

What an interesting week this has been. For our weekly, all day field trip, we went to a place called Neot Kedumim where they have recreated the biblical landscape and environment. All the plants and most of the animals that are mentioned in the bible can be found there. I, obviously, being the nature freak I am, was in heaven. It is so cool to see the plants mentioned in the bible.

Case in point: even heard of Hyssop? Well, it is this herb that is used like four times in the scriptures as the comparison against the Cedars of Lebanon as the smallest plant in the world. It is sort of the thing you say, "from the hyssop to the Ceders of Lebanon" which means that it encompasses everything. It’s the equivalent of saying "from Dan to Beersheba" which I think I mentioned in an earlier posting. Anyway I think it is mentioned in a couple Psalms and it is mentioned in relation to the wisdom of Solomon. The plant is also what was used as the brush which painted the lamb's blood on the doorposts of the faithful during the Night of the Angel of Death. It is also what they used to dip the water in to give to Christ when he was held up on the cross. Anyone notice the connection? Anyway, it’s pretty much awesome. Its modern usage is huge. In Arabic, it’s called Za'atar and it's the herb they put on bread ALL THE TIME which really means that almost anything you get in the city that goes with bread will be za'atar. I had it my first day here and I love it. With olive oil and pita, it's delicious. So it was growing there right next to a very small cedar of Lebanon (the cedars take 60 years to mature). According to our guide, it is supposed to be a symbol of the people of Israel because it comes back year after year and it doesn't take much time for it to blossom. Also it is not unbending like the cedar. That's just an example of the things we learned about the plants in the bible. There were so many others.

A really short one I’ll share is when Abraham had two holy men come to him who told him his wife was going to have a son in his old age, he had them sit with them under a Tamarisk tree which is awesome because when you sit on the ground underneath a tamarisk tree is always 2 to 3 degrees centigrade cooler than places around it. Why? They think it is because it collects dew on it in the morning and it takes the dew a while longer to evaporate than usual, so it cools down the area under the tree. Therefore, Abraham was being as hospitable and respectful as he could be when he invited the men to go sit under the tree. Cool huh!

But moving away from plants….. You give me a moment, and I'll go off about them for pages. We also did something really amazing that we got to herd sheep and goats. That's right, I went with a group of completely inexperienced city slickers and had to organize 16 very oblivious, occasionally murderous, animals into a circle of rocks, keep them there, then make them circle around a tree and come back. We were surprisingly good at it, partly because (for some reason) the animals took a liking to one of the girls in our group and the whole lot of them would trudge after her wherever she walked. When she went around the tree, they followed. It was rather entertaining when she was walking back up the hill to where our group was sitting and they were still following her.

But anyway, the guide taught us a lot about shepherding and how a shepherd knows his flock and uses the natural leader among them to lead them where they need to go. You know the Psalm that starts, "The Lord is my Shepherd"? Well, David is comparing himself to being the lead sheep who is following the direction of the master. I was in the first group to go and take the sheep and goats around. The second group had a more difficult task, they had to separate the sheep and goats and then get them into different circles of stone. That was rather entertaining to watch because, let me tell you, those sheep and goats see absolutely no reason why they should ever be in anything other than a tight wad of smelly fur.

After all of that, including with the hyssop and such, we went on a tour of the history of the four species that the Jews use in their holiday Sukkot. It is a long and involved story, therefore, if you want to know more, look up "four species" and I assure you, it'll pop right up. If not, add Sukkot and you're golden. I really like the history though; it's worth taking a moment to figure out.

We also saw the seven species that are traditionally grown in Israel, and we learned how to thresh wheat. If you've grown up in any Christian faith, you'll know the parable of the wheat and the chaff. Even if you aren't Christian, you may have heard of it. It’s basically the idea that after you've done all sorts of stuff to get the wheat cut, to slice the long stems into manageable portions and so forth, you have to separate the beautiful, useful little grains that make the bread from all the straw that accompanies it. How you do this is pretty interesting. Basically, you take the whole lot of it and throw it up in the air and the light straw flies away, (hopefully not back into your neat little pile) and the grain is supposed to fall back down where it started. I always, and still do, wonder what you do if there is no wind. Or, if there is such a wind that you're grain goes right along with the chaff. But anywho, our tour guide entertainingly took a whole bunch on a shovel and threw it up in the air, with all the chaff flying right into the face of the teacher accompanying us.

Ooh, I utterly forgot, we saw the COOLEST thing. They have a Torah scribe who works there, and he demonstrated what is used to create a kosher Torah scroll, and even showed us a Torah scroll that was made over two hundred years ago. It is SUCH an involved process, let me tell you. Everything has to be correct, and if you make a mistake, you have to scrape it off, or, in the case of the name of God, you have to completely excise the piece, replace it with a patch, and then in a special ceremony, bury the name of God with other retired books and such that carry God's name. The technique he was using was hundreds of years old, and the art of being a Torah scribe had been in his family for almost as long. Did you know, for instance, that the Torah scroll is not written on paper but on parchment--or in other words, on the skin of an animal? That is why they don't disintegrate very quickly and also why it takes so long to create a complete tradition scroll. Now, thankfully, there are machines which make the skin into parchment for them. He then demonstrated reading the Torah in the three different traditions. I'll give you the names, though they probably don't mean much to many of you: Ashkenazi, Sephardic (this you may have heard of, I know I had a slight inkling of what it was before I learned fully) and Yemeni. It was all very beautiful, and fascinating. I took tons of pictures of all the things he uses in the ink and so forth. It was a lot like those displays at revolutionary war re-enactments. I loved it.

