The Garden Tomb

This Shabbat I went with a few of my friends to the Garden Tomb where it is believed Jesus was crucified and buried. I live pretty close by it and have been there before, but it is just so amazing to me that I can spend my Sabbath afternoons at such a special place! What better thing could I do with my afternoon than read my scriptures at a place where the Savior may have been and where he suffered so much for all of us. By the tomb there is a place called Skull Hill (see the picture) that fits the meaning of Golgotha which is the place of a skull. Golgotha, or Calvary, is where Jesus Christ was crucified and hung on the cross. The traditional site of the tomb Jesus was buried and then resurrected in is at the Church of the Hol Sepulchre, which I havn't been to yet. But as most of the sites we see are not definite locations, just guesses based on facts found in the scriptures and other sources, it is not important whether this was the place it occured, what really matters is that it happened and that we believe it happened. I know that Jesus suffered and atoned for our sins and I know that if we repent we can return to live with him one day. The atonement is a wonderful gift, and I am so excited to study it with my class while I am here. We have been studying the Old Testament since I got here which has been really good because there are a lot of things about the Old Testament that I didn't understand. Now after learning about it and seeing many of the sites where battles and other events occured I definitely understand it a lot better and see how the gathering and everything fits into place with the New Testament and Book of Mormon. I am so excited to start the New Testament in two weeks to study about Christ's life and be able to see various places he was while here on earth.

Pink Walls, Chocolate, Underwear, and Limes

Here are some more fun pictures from Ein Kerem:

Random highlights from my week at the JC

This was a way fun week that was busy but way fun. One thing I love about being here is that every week is different, it really truly is. We always different activities and trips every week, classes at different times, random activities, and varying stress levels depending on the number of tests we have. This week we had a model Seder led by my Jewish teacher Ophir which was really neat. Seder is the Jewish Passover and so we had the meal and sang songs and everything. I was really impressed with all of the decorations and everything they put up and it was really fun, but also long. We started at 5:30 and didn't get done until 9:30!

Usually people wouldn't care that much because it was a wonderful thing to experience, but we had a midterm and a quiz the next day and people were panicking because they hadn't really studied and were planning on studying that night. That was my plan too, and since the Seder went so long, I realized that it was going to be a really long night. I studied for a little by myself and then started studying with my friends Amy and Craig probably around 11:00. We studied for awhile with enough laughing and talking to keep it fun and it just kept getting later and later. Around 1:30ish our friend Holly joined us and we just kept going and thinking up random ways to remember dates and names. We had some good study music going and did anything to keep us awake from dancing around to laying on the ground hiding in our sweatshirts. If they hadn't been there I would have just gone to bed because I was really tired, but they helped keep me awake which was good because I really needed to study. Anyway, we went hardcore until I finally crawled into bed at 4:00 am when I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer. I set my alarm for 6:30 am because I really needed to study more, but the next thing I knew it was 8:00 am and luckily our friend called to wake us up or we would have missed our class! I ended up doing fine on my tests and everything and we all agreed that it was actually a really fun night. I don't plan on studying way late every night, but since I had to, I am glad that it was such a fun experience. Hooray for school, I just wish they didn't give us so much work...

After our tests were over we had time before lunch we played ultimate soccer, which I think I have talked about before. We play a lot and it is way fun, though I am pretty sure that I broke my big toe from kicking the wall really hard (I was aiming for the ball...)It is way fun and thought I would post a picture of some of my soccer cronies. Yes, that is sweat that you see...

This week I also went to Ein Kerem with a bunch of friends, which is the place where John the Baptist was born. We saw a bunch of churches and stuff and it was a fun relaxing afternoon because we could set our own schedule and had plenty of time. We also got into a Russian convent and luckily our friend spoke Russian so that we could understand them. I am getting tired (I am still trying to catch up on sleep...) and am not sure what else to say about Ein Kerem, but I will post some more pictures from it later-hopefully tomorrow. I am going to be in Jordan for four days, but check back later this week and I will post more updates. Happy Halloween to everyone, eat lots of pumpkin stuff for me! This is my friend Swinterton and I at Mary's Spring which is apparently where Mary drank from. She came up to a church here to visit her cousin Elizabeth after she found out she was with child.

The Egyptian Journey Never Ends

I just got some more Egypt pictures from my friend's cameras that I thought I would share. Enjoy!

