There's so little time left here. I can't believe that I'm leaving this all so soon. I feel like I'm finally starting to understand things, finally starting to get a feel for life here, starting to learn the language, starting to know the Israelis. I'm running into the same people on the street, talking to people I recognize from random bus trips or conversations in cafes. It's different now. Things are a little less new to me, but no less interesting.

The best way I can describe it is with the Islamic call to prayer. Five times a day, every mosque in the city projects a man singing, calling all Muslims to pray. It happens before sunrise, around 12:30, in the afternoon, after sunset, and late in the evening. When I first came here, there was so much mystery about the prayer. It was so new and foreign to me. And it's still a beautiful thing to hear, but I expect it now. I don't even bat an eye when we hear it through the windows during class. And it's the same with other things. The sound of gunfire in the distance, at any time of day, is something I've come to expect. No one even talks about it now. Helicopters fly overhead, at all hours. Monks eat in the cafeteria. Some guy on the street thinks he's the High Priest. People carry around automatic rifles. So?

The best way I can describe it is that I feel a distinct break coming so soon... it's not that something's ending but just that I'm leaving it. It's not a vacation anymore in the way that a person might come and see things and leave and keep the experience in a little plastic vial of water from the Jordan River. This has changed my life, in ways that I don't think I could explain to you on a website.

The word on the streets is that of chaos now. People are simultaneously hailing the beginning of World War III, a new Palestinian State, the Third Temple Period. We were at the Western Wall the other day, staring up toward the Dome of the Rock, and my friend said quietly to me, "Wow, can you believe that the Temple once stood right up there?" A young Jewish guy, no more than 30, who had been listening walked over and put his hand on my friend's shoulder, smiling. "It'll be there again real soon, real soon." The feeling among all is that something is going to happen soon, any day, whether it's a suicide bombing or an all-out war or the coming of the Messiah. CNN says that 120,000 people are in Eilat right now in the south, mostly refugees from the north. Another suicide bomber was just caught in Tel Aviv. My roommate's mom was driving there and she was sitting in traffic that had come to a dead stop when she saw a woman surrounded by military and police officers literally thrown into the back of a van before it sped away. Three others were arrested, along with several others in Jerusalem. This morning I woke up at about 5 AM to wailing sirens that seemed to surround the school, and when I walked over to the window on the third floor to look down toward the Old City, I saw flashing lights. My friends have family in bomb shelters. I've met Israelis who can't go home because the roads are blocked off.

And I've experienced things, just tiny little isolated incidents, that I don't imagine I could ever forget. I went to Yad Vashem yesterday with my friend Alison. Yad Vashem is the Holocaust Museum of Israel, a huge complex of buildings and memorials centered around the "Hall of Names", a cylindical room that holds in binders stored around the entire room the names and information about every Jew who perished in the Holocaust.

That museum really hit hard, I think. I mean, I've been here awhile, and I'm studying at the state university of Israel that pretty much represents Zionism in its finest, so I'm obviously pro-Israel in a lot of ways. But I don't think I even had a clue what the existence of Israel means to Jews. Think about what it means to finally have a country to call your own after centuries of exile? I mean, can you imagine the entire Jewish population of Poland, a community of 3.4 million, completely wiped out? This isn't the place for me to muse over the totally bewildering nature of modern anti-semitism, not to mention the murder of 6 million Jews, but just for a moment imagine the displacement of that many people and that way of life. And suddenly, Israel could become theirs. They were offered an Israeli state in Uganda, did you know that? But it was this place, this Promised Land, and this Jerusalem that they desired. Their Temple Mount was here. And now they could be here too. So many Jews have made aliyah (immigrated) to Israel. (I met a girl today, just 18, who moved here from London a month ago. In four weeks she's marrying a 19-year old in the Army, a guy who's fighting in the north right now.) The Hebrew language has been resurrected after having only existed on paper for some 2000 years. And here, finally, the Jews have a place where their religion and their state and their way of life can be one and the same, the way it was in Biblical times.

But I began to question what I was feeling. Was it entirely pity for the Jews that I was feeling, or was I also caught up in a more sweeping emotion, an emotion that was being poked and pricked: a deep hatred for Nazi Germany?

And in a moment, the complexities of politics returned.

Welcome to Mea Shearim.