So, moving on, when we left it was already four in the afternoon and we had a half hour drive back to Jerusalem. BTW, as we were driving through hills covered with the olive groves I saw several ancient watch towers ... just like the ones in the parables.

That whole evening I spent studying as I did all of Tuesday and most of Wednesday. I did get to go into the city on Wednesday. We went back to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It was a lot better this time because on Tuesday we had a lecture from the man who used to be in charge of Religious Relations for the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem. He talked about relations between Christian faiths here and gave us some pretty entertaining stories about the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Church of the Nativity. He also taught us a lot about the general structure of the church. So when I went back on Wednesday, I took a map of the place along and we explored -- this time knowing where Golgotha supposedly is, as well as the places Christ was supposedly tried and where he was flogged.

There were two other things which really stood out to me about this trip.

First, the church is shaped, unsurprisingly, like a big cross. At least it was before a whole bunch of things were added, but you know. In the large rotunda where the apex of the cross is where they have the "aedicule," or in other words, the cave where Christ was supposed to have been buried. It looks nothing like it did back then; actually, it just looks like a tiny, highly decorated room in the middle of a church. The floors all around it are utterly filthy. Why? Because the aedicule area is run by all five of the churches which have dominion over the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. That basically means that none of them cleans it because, in ancient time in the Near East, cleaning is a sign of ownership. But that's beside the point.

Directly behind this aedicule, in line with the little clay figure they have that represents the middle of the universe (that's right, I've touched the center of the universe. Beat that!) was a tiny Syrian chapel which had been gutted by a fire years ago. I have no idea why it hasn't been repaired. There is a little hole in the wall there which is just large enough to go through if you duck. It leads to first century tombs. There is no light, no tour guides or anything in there; in fact, it is barely large enough for two crouching people to get into. But just inside it, right next to the head of two of the tombs, was a little candle that was still burning but was burnt almost to the end with several photographs laid right next to it. They showed some people who looked like a family. The walls were black with the soot of the fire, and the ceiling was for some reason sticky. While I know this part of the church is by no means unknown, probably everyone who stays in there long enough has seen it, it still seemed like a secret kept long away from the world. I would like to read more about it.

The other thing I want to relate is that on the exact opposite end of the church, there is a flight of steps that leads down to a chapel called the "Chapel of Saint Helen." When we first went down those steps, I failed to notice that on our map, there was a little line that pointed to the steps and read, "29 steps with cross graffiti." As we descended, I was thinking about how observant I am when I'm interested in things, and how I had managed to notice everything that should be noticed about the chapel we entered. Of course, I was proven wrong when I looked at the map and saw that little caption. As soon as we finished looking around the chapel, we raced back up to the 29 steps and looked for this famous cross graffiti. We had almost decided that it was gone before I realized that there was a tiny cross carved into the wall that leads up the steps. And next to it there was another one. I stepped back and realized that the entire wall was made up of little carved crosses, some smaller, some larger, some in clusters or by themselves. This was the case on both sides of the steps and the wall around the carved crosses was black with the fingers of thousands of people who had traced their contours or perhaps carved the crosses in themselves. I felt like I had made another amazing discovery, sort of like Indiana Jones.

While neither of these stories have any point, I chose to relate them because they sort of emphasis for me what the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is like. It is a fascinating place. I assure you, I could go back again and again and not tire of it.

Oh, oh, I must mention this. There is a little Muslim man that sits on a bench just inside of the church. He is there almost every day, as his father before him had been, and his father before him. His family has been in charge of holding the keys of this much disputed building for hundreds of years, since the time of the Ottomans. We met him as we walked in and he showed us pictures of him meeting the Pope, and told us how he met Barak Obama when he came to the church. He also gave us each a little card that reads:

Wajeeh Y. Nuseibeh

Custodian and Door - Keeper

of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher

Tel. Resid. 02/6285910 Jerusalem

Church 0522992524

He was adorable in his self importance and his kind welcoming of us. "You Mormons?" He asked when we first walked by. Everyone can tell in the city, even when we wear NOTHING with any BYU or Mormon-ish logos on it. We have several theories of how they can tell, but even on our way up to the church, wearing by chance nothing which would give our faith away, we had three different shopkeepers call us over by saying, "Mormons! We love Mormons!" or something similar. It is rather entertaining, though it is a good reminder that we'd better do the right thing because everyone knows who we are.