My class at Mount Sinai:

At the Egypt border crossing:

Camel ride:

Our crazy taxi group in Cairo (in a 12 person van):

Camels are neat, but sometimes are a little groddie:

Mount Sinai sunrise:

Karnak Temple:

Luxor Temple:

Pyramid at the Pyramids:

P.S. Comments are welcome and appreciated!

I think I'll go pick some olives...

This week we got to pick olives from trees surrounding the center and then pressed them into oil. It is so amazing that we just had to walk outside and there were a bunch of olives to pick, how fun! There were a bunch of olives on all of the trees- some of them were green and some were purple-we weren't sure which ones we were supposed to use, but apparently all of them have oil so we used them all. We had ladders all over and were climbing in the trees and it was a lot of fun. We actually went over to Augusta Victoria, a church up the street, and picked olives for them as a service project, so now I am an official olive picker. At the church they had a whole olive orchard and it was a lot easier to pick them. They had these comb like things that we were able to use to kind of comb all of the olives off of the branches which worked quite well. We just laid tarps out around the trees to catch the olives and then we put them into bags. I was picking olives up in a tree and seriously almost fell out of it-it was pretty funny!

Anyway, once we had all of the olives picked we got to press them into oil. They washed all of the olives in water and then used a millstone to grind them into olive paste. We put the paste in fiber disks and stacked them on one another and put them in this thing that applied pressure to pretty much squeeze out the olive juices. I don't totally understand all of the details, and the process takes awhile (they just showed us how to do the steps, we didn't complete all of them). It was really interesting to learn about the process though, it seemed pretty intense. Some people ended up having an olive paste fight and in case you are ever thinking about having an olive fight-they stain...

I think that we are each going to get a small vial of this olive oil that we made in the Holy Land, which should be awesome. They said that the oil we made isn't for cooking or anything because it is not very good quality-I don't really know what contributes to quality (Nathan-care to enlighten us?) but I don't think the equipment we used was terribly sanitary, and maybe the type of olives is a factor? Anyway, I am really glad I got to experience the olive picking/pressing process.

Paris Holds the Key to your Heart

Right now I am watching Anastasia and am really excited for the Paris song to come up! Most of you probably know by now, but I recently got my mission call to serve for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints for 18 months in the France Paris Mission! I leave in January and am so excited! I have mock french conversations with people at the center which are pretty funny-basically we say hello, how are you, our names, pretty intense stuff. Since I remember very little of the french I learned in high school, I will study french and religion for two months at the Missionary Training Center in Utah, and will then go to France to teach the people there about my church. I am mega excited, and everything to do with France pops out at me now and I am really excited to see the movie Ratatouille again because it is amazing! Anyway, I am sorry I let myself get so behind on posts, I feel that the excuse I am really busy is getting lame (but it is so true!).

A few weeks ago I went to Tel Aviv with 18 other people and it was amazing! I spent the day at a beach on the Mediterraean Sea! My family isn't really a beach family so I havn't spent a ton of time on the beach, but it was so fun. All of the people that I went with were way fun and we had fun swimming around (the water is pretty salty!), playing missionary tag, and a few other games. We buried each other in the sand which was really fun. We had 12 people buried in a row which was really funny, and my friend Craig dug a hole in the sand and completely buried himself which looked really cool, even random people came up and took pictures of him! Here's a picture of the group I went with, my friends Amy, Lauran, Kendra, and I before we run in, and Kayla and I with Craig's head.

Egypt Travels Continued

I am sorry I havn't been faster at blogging about the rest of my Egypt trip, but they sure do keep us busy over here. Since Egypt, we have gone on a few day trips and went to Galilee which was way fun. I still need to get pictures of those trips though from other people, so I will try to finish up with Egypt and then catch up sometime...

After seeing all of the pyramids and everything we took an overnight train from Giza to Luxor which was way fun. I had never been in an overnight train before and it was quite the experience. This is a picture of my bed and my roommate Kayla and I with our gourmet dinner! Don't worry, that is actually me in the overrhead storage compartment area, our beds pulled out from our seats! We even had a little sink and stuff and although it was cramped, I could at least sleep on the train a lot easier than if we had been on a bus or a plane.