After the Holocaust Museum, we took a bus over to Mea Shearim, a neighborhood northwest of the Old City inhabited strictly by ultra-ultra-Orthodox Jews.

This is a whole different world. The streets are unpaved and filled with rocks. People are dirt poor. They wear clothing in tatters. Women and children wear clothes clearly homemade, with the same dull blues and blacks and smoky browns you would imagine to find in peasantry Eastern-Europe. Modern life is shunned. Alleyways and staircases are falling apart. Behind each run-down house is an inner courtyard which connects many of the buildings and opens into a communal area where children sit and play jacks and women dry clothes above. It's like stepping back in time into an 18th-century Polish ghetto.

You can't get anywhere close to the neighborhood, if you're a man, unless you're wearing pants and a long-sleeve shirt, and you need to cover your head. (The dress code for women is even more strict, and women cannot walk alone safely.) I was wearing the nicest pants I had with a white dress shirt and nice shoes. Alison and I walked over to a little store before we got near to Mea Shearim and I bought a kippah. Yes, that's right, a yamekah, one of those little circular pieces of cloth that many Jewish men wear on their heads. So I was fully decked out... but it still wasn't enough. I still felt out of place because my pants were brown instead of black. The moment we got in there I felt completely separate from everything, sticking out like a sore thumb.

I've heard from multiple people that you can be stoned in this neighborhood. If you drive through their streets on Shabbat, "they will throw rocks at your car." People have died here. And the neighborhood has been the target of its share of suicide bombings. As we walked down the street, there was a man, probably a Christian, running, literally running, through the street, wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I caught him in the photo above... you can see him way in the back if you enlarge the picture. I don't know if someone was chasing him, but people were yelling as he ran past.

You see, in Mea Shearim Jews don't believe that Israel has a right to exist. They believe that, unless the Messiah brings it, an Israeli state cannot exist on the Earth. Signs posted throughout say "Long live Palestine" and other such things. Streets fall into disrepair, and when something explodes, no one really cleans up after it. You see, the Kingdom is going to come so soon! Hatred for Israel is intense here. People have died. Some residents go so far as to reject Hebrew as a spoken language, calling it a language of the Holy Books, and speaking only in Yiddish. Photography is highly disliked in Mea Shearim. I took about 10 pictures, and each one I had to try to take without anyone seeing me.

Most Jews despise this neighborhood and the people who live here. In every conversation I had with informed Jews about this topic, they said things like, "I can't believe you went there. People get stoned there all the time."

I was talking to a couple of my friends today. We were discussing our views on this whole trip. We've met a lot of interesting people, and a lot of very religious and dutiful people, but our experience with people who have something to say about their actual connection to God is only contained to a few people in random places. A lot of my dialogue with Jews has been informative, but 99% of the time it's focused on the State of Israel and global politics, rather than on the state of their relationship with God. Everyone has a political agenda to push. With almost every person I've met, a lot of the Jews who moved here from Europe or America believe that Jews have a superior claim to sole occupancy of the Holy Land. Racism is rampant here. Arabs are feared irrationally, to the point where very few of my Jewish friends would even consider walking around a Muslim part of town. The other night we were in the Old City and we were going to take a shortcut to the Jewish Quarter through the Muslim Quarter, and a couple of the girls we were with, when they discovered where we were going, simply freaked out. They've been taught their whole lives that the Muslim Quarter is dangerous and off-limits. In our discussions on their religion, they've focused mainly on their fear of some sort of attack from Muslims. And most of my talks with Christians here have focused mainly on their sense of undeserved minority in the city and their exclusion from politics, like they're not allowed to play the game but they really want to. Get off it, guys! You don't need to look for people to hate too!

I've discovered that, personally, I believe that both Jews and Arabs have very legitimate claims to this part of the world. Muslims have lived here for the last 1300 years. They have holy sites here and they have family here and they have lives here. I don't understand how people can feel so divided when they each pray to the same God, each Faith traditionally branching back to the same Abraham. It's the same God, my friends. It's the same Biblical characters, the same stories. Muslims and Christians and Jews pray to the same Yahweh. This is undeniable fact. You walk through the Old City and you walk down the same street and you pass through boundaries to three different quarters. Through each quarter, people around you are reaching out to God in the way they learned how. What is this battle they're fighting? Their Holy City is divided down arbitrary boundaries, with churches and mosques and synagogues and holy sites sometimes standing inconveniently beyond the borders of their religious quarter. Bethlehem is illegal for Israelis to enter, and today most Christians will never see the Church of the Nativity. Palestinian-controlled areas like Jericho are segregated and divided. The security fence splinters through the West Bank. Checkpoints restrict vehicular access to many small towns. But in each neighborhood, the truly Faithful each seek desparately to connect with the same God.