Thursday went by with five different classes -- a total of 7 hours spent in class in all, and Friday was almost the same. But there was a definite perk to Friday.

Just before sunset, we went to a synagogue in the City of David. It was actually in a scout building which is used as a synagogue on Fridays and Saturdays. We arrived in our Sunday clothes, received prayer books with English translations and transliterations so we could sing along, and after an introduction by our Judaism professor, we went in and sat down. The particular congregation we attended had many attendees from the U.S., so most of them spoke English almost perfectly. Not that we spoke during the service, it was mostly singing Psalms and reciting portions of the Talmud. The congregation is liberal-orthodox, or in other words, they're Jewish enough that they really observe the Sabbath well and wear the kipa, but most of the women don't wear head coverings. They are also of the "neo-Hasidic" persuasion, which basically means that for them Shabbat is a joyous time that should be full of boisterous song and some dance. We sang and danced right along with them, we women on one side of the synagogue separated from the men by a white cloth barrier. At one point, we even danced around the chairs in a circle holding hands, our hands going up and down in time to the song. They were very welcoming and I enjoyed the entire thing.

As we left, we spoke with some guys attending a local Yeshiva, literally meaning "place of learning," which traditionally is attended by observant Jewish young men who want to learn the Tanakh (The Talmud, Torah, and Mishnah put together) as well as the Halakha (or Jewish law). This Yeshiva, they said, is best termed a "pseudo-Yeshiva" because it doesn't require you to be observant and is co-ed, which is almost unheard of. Anyway, they were great fun because they were all from the Midwest or east coast, so they had great Chicago or New Yorker accents and a sharp sense of humor.

Our Jewish history teacher walked home (as it was now officially Shabbat) with his adorable three-year-old girl who came along, and we drove back to the Center in time for dinner.

What's been up since I've been back in Jerusalem

Alright, so since the last time I wrote, lots have things have happened.

We were just about to head out the door to go to the old city when we were turned back because of problems on the Temple Mount. East Jerusalem and the Old City were off limits to us. I've heard two different versions of the story: one, from the Jerusalem Post, says that riots started because a group of Jews tried to get up on the Temple Mount, or Haram As-Sharif, the Dome of the Rock, to pray. They took armed guards with them and the Muslims up there began throwing rocks in protest. The other version which I've heard from people here is that there were rumors that the government was going to let some people go on the Mount to pray (some Jews I mean) and that the Muslims were really wary of this. As a consequence, when a bus full of French tourists came up onto the Mount, the Muslims there started throwing rocks at them thinking they were the Jews. Even after it was discovered that they were not, the Muslims were still afraid of something that has been termed by a Hamas leader (who has been banned from the Old City as a consequence) as "The Jewish takeover" of the Holy Mount. Therefore a group, which I've heard was anywhere from one hundred to two hundred people, mostly young men, spent the night on the Mount to protest it being used as a prayer site for the Jews. This sort of problem has been getting worse, with people lighting trashcan fires and protesting at night in the Jezreel valley just below the Mount and across from us, between us and the city.

This problem was compounded because there are thousands of Jews from all over the country who came to have a priestly blessing at the Western Wall, the consequence being that the whole of southeastern Jerusalem is overcrowded with pilgrims. The government has not been allowing nearly anyone except Jews into the city; they've even closed the Holy Mount to all Muslim men under the age of 50.

This holiday, called Sukkot in Hebrew, or the Festival of the Tabernacles in English, is going to continue until Friday, so we can expect to be barred from the eastern or Old Part of the city until then.

Therefore, we went on a different field trip yesterday which turned out to be smashing. It was to the old part of the City -- the City of David.

This was the place where the city, once ruled by Melchizedek, stood and also where the Jesubite city David conquered and took for his capital had lain. It stretches along a long narrow hill, flanked by two valleys which meet in the middle and eventually slope down toward Jericho. There, all the history of the First Temple period took place, all the way up until its destruction in 587 BC and the capture and carrying of Judah into Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar. We toured some of the few places they've been able to excavate back to the time of David. There were a few standing ramparts and a couple houses which had been attached to the walls before they were burned down or built over. Undoubtedly some of it was there when David walked those streets and some during the time of the prophet Jeremiah and Lehi as well.

Most interesting though was our excursion through Hezekiah’s tunnel which allowed water from the Gihon spring upon which the city relied, to be relayed through a half mile stone tunnel to the pool of Siloam at its end. It was through these very tunnels, some of which had been dug previous to Hezekail, that David's men infiltrated the walls and destroyed the city. It was also the extension and reformation of these tunnels that saved the city in the time of the failed siege of the City of David by the Assyrians (circa 700 BC). The walk was forty five minutes. Some of the time, the roof of the tunnels stretched far above my head and I could walk upright. Other times, it sloped downward until I nearly felt as though I was inside the Pyramid walking up to the Pharaoh's tomb again, although this time the air was filled with the moldy smell of algae instead of stale age.

