First Night

The first we got her we were exhausted! They took us off the plane after 27 hours of travel and then dragged us through an additional 5 hours of orientations (they did feed us dinner though) and when I finally got to my room all I wanted to do was sleep! but it turned out I had the most amazing view from my room patio and as we were standing out there it started to thunder and lightning. It was so amazing and I videoed this awesome clip of the Dome of the Rock. Turn off the sound though because i am pretty sure I sound like an idiot. Well enjoy the view I had on my first night in the Holy Land :)

May 1st- First day in the City :)

So this was our first free day to explore the city as well as the first time we were able to take cameras with us. We are supposed to leave the center in groups of at least three which can make it hard to do what everyone wants to do. I had planned to head out with one group of people but when I realized there were twenty people with them I decided to hop ship so I invited myself with a smaller group as they were walking out the door. The day ended up being an adventure!

We headed to the Old City via Lion's or St. Stephen's Gate. We were planning to go to The Dome of the Rock but we ended up being there when they don't let white people in (the vendors terms, not mine haha). So we wandered our way into Bethesda. Bethesda is the pools where it is said that Jesus healed a lame man when no one had the compassion to place him in the bubbling waters of Bethesda. There is a cool church there now called St. Anne's after the Virgin Mary's mother. The pictures captions will describe what we did there but one thing I didn't get a picture of was this Spanish woman holding this kitten. There are feral dirty cats all over Jerusalem and as most people know I love cats but even I won't touch these cats because I am pretty sure it would kill me. Well this tourist picked up the kitten and was holding it over her head and cooing to it like in Lion King. It was really ridiculous and you could tell the cat was terrified.

Next we went to Jimmy's Bazaar; Jimmy has a shop selling really cool olive wood carvings and he caters to Mormons. One guy in the group said he needed to go say hi because him mom buys a lot of stuff from Jimmy. Little did we know that his house is like an olive wood museum and she is like Jimmy's best customer. Jimmy welcomed us so warmly and showed us everything in his store and then he took us next door to his friend's restaurant called the Philadelphia. We realized soon after we walked through the door that it was a really nice restaurant that had hosted both Jimmy Carter and Chelsea Clinton. He bought us a shwarma dinner (shwarma is basically meat in pita). It was absolutely amazing food, especially the hummus and we were so stuffed. That's him in the picture with us at the restaurant. We now LOVE Jimmy and visit him often.

Jimmy and us at Philadelphia!

Door to St. Anne's: Interestingly, the church was to be destroyed in the Islamic conquest but was saved by a Muslim whose name I don't remember but it was used for a time as an Islamic school so there is Arabic writing above the door and was later restored to the Catholic church. 

I love the wildflowers here and especially all the poppies. They will all be dead shortly since the rains have been long gone but I am trying to take pictures of them now so I can remember that this place isn't always so brown. 

Bad pic of me but this is in an underground basilica to St. Anne under the church. The colors were so beautiful!

I am so terrible!

I have been doing super good at emailing and kinda of good at journaling and awful at blogging. but I promise to do better from here in out. Don't put too much stake in that however. Well I will just give a rundown for some people still unaware. I have been in Israel now for 2 weeks but it feels like forever and is really starting to feel like home. I am studying at the Jerusalem Center through BYU; the center sits a top Mt. Scopus next to the Hebrew University in East Jerusalem. The neighborhood were the center sits is pretty much entirely Palestinian. It sounds far off because we sit on a mountain but it's really just a 5 minute walk across the Kidron valley to get to the Old City. I feel like we have done a ton since getting here so I will write some posts on the highlights but needless to say they keep us going non-stop. We are taking classes in language, politics, archaeology and bible studies. We have field trips and other activities as well. There are 80 students and two young families as well as 4 service couples that live in the center. This is all the background info I can think of for now but if you want to know anything else just comment and I will answer it in a future post. I apologize for how ugly the blog is. I am technologically challenged and I have already devoted two hours to it and have given up. Well here is to the Holy Land for the next 4 months.

The Jerusalem Center is in the left corner with the black arched windows. Not the best pic but it gives an idea of were it is in relation to the Dome of the Rock and Old City.

Errrrr My bad....

So yep it has been a full three and a half months since I blogged last. Really stickin' to that creed I am (I talk like Yoda when I am feeling awkward?). Anyways I really will try to make up for it, but probably not in the next few weeks because next week is the last week of school before finals :( I hate finals! But after that it's a crazy whirlwind trip home to see my best friend get married, be a bridesmaid, see friends and get my tonsils out promptly the following monday. You may be surprised to hear this but I am way excited to get my tonsils out! It actually varies day to day but today I am feeling good about it. Because I am so excited I decided to make a list of things I will do while spending two weeks on pain pills healing up:

1) BLOG BLOG BLOG! (you should appreciate that)
2) edit. edit. edit. (i NEED to figure this photoshop thing out)
3)  Catch up on all the TV shows I haven't had time for this semester.
4) Re-watch almost every episode of the office
5) Draw and work on my skills (yeah I said it out loud in Napoleon's voice too)
6) Actually read all of Confessions by St. Augustine
7) Read all my back issues of Nylon that are piling up. (don't tell them, I am still utterly devoted)
8) Write letters (to whom, I don't know, I just miss receiving them so the solution is to write them)
9) Sleep (majorly deprived this semester)
10) Start of 2011 right... tonsil (and hopefully) illness free!

So I finish about 80% of my lists, you can bet on what I won't done. Oh and I am blogging on my new mac! Her two month birthday is in 4 days! Yay for more blog posts to come!

Ps. Have you noticed I use parenthesis a lot? (I think it's how i break the fourth wall...lol )

Don't you just miss summer!

A Tea Party for One

Have you ever had the experience where you decide to do something and you think it is really awesome but at some point it completely falls apart and you are left at square one again? This happens to me often, and rarely early. Whenever this happens to me it always seems to be at the last minute when the time clock is ticking. Thankfully though, some things turn out better after a little road bump (ok this was a huge freaking road bump).

When my photography teacher told me about our final I was rather excited. It offered us complete artistic range and allowed us to do whatever we wanted as long as it fit into the guidelines of presenting our photography. I am a bit of a nostalgic person so i thought I would use this wonderful opportunity to take pictures of my upcoming family reunion in Montana over the fourth of July. The best part was, I was going to take the whole thing on my brand new (yet very old) film camera, this way I could develop the film and make the prints myself.

Heres where the snag occurred: I completely murdered my film during the developing process and not even half of my roll of film ended up being usable. At this point it is Wednesday and my FINAL project is DUE the following Monday. Not a lot of time to put something thoughtful and well done together. This is when all my creative powers died and I was left to waste away in a ditch somewhere... Not really but I was pretty devastated.

Once I got all my creative powers together I came up with a photo shoot centered around tea parties and gardens. Definitely  something whimsical and fun. My lovely model was my roommate Tia. I had a ton of fun putting it together and editing it and almost having a breakdown in Walmart trying to get it printed but in the end it worked out all right.... I got an A! WOo

Now here are a lot of pictures to make up for all the words :)

I hate being in front of a camera but we had to show a little love ;)