And there are some people in this city who do have a real connection to God. In Jerusalem there are Jews who have studied the Bible for decades, every day of their lives, and know each word by heart. Some of these people have connections to God which don't depend on a forced sense of political superiority but rather on humility and prayer. Some have connections to their ancient traditions that don't rely on a hatred for Nazi Germany but rather on a sense of survival and deliverance in the tradition of the Exodus from Egypt. And some have a love for their neighbors that looks beyond religion and seeks to know each person by the way they live rather than on the color of their skin or the way they pronounce the name of God.

These people are few.

Before I get into anything else, I have to talk about our trip on Friday.

So on Thursday night I didn't go to sleep, mainly because I'm an idiot. We were leaving at 2:30 AM. I thought that I'd be able to sleep on the bus on the way to Masada, a good ways south in the Negev Desert near the Dead Sea. However, the school overbooked the trip horribly. We took 3 buses, and each was really crowded, hot, and kind of dirty. I sat with my friends, and just as were drifting off to sleep some girl in the back of the bus started screaming. She found a cockroach. I'm sort of used to them by now, to be honest, but I don't like the idea of them running around the floor of a crowded bus. Fun trip.

The sun comes up really early here, and around 4:30 the faintest light started to creep over the desert horizon. Massive mountains, infinite stretches of sand, nothing around. We were the only vehicles on the road, a road which became only faintly discernible from the sand. As we got closer to Masada the mountains got higher and the road got bumpier.

Masada is a enormous plateau, on the top of which existed a Jewish city. King Herod, who also built the Temple Mount, built a series of 30 cisterns and aqueducts and bathhouses and the like into the side of this mountain to support a population of some 1000 Jews in the middle of the desert. And this city had everything. A synagogue, houses, public buildings, shops, a palace... everything.

So along come the Romans, again, and they want to kill the Jews, again, but this time, the Jews are at the top of the biggest plateau in the desert. Well, that can't be, so the Romans decide to recruit Jewish slaves from Jerusalem and build a ramp up the side of the mountain to the top. It took two years, but they literally changed the topography of the mountain. The Jews on top waited, not knowing what to do. They could throw things down at the slaves building the ramp and kill as many as possible, but they would be killing their family, their blood. So they just sat and waited. At the end of it all in 73 AD, when the Romans breached the walls of the city, all 600 Jews inside committed suicide rather than be taken captive or killed.

Of course we were late. We missed the actual sunrise. Our guide first led us downhill to some of the cisterns. Huge rooms. Really gigantic. The water collected inside each and was sufficient for a year or more, in case of a drought. It was interesting, but we had all wanted to watch the sunrise over the Dead Sea from the top.

Anyway, we walked up the exceptionally long, winding path to the top of Masada, built partly on the remains of the Roman ramp. When we got to the top, our tour guide explained the ruins we saw: stone outlines of buildings, a synagogue, a church (!... some monks decided to build a monastery up here sometime around 600 AD), and some other things. The synagogue up there is the oldest known synagogue in the world. We had to wear hats to go inside, even though only the low stone walls were all that remained. A group of Orthodox Jews were praying inside. We watched them pray against the backdrop of the mountains below. Apparently a Torah was discovered buried nearby. The Jews never throw away their Torah when it falls into disrepair. Instead, they'll often bury it. This was one of the oldest Torahs ever found. AND, the existence of a synagogue at all from this early date proves that synagogues were not a replacement for the Temple after it was destroyed, as was once imagined, but actually existed and flourished as the heart of local Jewish communities even during the Temple Period.