Normally, the water flowing in the tunnel is waist high, but because of the persistent drought plaguing this part of the world, it measured on up to mid thigh. There is cause for hope, however, because today, for the first time in nearly a month, it rained! I could not help but wonder if the prayers of the faithful Jews calling for rain on this holiday were being answered with this brief shower.

On our slog through the tunnels, we sang and talked. I watched carefully for stalactites which had miraculously missed the head of another tall tourist and which could, painfully, hit mine. Thankfully, my diligence paid off. I only hit my head once.

At the end of the tunnel is the ancient pool of the Byzantines with four squat pillars poking out of the water. We wandered about for a bit, before heading off to try and find a way back to the center. First we passed the New Testament period pool, empty now of water as it has been for centuries, and only recently excavated. It was to this pool that the blind man who Jesus had anointed with mud made from dirt and spit on his eyes, had come to wash himself and receive his sight (John 9).

After our security personnel figured a way to pick us up, we walked up a prodigious slope out of the city of David and all the way to the garden of Gethsemane where our cars picked us up and drove us the rest of the way. We passed numerous checkpoints adorned with machine-gun toting soldiers eating lunch. Our driver seemed intent on returning us at record speed, or at least, testing how good the suspension really was on his van. Though I ought not complain, I have become accustomed to rocketing down hills and careening round corners. It seems just as normal here as honking incessantly and shouting out the window to anything which may be construed as a threat.

Once we were returned to the Jerusalem Center, I dithered away my day. We had no classes this week but Old Testament and Hebrew and only on Friday our Jewish history class. This is partly due to the holiday.

In preparation, the Israeli government shuts the borders to any Palestinians trying to come through the West Bank to Jerusalem. That cuts off our Palestinian history class. It is also due to the unfortunate death of our Ancient Near East Professor's father. Naturally he flew back to the States for the week. Our surprising lack of work would be wonderful were it not for our restrictions to the majority of the city. I suppose I'll take the opportunity to explore West Jerusalem more thoroughly.

I spent Sunday, when we couldn't go to the old city, visiting numerous sites and wandering around hopelessly lost for about a third of our travels between them. We visited the largest (I think) synagogue here, as well as an old book shop. It was just like something you would dream of -- books up the wazoo in a tiny hidey-hole type shop, all of them old and falling apart. There were a surprising number in English which I perused with pleasure.

But let’s not get into all that. I could describe the book shop and the bird-like little Israeli who ran it, for hours. Suffice it to say, I bought three fabulous looking books for 10 shekels. That's only 2 and one half dollars. Bother, I've lost my train of explanation. What have I left out? Today has been utterly unremarkable, other than the rain of course, and the fresh feeling to the air. I did notice that a pomegranate tree just outside of Hebrew class looked greener than ever against the china blue sky.

Anyway, the third day in Egypt may come soon. At this rate, I’ll have written about them all by the end of the semester... hopefully.

THE PYRAMIDS

The next day was the day we'd all been waiting for.
I got up pretty late-- about seven, because I was so exhausted from the day before, got dressed and hurried off to breakfast. Our hotel was exactly like you'd want a hotel in Egypt to be. Instead of floors on top of each other, we each got a bungalow which was surrounded by palm trees and other tropical plants arranged in pretty, fountain-centered gardens. The day was already hot when I finished breakfast and ran to get a front seat in the bus. But that didn't matter-- it wouldn't be Egypt without the incessant, muggy heat. It was a quick drive through the city.

Though it can be easy to forget when you're live on the delta, Egypt really is a desert. Rain is so infrequent that the moment you're outside of the affects of the Nile’s water, plant life completely ceases. In some places, you can be standing on lush, ready farmland with one foot, and with the other stand on dusty, barren desert. The ancient Egyptians built their pyramids on the latter sort of terrain -- the Giza plateau is only a few feet from the Nile's influence, but you'd never know it standing next to it.

When we disembarked from the bus, we had to stand in a long line (we all squeezed together to prevent anyone cutting into the line) so, hopefully, we could be part of the 200 people who are permitted to go into the Great Pyramid and climb all the way to the ancient tomb of king Cheops each day. It seemed to take forever -- I felt bad for the short girls who were squeezed so as to get little air -- but finally, finally, we were ready to go. To our amusement, they had us hop back on the bus to drive us the 200 meters up the hill to a parking lot that was parallel to the side of the pyramid.

Impatient might be the wrong word to describe what we were all feeling as we stared at the pyramid which rose like a mountain in front of us as our bus carefully parked. We tumbled off, and the first people in our group started running towards the pyramid, eager to be the first people to go into the tomb that day. Believe me, had I not destroyed my knee before I came, I would have been right along with them.

It is difficult to try to scale the pyramids in your mind. Even the night before, while I was sitting and watching the light show, I couldn't really tell how large they are. This may help you to imagine it: when I stood at the base of the pyramid, the stone right in front of me was almost taller than I am. There are MILLIONS of these stones that make up the structure. To even see the top, I had to crane my neck back almost as far as it can go, just like looking at a skyscraper. It's extremely wide too -- we never even walked to the other side of the pyramid, but I can tell you it would take about three minutes at a normal pace to go from one end of one side to the other.