We got off the train around 5:30 am and got right going with our day. We went to the Valley of the Kings where a lot of tombs are. I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside them, but they were all really neat and quite spacious. Most of the tombs were raided except for King Tutankhamen's tomb, which is what made him so famous. His tomb was really awesome and later in museums I saw a lot of the stuff that they found in his tomb. I think that I might have liked seeing this stuff more than the pyramids, but they were both amazing. That afternoon we went on a faluka ride on the nile which was beautiful. A faluka is pretty much a giant gondola so I was with 15 other people and we floated down the Nile and had a lot of fun. This is me "drinking" the Nile. Our hotel had a beautiful pool so we went swimming and then went to the Luxor Museum. They had a lot of really neat things things there that were in amazing condition. They even had two mummies and you could see that one of them had curly hair!

The next day we rode around in horse drawn carriages to the Luxor and Karnak Temples. The Karnak Temple complex is the largest in the world and has 134 carved columns and amazing works of art (picture above). It was huge! The Luxor Temple was also amazing and had a ton of magnificent statues.
On our walk back to the hotel, I noticed a truck bed full of pitas. They were just sitting there in a dirty truck so I had to take this picture quick. Some guys saw us taking the picture and as we walked quickly away, I saw them taking the pitas out of the truck and I am pretty sure they went and sold them! This experience definitely helped validate the advice we were given to not eat food off of the street or even at restaurants they didn't take us to...
While I am talking about food I might as well briefly mention some of the advice they gave us while in Egypt. We were told not to drink the water or else it would make us sick, so we always had water bottles with us and used them to brush our teeth and everything. We weren't supposed to eat fresh fruit or vegetables and they pretty much said to eat things only when they were steaming hot. Everyone pretty much followed the guidelines, though a few people had watermelon one night because Brother Ludlow said it had a risk factor of 2 out of 10, but for some reason all of the watermelon eaters got sick...Anyway, I wasn't a huge fan of the food there (sorry Safwat) but I did really like these honey soaked cookies and cake that they had at a few meals! Oh, and everyone loved the meal at Hard Rock Cafe Cairo because they had a lot of chocolate for dessert (most things are more honey/sugary than chocolaty here).

That night we took an airplane back to Cairo and the next day we went to the Egyptian Museum where they had a ton of awesome stuff. I am not going to lie, the first hour we were there was probably my least favorite hour of the whole trip. The place was packed and not very many places understand the importance of air conditioning, so it was really really hot. I was just sitting there sweating while our tour guide was describing a lot of different things, and I thought I was going to have heat stroke or something until I chugged a liter of water and found one of the three air conditioned places in the entire museum. Anyway, regardless of the heat, the museum had a ton of cool things (get it?) including a lot of stuff from Tutankhaman's tomb and everything from insanely large earings to mummified animals-they had dogs and monkeys and some pretty neat stuff.

After the musuem we ate at the Hard Rock Cafe and then went to a big bazaar market type place which had a ton of stores. We kind of ran around and got lost but then slowed down to find some stuff to buy. It was funny because I wore a superman t-shirt and practically every single merchant we passed made a comment about it. I am not sure what I was thinking by wearing that shirt, but after about two minutes of being called superwoman I knew I needed to buy a new t-shirt or something. Luckily I had a chance to quickly turn it inside out while we were in a store-don't worry Mom, I had a shirt on underneath! Anyway, the market was fun and I love to haggle, but I didn't really see anything that I terribly liked so I just got a t-shirt. After dinner we went to a pyramid light show that was okay (I might have fallen asleep for some of it) but it was neat to see the pyramids at night.

The next day, Saturday we went and saw the Muhammad Ali Mosque which was really neat and then a few other churches and then we drove for awhile to Sinai. We got in around 8:00 pm and then had dinner and Sacrament Meeting at 10:00 pm. It was pretty neat because we had it in this random building that had cats running around throughout the meeting and had three different speakers which were all really good. We were planning on leaving to hike Mount Sinai at 1:15 am, so I was planning on just staying up, but then ended up getting probably 40 minutes of sleep. We got on the buses at 1:15 am somewhat resembling zombies or something and comparing amounts of sleep which ranged from none to 2 1/2 hours. Anyway, we got to climb Mount Sinai, which was amazing! We left so early so that we could get to the top to see the sunrise and I am so glad that we did! It was pretty cold up there, but after roasting everywhere in Egypt I loved it! While we were up there, Brother Draper talked about the 10 commandments and how we can apply them to our lives and we sang a few songs. It was a really neat experience and definitely one of my favorite parts of the trip.