We walked around a little more and then took a cable car back down. Yasin wanted to hear about the inclines in Pittsburgh, and I explained them to him and Gere and a couple girls from England and Scotland. Haha, I love talking about Pittsburgh. I've found that almost everyone from every country has heard of Pittsburgh, though almost no one could point to it on a map. When they don't know I grudgingly say, "It's sort of near Philadelphia," and they'll say, "Aaaahhh." I could spend hours writing about the disproportional amount of attention American cities get over any other cities in the world. For the rest of the world, the US is made up of and east coast and a west coast, a hillbilly south, and a lot of cowboys in-between. But those same people also seem to know so much about random pieces of American culture and history, and you can't help but be fascinated when they excitedly mention something they've heard in a movie or song. On the one hand it makes you upset that you don't know much about their countries, but on the other hand you begin to get a sense of the overwhelming almost-mythical aura of New York City or the Wild West or the space program, or rock and roll or movies or Coca-Cola, Hollywood, Chicago, Philly, Texas, California. Do you feel something when I say those things, or are you too used to it? Tell me, name 10 cities in Israel. An Israeli can name 100 cities in our country. And everyday I'm surprised what obscure references I sometimes hear, things that I've forgotten. What a great country.

That doesn't change my opinion that Jerusalem is the most interesting city on the face of the Earth. I think I know a reasonable amount about the US and Europe, and though I've only been a handful of places, I've met people here who've traveled all over the world, and they agree that Jerusalem is the most unique place on the planet.

I miss the United States. I don't want to come home yet, by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm appreciating home a lot more than I did before. There was a time when I said that the US was a great country, but now I understand why. I won't get all mushy right now, but I will say that we take for granted simple things like crossing state borders without having to stop at checkpoints, or riding buses without a paralyzing (but legitimate) fear of the man sitting next to you, or not having to worry about turning on the news because the third-largest city in your country is under attack and your family's stuck in a bomb shelter and you have no way to contact them.

I know I take those things for granted. I'm simple, I guess, and I miss simple things. I miss cheeseburgers and Doritos and grilled barbecue and picnic tables. I miss rainstorms and cool evenings when you drive around in the car with the windows down. I miss driving. I miss fast food. I miss lasagna. I miss English. I miss American accents (I've learned how thick my own is here). I miss rock music. I miss air conditioning. I miss Kennywood. I miss fishing. I miss baseball... yes, even the Pirates. I miss summers at home. And I miss my friends and I miss my family.

That was ridiculously mushy. I apologize.

Ahem, so yesterday, Jake from New York (one of my best friends here), Alison from Pittsburgh, Alyssa and Kevin from Canada, and Lars from Germany went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. That's one Protestant, three Jews, and an atheist for those who are counting. We were trying to go to whatever mass was being offered at the time, but it ended up being a crazy fight through the crowds, trying to follow the different services all going on simultaneously, walking around the church through all the stations of the cross. What's cool is these stations of the cross are actually the real Stations of the Cross. "Hey, Jesus was crucified up here." "Hey, he was buried over here."

The music was phenomenal. Gregorian chanting greeted us as we walked in. I showed them around the church, since I'm pretty familiar with all the nooks and crannies now, showing them the entrance to the crypt, Golgotha, the Tomb, the stone that marked the center of the world on ancient maps, the basement, the basement below that one... you get the idea. At one point we just sat down near Calvary and soaked in the whole thing around us. A crowd pushed by following the Greek Orthodox service as it made its rounds around the church. After the crowd had disappeared, in came the Armenians with their little band of faithful. Their service was beautiful. The chanting and singing sounded so sad. The monks bowed down and kissed the ground in harmony, kneeling and standing in perfect rhythm, part of an ancient ceremony older than anyone probably could remember ...and almost no one saw it but us.

Then we ran over to the Jewish Quarter for a tour that we had booked. 15 shekels got us on an English-speaking tour of the tunnels under the Muslim Quarter along the length of the Western Wall. You see, a long time ago, after the destruction of the Temple, Muslims built the Dome of the Rock and the El-Aqsa Mosques on the Temple Mount. That was in about 690 AD. Well, Muslims were tired of walking up to the Temple Mount 5 times a day to pray in their mosques, so they built these enormous arches on which they built their homes above so that the walk to the mosque would be on level ground. This is now known as the Muslim Quarter.