But returning to the tomb…I scrambled after the other people in my class, up the steps carved into the stone to the narrow opening (barely my height) that was left for access into the tomb. They punched my ticket, and I stepped into the rough hewn tunnel.
At first it was almost exactly like a cave--the walls seemed seamless (no pun intended) and the shape of the tunnel was irregular. This quickly changed when I climbed a half dozen recently installed metal stairs, to a very narrow shaft that ascends rapidly to the tomb at the center of the pyramid. 5,000 years ago people were short, I know, but no one is as short as they made that tunnel. Either they decided it was too much effort to make a human height shaft that gave entrance to the pyramid, or they enjoyed walking for almost an eighth of a mile bent double! That part of the pyramid was probably the worst just because it was so uncomfortable. The air quality was poor too -- it's not easy to get fresh air into a cave sealed so tightly that some claim aliens created it. It wasn't long until I was utterly drenched in sweat of a cool, slimy quality unfamiliar to me. There were brief openings in the low tunnel where you could stand for a moment and look up a few hundred feet to where it peaked like the inside of the pyramid. Why they didn't build it all like that is beyond me. Because of our eagerness to get into the tomb, we practically ran up the steep slope, so, in spite of the difficulty, it wasn't long at all until I stood up straight and entered a tall, black doorway to the darkness of the tomb.

The room was only maybe 60 by 30 feet, but the walls reached up two stories above me. They were made of a dark, almost black stone which seemed to suck in rather than reflect the light of the dim florescent tubes built into the sides of the tomb. It was almost completely empty, with walls, floors and ceiling as smooth as marble and so straightly cut I would have sworn it was hewn by a machine. The only object in the room (besides the 20 or 30 of us sweaty, echoing students) was on the far end from the entrance. A long, narrow black box made out of the same stone as the floor, the remains of the sarcophagus, was the instant focus of attention. I quickly walked over to it and stood on the side, my hands joining the thousands that had traced its edges into a polished, slick surface. The sarcophagus had no lid, and one corner was broken off in a V almost to the floor. The inside was just as smooth as the outside with the bottom covered in a thin layer of dirt. It was a while before the first person was brave enough to get in, and a while after that before someone lay down. I quickly realized that my opportunity to lie in the sarcophagus of Cheops, one of the greatest Pharaohs of the first dynasty, would be completely eclipsed if I didn't act before all the students gathered the courage to take their turn. As the fifth person in, I lay down with my head on one end and my toes pointed upward at the other. The coffin was my size, perhaps six inches too long. I crossed my arms over my chest just as everyone else had done, and, though I felt supremely immature, thought about how the people of the first dynasty had laid their God in this tomb after more than a month of mummification, and, leaving the tomb full of priceless treasures which were plundered only a few years later, slowly marched out. I only took a few moments in the sarcophagus, staring up at the black ceiling, sucking in the stale air, before I stood and exited.

While more people filled the tomb, someone started a song -- partly because we were in one of the greatest treasures in the world, and partly because the place echoed. It was "If You Could Hie to Kolob," one of my favorite hymns and one of the few which speaks directly of our theology about the afterlife and the preexistence. A few other songs were sung, and, as people became more comfortable, some of the boys started to hum as though they were mummies rising from the dead. I left about then, thankful that it was almost solely our group in the tomb because I was positive they would assume we were some strange cult. It didn't help that we'd naturally stood in little circles all throughout the tomb...

The descent was less strenuous but more difficult. Should I walk down forward doubled over completely in two, or should I descend more comfortably but with a greater chance of falling and walk backward? I opted for the first of the two, recognizing that my track record of injures due to clumsiness (or idiocy) isn't that great. When we were out, we wandered around on the rocks near the tomb’s exit for a bit, careful not to climb too high and get arrested. I took about a dozen pictures of me standing on the pyramid. For me, this is one of the most irritating things about traveling. I would rather do anything than pose for my thousandth picture! But I know that without photos, memories fade more rapidly. We left soon after, off to see the Sphinx.

We entered through the temple of Chephren, builder of the second pyramid, and the son of Cheops, builder of the great pyramid. His pyramid is, I believe, the one which the transformer in Transformers 2 tore through to get to something-or-other. That movie is really irksome. I don't know why Michael Bay has something against relics of the Near East. Anyway, the temple was spectacular of course, with many wide-based columns as all the Egyptian temples seem to have, and a well at the entrance where you're supposed to throw in money if you ever want to return to Egypt. I didn't throw in money, but my professor said he hadn't either when he was here the first time and, here he was again. So there superstition!

Exiting from the back, we came to stand on the left side of the Sphinx. People don't actually
know why it has no nose. There are multiple theories -- such as the Ottoman's blasting it off because it was sacrilegious, something-or-other about Napoleon or, as the movie Aladdin postulated, because two people flew by on a magic carpet and the distracted sculptor accidentally broke it off with his chisel.