I am glad that we hiked Sinai at the end of the trip, or else our sleep schedules would have been way off. After we hiked back down we packed up the bus and headed for the Israeli border where we spent forever at customs (and an alabaster pot I bought broke) but it was fine because we had time to see the Red Sea while we were waiting. My friend Lauren went wading and got pretty wet so she just decided to jump in! It was pretty funny, but I am glad she was on the other bus...We finally made it back to the Jerusalem Center at 9:00 pm and after racing to put my laundry in before everyone else, I ate dinner and then went to bed.

It was seriously an amazing trip and every day was incredibly fun. We got to see some really neat things and I am glad that we were all able to make it home healthy and safe. If you want more details about any of the things I saw-this is definitely the highly condensed version-feel free to ask me! Wasn't the sunrise at Mount Sinai beautiful?

I was in a pyramid!

So I always thought the pyramids were huge, but looking at them up close and imagining humans building these ginormous structures is just incredible. Each block of stone was around 2 1/2 tons, and who knows how they were able to get those on top of the pyramids. In Giza we saw the Khufu (largest), Khafre, and Menkaure pyramids along with the Sphinx. We got to go inside the Khafre temple which was a neat experience. To get into the pyramid you had to duck way down and walk down a ramp into the pyramid and then, still crouching down, you walk up an incline until you get into a large room deep inside the pyramid. It was awesome to actually be inside one of the pyramids, and the room that they built was huge. Getting out was the same as getting in, only I stood up a little too soon and banged my head really hard when I got out...The point I am touching is the original height of the pyramid, I think some of it has fallen away with time.

After the pyramids we saw the Sphinx which is sculpted after the body of a lion and the head of Khafre, a pharaoh. It was way fun to see, and I thought of the scene in Aladdin where they fly by it on the magic carpet and you see the nose get broken off.

After the pyramids we got to go on a camel ride! Camels are very interesting animals, and their legs bend in such a weird way! I think that I thought riding a camel would be similar to riding a horse, but you get way higher up! It was a lot of fun, but a very quick ride because we had to get through the rest of our tour.

Egypt is Amazing!

I just got back from Egypt late Sunday night and it was a blast! I can now say I have been to Africa, and it was definitely quite the experience. We were there for a week, so I will probably talk about the trip in segments, but don't worry, I will try to post a lot of pictures (as long as my connection lets me).

We left last Sunday and stopped by Beersheba where Abraham dug a well. There was a whole town there and it was really neat to see the things that were left. We also got to see the wilderness of Zin and Kadesh Barnea. The Israelites wandered through 7 different wildernesses, two of them being these, and it was neat to see. Check out the wilderness of Zin in the background of the picture.


After that we drove to a Kibbutz and went on a tour and then spent the night at a different Kibbutz. A Kibbutz is a community that combines socialism and zionism, and the tour was really interesting. The community works together to run a dairy farm, and they showed us the entire process. They all have different jobs around the community, but all of them receive compensation according to their needs, and things like healthcare and everything are provided for them. It was a really pretty place and a neat concept, but I am not sure I would want to live there. They had a lot of date trees which was really neat and we got to try fresh dates which were really good. It was funny because they had big bowls of dates for us to try (they said it was the only "date" we could have this semester...) and a lot of people didn't really like them so I grabbed a bunch on my way out. I think I was on a sugar high for awhile...The tour was really fun and then we had dinner there and danced around and sang Jewish songs. It was so much fun! This is me with a cow at the Kibbutz.


The next day we crossed the border into Egypt and it was kind of crazy because I almost left my purse with my camera, wallet, etc. at the Kibbutz where we stayed-that could have been awful! Luckily a guy in my group noticed it got left behind and brought it. Egypt has a lot of sand and such, and it was cool seeing where people live and how they dress. My bus almost hit a camel as it walked across the road-crazy huh? We traveled to Giza and stayed at a really nice hotel with a beautiful pool that like 50 of us went swimming in. It was really funny because we played a lot of games and even turned it into a whirlpool, all while people lounging around the pool just sat and stared at the crazy Americans. After dinner we packed 16 of us into a 12 person van with a crazy taxi driver who gave us a tour of Giza. Our tour was pretty much him taking us to his cousin's/friend's shops, but it was hilarious. He was a crazy driver and driving really fast, while all of us were just packed in the back. Fun times.