Far underground, under the ancient arches, archaeologists have now been able to excavate along the Wall, revealing stones weighing 600 tons, stacked on top of each other, supporting the side of the Temple Mount. Do you realize how big 600 tons is? To this day, no one has any idea how Herod was able to move stones like that. No one has any idea. They're still trying to find out how deep the wall goes. It's deep. Really deep. And they just last week discovered one of the ritual baths that Jews used to bathe in before going up to the Temple Mount. That's the first one they've ever discovered, I think.

So we walked single file through this tunnel. We were on a tour with only Jews. To go on the tour men had to have something covering their head, so I got to wear another one of those cardboard kippahs. At one point in the tour we stopped along the Wall directly perpendicular to what used to be the Holy of Holies. A little synagogue was set up down there, in a little room no more than 10 feet wide with a ceiling about 7 feet high. Basically that's the closest you can get to the Holy of Holies unless you're a Muslim or unless you go to the Temple Mount and walk right up to the wall of the Dome of the Rock. Four or five people were sitting down there praying. They whispered their Hebrew. A woman dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. It was powerful.

The tunnel let out on the Via Dolorosa in the Muslim Quarter. The Via Dolorosa is the street that Jesus walked down on his way to be crucified. On Fridays at 3:00 PM, Franciscan friars lead hundreds of people in a procession down the length of the street to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, going through all fourteen Stations of the Cross. They carry a big wooden cross and push their way through the crowds. Pilgrims weep, Muslims stand by and watch. I want to see it.

Most interesting place in the world, hands down.

Let's say you want to walk around Jerusalem. If you want to go to any holy sites, you need to wear pants (no jeans) and a nice shirt. If you want to be comfortable in the desert sun, you need to walk around naked. It's going to be a long day. Bring a water bottle and a pocketful of shekels. Trust me.

If it's Shabbat, like today, forget about eating in the Jewish Quarter. You can't take pictures there either and you can't use any sort of electronics. The street vendors in this Quarter have closed their shops. You'll have to spend your money somewhere else.

People will beg from you, however, wherever you go. If you're feeling generous, give them any loose agorot you might have, that is, the tiny fractions of a shekel that amount to less than a penny. Soon you'll realize that you can't possibly help everyone who stops you, and you'll ignore them.

You'll see the Western Wall, for maybe the twentieth time, but you'll still be amazed at the sense of overwhelming quiet there. You'll probably want to go up. Since it's Shabbat, a lot of people are here. Remember, men on one side, women on the other. Someone will hand you a piece of cardboard to put on top of your head. They'll talk to you in Russian, and you'll nod and hold your hand to your head to keep the cardboard from blowing away. Don't be nervous but you'll be the only one walking around the Wall who's not an Orthodox Jew. They're the ones who wear full black suits and hats. And they pray out loud, rocking back and forth. Old men, young men. Jews from all over Europe and Russia. The closer you get to the wall, the louder the murmur of the prayer, from behind you, from beside you. Some people will be sitting in plastic chairs dotting the square. Others will lean against the Wall with one hand raised, crying. A group of 6 or 7 Jewish teenagers from the US will inevitably show up, but they'll stop joking around and they won't talk here. Neither will you.

You'll leave the Wall, hungry, and walk through the security gate to look for food in the Muslim Quarter, no more than 100 yards north. It will surprise you how loud things suddenly are here. The street is narrow and twists its way up a long incline. All around you are street vendors, selling everything from clothes and carpets to fresh fruits and bread and pastries... always bread and pastries. Their stores are tiny and jut into the street, spilling out into the flow of people moving past. You bump into strings of beads hanging from the ceiling and step around an old woman walking slowly up the steep hill. Every vendor is yelling in Arabic, always yelling. Music blares from some Arabic CD store. Groups of two or three Muslim women in full dress rush past you with their heads lowered. A few men are dressed in their traditional Islamic robes, but almost every young man and little boy wears the same tight dark t-shirt and jeans. Young women are rare here, and even they are covered up. Every man in sight has a cigarette or is lighting one. Old men sit on the ground smoking narghile. You smell their tobacco mixing with the scent of incense and garbage.

The stones in the street are worn and old. Tractors push their way through the crowd, always driven by an old man with that same angry expression on his face. Cats dart into the narrow street and jump into some little side path or through an old doorway leading up a flight of steps. In those places where the street opens up, above your head are clothes hanging in windowsills. Otherwise, you are surrounded by old stone arches and strange buildings.