The Sphinx is big, as big as you'd expect -- it still seemed large even though we were standing on a walkway 20 feet above ground level and 40 feet away from it. Apparently, when the Sphinx has been neglected for a while, it becomes covered in sand every few thousand years. In antiquity, because the desert had risen over it, some people believed the Sphinx was only a head planted on the sand. Most recently, when it was excavated, they found a little plaque between its legs. On it, in hieroglyphs I believe (though don't quote me on this) was a story from a Pharaoh on how, as a young boy, he had fallen asleep one day in front of the Sphinx. According to him, the Sphinx sent him a dream and told him that if he would remove the sand from around its body, he assured the boy that he would become king. This the boy did, and years later, as Pharaoh of all of Egypt, he came back to leave record about it.

President Brown, the District President of all the Middle East pretty much and the director of our center, who has been a consultant on such religious and diverse things as the Coptic encyclopedia, the movie Prince of Egypt and the movie Journey of Faith, gave us a brief, spontaneous discourse on how the ancient Egyptian temple system is similar to ours in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was fascinating. A friend of mine took a picture of me "kissing" the sphinx which is actually pretty convincing. Hopefully he'll put it on Facebook so I can have a copy. Realizing that I should purchase something as a record of these places, I got a really overpriced brass pyramid with hieroglyphs on the sides and a "wooden" Egyptian cat. Over the course of that week, I lost or broke both of them. So basically, I will have to go back, just so I can get a proper souvenir.

We left the Sphinx, to my sadness (I was feeling quite chummy with him) and rode around the Giza plateau to a place where we could get pictures of all three pyramids together. From there, we went to a small valley of tombs built into the rock and specifically into the tomb of Ti. If you've never heard of Ti, I wouldn't be too distraught. He was actually just a hairdresser. Really! But for some reason, he was wealthy enough to create an elaborately carved, hieroglyph-covered tomb. We spent a good deal of time standing in a room deep in the tomb whose walls were completely covered in hieroglyphics and drawings of daily life at the time of the Egyptians. The color was even preserved on some of the carvings which were even more impressive because they weren't carved into the stone; the stone around it was carved away so the pictures were raised up and even contoured so you could see the shape of the muscles in the arms of the workers of the field. Our tour guide, Ahmed, bless his heart, spent almost an hour explaining pretty much every aspect of the tomb despite the fact that we were all utterly exhausted and it was ridiculously hot. Through it all, the face of Ti stared at us from the other room. The chamber where we were was the “offerings chamber” where people were supposed to come and offer victuals to the family of Ti. In order so he could see it, they had carved and painted a statue of Ti then put a little hole in the wall where, if you stood directly in front of it, it seemed his dark eyes were staring right at you.

THIS IS A CHANGE FROM THE ORIGINAL (originally I said we went to Memphis this day, but that was actually in Luxor, and here we're still in Cairo...)

What actually happened was that we went to a papyrus factory where we spent quite some time. It was below a really fancy market place for overpriced souviners, and it was constantly being filled by busses of tourists. They had a man demonstrate exactly how papyrus was made anciently, then tell us how to buy some of our own made by the artists there who created them and painted them the ancient way. It was a really legitimate place, very nicely taken care of. Though the papyrus was, of course, over priced. I ended up only buying one as a gift-- a beautiful papyrus of a ship from ancient Egypt. I was too stingy to buy any more. When we left, we were off to eat and then to fly to Luxor.

Because it was still Ramadan (though that night was the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Eid Al-Fitr, or the little feast that lasts three days and is the Muslim equivalent of Christmas), when we went to lunch at a nice restaurant, there were no people there but us. We had an entire staff of 8 people serving us at the buffet and providing us with sodas -- which they didn't tell us cost money until the end. The food was good, and we over-looked the Nile wetlands and greenery filled with palm trees and houses that were falling apart. The manager had a really fabulous sense of humor, so he went up to a girl every once in a while and did this really incredible trick involving a cup full of tea or coffee and a spoon where he would pretend to spill it on someone but then catch it at just the last second. That was also my first experience with being told that I had beautiful eyes like the moon... it happened a lot in Luxor. I spoke with the waiter in Arabic for a bit, so I think he was impressed, and he told me a couple times how "yo have bautaful eyeis," (read out loud, it should sound like an Arabic accent). There was not one time anyone complimented me on the rest of the trip that it was not about my “eyeis.”

As we headed back to our bus they played really loud Backstreet Boys music -- not for us, but in preparation for a party later that night. It was really quite fun to hear though -- at least in Egypt the Backstreet Boys are still cool!

From the restaurant, we drove straight to the Cairo airport where I broke the cat I bought at the pyramids on the security machine. The plane we took to Luxor was sort of small, but the flight was really short and they provided us with seemingly endless drinks. The landing was the roughest I've ever experienced: we bounced at least three times and lurched to the right and left several times before straightening out. I felt ill for about an hour later.

