Day 2!

  Well, we've now spent 2 days here in Jerusalem, and it's been a cool day! It's been really hard to stay awake all afternoon- We had a cool morning out in the city, on a long walking tour through the old city, it was really cool! I'll elaborate in a second, but then after that long morning walk in the heat, we came back and had lunch, and then were expected to stay awake for 2-3 hours more of orientation stuff. Yeah. Right. Especially when you factor in the collective jet lag, I think there will be a lot of questions tomorrow and the answer will be "we covered that yesterday".

   So anyways- old Jerusalem. It's pretty cool. It's the historical part of the town, that has the famous sites, one of the cool places was the church of the holy sepulchre. This is one of the places where it was believed that Christ was crucified and buried. I know that with some biblical history sites there was a bit of disagreement about where it actually all happened, but I thought that the crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ were agreed upon. So this seemed to be the less traditional one, but they had a place where there were 3 holes in the ground, which apparently was for the crosses. There was a marble slab which apparently was where they laid Christ to prepare his body for burial, and another place (I'm forgetting the name) where they hold that Christ resurrected. There was a ton of people in a huge line to check it out, so we didn't go then, but hopefully we'll go. We walked by the street that goes to the Garden tomb, but didn't go close enough to actually see it.

   Another interesting thing that goes in is at certain hours of the day, they broadcast a prayer over the city through a loudspeaker, so everyone can be reminded to pray, or follow along with the prayer. It's of course in Hebrew, and is kind of sung/chanted, in a very middle-eastern style feel. It was kind of cool to hear during the day and during dinner when we're eating on the terrace, but a little less enjoyable when they do one at 4:30am.

   Well, despite my best efforts, I forgot my camera charger- but luckily, someone else had one that was compatible with my camera. So, on my next post, I'll be sure to have taken and uploaded some pictures!