A Photographic Essay of the Past Few Weeks

These have been an awesome few weeks! Here's some photos to give you a glimpse of some recent happenings.

Garden of Gethsemane on a Sabbath afternoon. It's so surreal to think that just a short walk from where I live, the most important event in history took place.

Almost every Sabbath, I walk to the Garden Tomb. There, groups of students like to sing a few hymns and have time  to read scriptures and think about the great event that happened there- the resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ. This has become my favorite part of the week because of the peace and Spirit I am able to feel there.

Getting some gelato one night in West J

Jewish quarter of the Old City

Writing notes at the Western Wall

Western Wall/Wailing Wall- this is the only wall that remains from the second temple that was destroyed in 70 AD. Jewish people gather here all the time to mourn, pray, and leave notes in the cracks of the walls. They are still waiting for the temple to be rebuilt.

Leaving my mark at the Western Wall

View of West Jerusalem from the Tower of David Museum

View of the Old City from the Tower of David Museum (we didn't care much for the museum part of this museum, but we liked the view from the top)

View of the Old City from the Tower of David Museum. We spent almost an hour up there just enjoying the view and talking about life. By the way, I LOVE my friends here.

Overlooking the valley where David killed Goliath with a sling and stone - this was on our fieldtrip to the Shephelah (low Judean foothills). I could not get enough of the lush, green rolling hills!

Bell Caves at the shephelah. The limestone is soft so huge caves were dug out to collect chalk a long time ago. They also had some sweet acoustics so we sang some hymns in them.

Bell Caves

So you're at this national park with rolling green hills all around, then you walk down some stairs at the top of a hill that lead inside of the hill, and this is what you see. It's a huge underground ancient pigeon housing/breeding place that I was definitely not expecting!

These rolling hills and blue skies were to die for

A cistern at Maresha- this ancient city (about 6th century BC) was built on top of soft limestone so all the homes dug  huge basements and cisterns underneath. Archaeologists found these and connected them underground so we were able to go on a half hour walk through a bunch of these ancient homes and cisterns- it was really cool! 

Caves at Maresha

Arab culture night at the JC! This night started with some Muslim call to prayer leaders who sung the call to prayer for us and talked about it, then we had a HUGE Arab feast prepared by our fabulous chefs, followed by Arab dance instruction and then our interpretations of it to some cool Arab music. It was so fun!

Arab culture night... yeah we're pretty much really American but we tried

We found a patch of wildflowers at the Pools of Bethesda in the old city on a day we spent exploring

South Jerusalem- this is built on top of ancient ruins from the time of David in the Old Testament

Hezekiah's tunnel! This tunnel was built under the ancient City of David (ancient Jerusalem) during the reign of Hezekiah in order to bring water under the city walls to prepare for a time of siege. It's about a half hour of hiking through water in a super narrow tunnel, often having really low ceilings. It's a claustrophobe's nightmare but I thought it was pretty cool!

Pool of Siloam where Christ healed the blind man (it's a lot bigger than this but most of it hasn't been dug out)

Everywhere you go in Jerusalem, there's clothes hanging out to dry

On Valentine's day after classes, a group of us headed out to the Old City for a little bit to buy chocolates for our friends

The story of this paper chain: The night before Valentine's Day, I was handed a stack of red paper to make decorations for our Valentine's Day dance with because I'm on the Party Planning Committee. I then proceeded to hand it to my friend Nick who was supposed to help with the decorations too and went to take a shower (I'm the worst). When I came back like an hour later, I was shocked that there was this paper chain that went from the 5th floor lounge down to the 4th floor. Of course it couldn't just cover two floors, so we decided to triple the length and stayed up late working on it. We hung it across the ceiling of the 3rd floor up to the 6th floor and made a big heart on the wall to decorate for a surpise for Valentine's day morning. Then for the dance we moved it and surrounded the entire gym with it. Okay so it probably wasn't the best use of time but it was the longest paper chain anyone here had ever seen and is a funny memory.

You wouldn't think that a Valentine's day dance for only 82 students (59 of which are girls) would be fun, but trust me when I say this group of students can make anything fun. My neck is still sore two days later from whipping my hair so much. I'm lucky to have had 81 wonderful valentines this year!

I can never get enough of this view from the balcony off my room. Every day, I walk out and look at it just to remind myself it's real.