After a short bus ride on our new Luxor busses, we got to the beautiful Sheraton Hotel where we were going to stay the next couple of days. It sits right on the Nile, but unfortunately I got a room on the side that looked over the parking lot! When I did see the Nile that evening, it was a shimmering strip of black, reflecting the lights of the boats gliding over it and the hotels that lined western edge. The moon was barely a crescent and it hung low and golden. It was stunning.

Oh, I mustn't forget to mention how amazing the rooms were. They were modernish, black wood and white beds, and they were equipped with huge televisions that played Arabic soap operas which are exceedingly entertaining to watch, let me tell you. I was exhausted and, still feeling slightly ill, I didn't go out on the town that evening. I went to bed pretty early, excited for the next day.

Coming next: Luxor's temples, and the flight to

Cairo. The real deal.

The next day was our first day in the country of Egypt.

It was pretty exciting to get up in the morning and rush on to the bus to drive across the Sinai. I was excited not only to get to the actual, traditional part of Egypt, but to cross the famed Sinai. Yeh, I’ve crossed the desert on my way to Utah, and the day before had driven through the Negev, but this was my first HUGE desert, so inhospitable that the only real population by the Red Sea are nomads. But first came the border crossing.

Talk about a long wait. When we came to the Gulf of Aqaba, we had to grab all our stuff and disembark into the hot sun -- the beautiful view of the pristinely blue sea was helpful, I must say. It seemed to take forever to get through the line and out of the bureaucracy of Israeli checkpoints just to enter the Egyptian side. I paused at the sign which said "Welcome to Egypt!" in English and "Marhaba bukra Misr" in Arabic (which I was stoked that I could read, btw) and took pictures. Then we rushed across the line and into Egypt.

Realizing that I was suddenly in one of the oldest kingdoms on the entire planet was dumbfounding. Were it not for my exhaustion and general heat stroke, I would likely have been bouncing up and down like the Energizer Bunny. The Egyptian policemen wear antiquated uniforms--all white with a leather belt which has an extra leather strap that wraps over the shoulder. It was like a last vestige of the colonial period of the Middle East, or of the Ottoman Empire. For some blasted reason, Egyptians never quite adopted the air conditioner. That means in almost every building we went (other than our hotels) it was just as hot as outside and frequently more stuffy.

People had warned me about the Middle Eastern tendency to cut into lines but I'd forgotten. As I stood there in the line, I got progressively farther and farther back due to the nonchalant groups of other people who would stride up to somewhere in the middle of the line and slyly integrate themselves into it. Thankfully we were saved from being in the line for the next week because the Egyptian checkpoint passport-people realized we were just a huge group of extremely harmless Americans, so they called us to come to our own separate line so we could get through it.

Once we were on the other side, we had the fabulous opportunity to experience our first Egyptian bathroom -- meaning, no toilet paper ever (they generally have someone standing outside who, for a few Egyptian pounds --about 5 to a dollar -- will give you two or three squares of paper), toilets which actually operate only half the time, and typically no soap or paper towels. We never encountered a bathroom without running sinks though, thankfully. Because of the numerous warnings we'd received, we used hand sanitizer obsessively. I became very paranoid about touching anything after going into that bathroom. It was not pleasant.

After that little adventure, we trundled onto the bus which was as colorfully decorated as a fiesta, and started off into the Sinai. The water of the Red Sea is transfixingly beautiful -- it’s this shade of blue you can hardly believe is real because it’s dark but clear and bright at the same time. Sort of like the night sky just before the first stars appear, but more brilliant. Soon though, we had passed into the mountains which were just as starkly empty of plants as the mountains in the Negev.

When we emerged from the mountains, we spent the next five hours driving through flat land where the only trees were telephone poles and the only life was old men running dirty way stations, that is, except for the checkpoints. I couldn't quite figure out why there were so many of them. You would think they would only need to check you a couple times to make sure you weren't Israeli terrorists or smugglers, not to mention there was only one road you could drive through most of the desert anyway. Yet this was the scene of several recent major wars, from the Suez war with France and England on one side and Egypt on the other, to the 1967 War where Israel conquered all of the Sinai and kept it until the Camp David peace accords.

At the check points, they'd have us stop for a minute and they'd talk to our bus driver for a moment in hypersonic Arabic. Several other soldiers, either in their distinctive camo or the white police uniforms, would unabashedly stare at us until the engine revved and we were off again.

I listened to my iPod for a while, unfortunately, I only have exercise music on it so my ears were full of Linkin Park and Green Day. The music did make it easy to imagine the soldiers of so many generations who'd traversed this wasteland on their way to Israel or to Egypt. Soon though, I became absorbed in a conversation with one of my favorite people on the trip, Yassir from Cairo. He’s one of our tour assistants who has been coming with BYU students on this excursion for years. He spoke with me in Arabic as frequently as I could understand him, and he taught me about Islam, Egypt and his life in Cairo. It was fascinating to see it from the perspective of a native Muslim, and I found him to be amiable and intelligent. As I had been warned by my Arabic professor, he soon pulled out his cell phone to show me his beautiful family: twins, a little boy and girl. In turn I showed him what pictures I have of my family on my camera. The trip seemed a lot shorter with him for company, though he did have a habit of speaking so softly that I had to strain to understand him. Like most middle-aged Muslim men, he had a calloused bruise on his forehead from his daily prayers. I became very accustomed to seeing it all over Egypt.

In the late afternoon, we passed under the Suez Canal which we weren't able to see except for the huge ocean liners passing over it. Someone in our group held her breath the entire time we were passing under the canal in the large, curving tunnel. It was extremely impressive. I tried on the way back and failed miserably. When we emerged, we had left the Sinai and were officially, indisputably in Africa.

I have now been on four different continents. It was a very cool thought.

At first, Egypt was almost exactly like the Sinai, but then the city of Cairo began to emerge. It holds 14 million people and is the biggest city in all of Africa as well as the 16th biggest city in the world. And, as Egypt is a third world country, it is extremely poor for the most part.

This may help you imagine what it looks like: You know those games where you can construct a building? It starts with just the outside, the walls, roof and floor, in only brick or cement. In Cairo, there was a lot of brick. So imagine a high rise apartment building with nothing but the shell of the walls, roof and floor. Then hang laundry out of the windows, break off a few pieces, put a rusty bike on the balcony and makeshift shutters on the window. Put hundreds upon hundreds of these buildings next to each other, of slightly varying heights and levels of dilapidation, Middle Eastern people in traditional Arab clothing, headscarves and out-of-date western clothing, cars which squeal around corners, bicycles and carriages, a Mosque or ruin every few hundred yards, lots of smells -- most unpleasant, and a strange film of grime over everything, and you have greater Cairo. This was essentially what I saw of it while there. This may sound mostly negative, and it was difficult to see people living in such squalor, but I did not get the impression that along with the poverty the people were unhappy. On the contrary, they seemed to be contented with their lives and happy with the communities surrounding them. Yet no one deserves to live in streets full of filth. I can see why people devote their whole lives to charities employed in aiding these countries. But in all this, I'm forgetting a major part of Cairo -- the Nile.

The first time we drove over it on a large, freeway bridge, I clapped my hands in joy and gasped. It is everything it should be, wide, meandering, blue (at least from the surface) and edged by bright green papyrus and tiny houses made of straw. The delta together with the Nile is the most stunning combination of color. Dark, dark brown, every shade of green thinkable, yellow from the shacks of papyrus, and the blue Nile. It was almost shocking to look from such verdancy to the cement, metal and brick of the city. On the Nile sailed feluccas (one-masted, triangular sailed boats, one of the oldest vessels in the world), tour boats and dinghies. And way far in the distance, almost dwarfing the buildings of Cairo, the three pyramids of Giza waved in the heat, pale with the atmosphere between us and them, and an even more shocking contrast between the old and new. Something that crossed my mind several times as we drove towards our hotel was how much Egypt had changed. From a civilization who four thousand years ago built the only remaining wonder of the ancient world, to the country that had so little power in the current world... that was astounding.

Finally, we got to the hotel. When we disembarked, I was exhausted and absolutely ready for bed. But first, we had the “Pyramids Light and Sound” program to attend. If that sounds cool, believe me, it is. The sun had set while we had dinner at the hotel, (skipping over the fresh fruits and vegetables--no one wanted Pharaoh's revenge), so we drove through dark, winding streets of Cairo. It was one of the last days of Ramadan and, accordingly, there were few people on the streets. I watched the hundreds of souvenir shops shoot past, carrying the same wares as the next, and the men in their traditional garb sitting in sidewalk cafes smoking on hookahs. When we arrived, for the millionth time that day, I could hardly stand to stay still. Grabbing the arm of my friend Lindsay, we rushed over to seats as close as we could get to the front. We sat directly in front of the temple of the Pharaoh of the second pyramid. The Sphinx sat only a little off to the side, and the three giant pyramids of Giza rose monolithically in front of us. Against the orange light pollution of Cairo, they were giant black triangles that gobbled up a significant portion of the sky.
The light show began slowly with the first pyramid, Mycerinus', the smallest of the three, as it was lit in blue. Then the most famous, with the portion on the top still covered in limestone as they had been originally, Chephren's pyramid was lit green. Lastly, the largest of the three: Cheops’s pyramid, the father and grandfather of the other two, lit up yellow. Then the light show began. Green lasers, projected pictures onto the temple, various colored pyramids and a loud British narrator told the story of the pyramids and the Sphinx from their beginning through Alexander, Napoleon and the Ottomans until now. It was spectacular to say the least, though perhaps slightly too extravagant in its praise and descriptions. The term purple prose comes to mind. I took pictures of the show, some of which actually aren't blurry, and I hope to post them as soon as I can.

Unfortunately, sleep is a nastily controlling thing and I found myself drooping during the performance. When we finally got back to the hotel, I fell asleep almost immediately after I went to bed.

Coming next: the Pharoah's tomb in the pyramid (I actually laid down in the original sarchophogus inside the tomb), the sphinx, memphis and exploring Cairo.