You'd better like falafel because that's about all you're going to eat. You walk up to a counter right inside some shop. Chickens dangle in front of you, and a chunk of lamb rotates on a spit. Maybe you'll ask for schwarma. Just say "schwarma"... he doesn't speak English. The man will walk over and shave off part of the lamb as it rotates, quickly spreading humus inside a pita and dumping the meat in. Alright, now you have to work fast. Point to what vegetables you want behind the counter (you don't know what they are anyway), and make wild gestures to indicate that you don't want the spicy paste on top. French fries are standard on top of all the vegetables. For some reason this will be the only thing he says to you. "Chips?" "Ken," you say, mispronouncing the word for yes. He'll throw the pita in a bag. Grab a bottle of Coke or Fanta. It's in a glass bottle, and he may or may not open it for you. Total cost: about 10 shekels or a litte more than 2 dollars.

Walk around and eat your falafel in one hand. It's meant to be eaten that way.

People are probably going to notice that you're not Arabic. They'll assume you're from Europe or America (probably America) and they'll assume you speak English. They won't really speak English. Every so often, one of the street vendors will literally grab your arm and stop you and ask where you're from. They'll say it with a smile, though they really just want you to stop and walk inside. If you want something, ask how much it is in shekels. He'll tell you. Shake your head and walk away. He'll yell out for you to come back and he'll cut the price by a third. Name something lower. He'll split the difference. Ask how much that would be in dollars. He'll stall at this point, too excited at the prospect of US dollar bills. Be ready for him to really overvalue the Dollar. Congratulations. You're the proud owner of a new plastic menorah.

Time to check out a few churches. Walk over to the Christian Quarter, again, not very far from here. You'll be at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 5 minutes, though it's straight uphill. The entire atmosphere will change once again. Things are quieter here, and fewer people pack the streets. Every so often a monk will walk past you wearing his brown hooded robe. Nuns too. Again, the streets are so narrow that only two people can pass each other at the same time. Children will be everywhere, riding their bikes, chasing each other up and down staircases, running out into the street. If they see you holding your camera, they'll keep yelling "hello" until you take their picture. Then they'll jump up and down and ask for you to take it again. More kids will run over this time. Eventually you'll just have to walk away.

Today was my church-visiting day. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was packed. There happened to be a mass going on when I was there. Tourists flooded the floor. I walked over to the rock that marked the "center of the world" on ancient maps. For centuries pilgrims sacrificed everything they had and made the journey from ports in Italy to Jaffa and across the desert on camelback to this church. Pretty amazing. Look at this mosaic.

A man stopped me as I was walking around inside and asked me if I spoke English. He was a journalist doing a story on tourists in Jerusalem. I answered a few questions and we talked for a little while. He was from Dublin. Awesome accent, by the way. "Moore... there's a good Irish name." Apparently a lot of the people he talked to were set on staying here, despite the war going on. I told him that that may be true, but there were certainly fewer tourists now than when I first got here.

I walked out to the Armenian Quarter. There's a little Syrian church there, tucked away in some alley. It's not in any of the guidebooks I've seen. It's called St. Mark's Church.

I walked to the door of the church and didn't see anyone. I peeked my head inside, and when my eyes had adjusted to the darkness I saw a woman sitting there. She stood up and walked over to me. She started speaking in some weird language, and I told her I spoke English. Luckily she did too.

Thus began one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had.

The woman told me to sit down, and she began to talk about the church. She walked over to the wall and flipped on the lights. Then she went over to a colorful drape and pulled it away, revealing the altar in front of the church. This was the first church in Christianity, according to the Syrian Orthodox. An inscription in Aramaic proved it, apparently. I had heard that it was definitely one of the oldest. We walked over to an icon. I'm sure I've seen it before. I couldn't take a picture of it, but it's the most famous of the ones where Mary is holding Jesus and Jesus' face looks like that of a grown man. It's really old, attributed by legend to the Evangelist Luke.

Anyway, the woman went on to tell me that no fewer than five miracles had occurred during the time she had been at this church. She paused, and her eyes started to water. Another old woman sitting quietly in the back of the church shuffled her feet. Of course I asked what miracles she had seen. She told me a story, very lovingly and very seriously, about a time a year or two ago when a woman came into the church with her family. She had a tumor in her stomach. The afflicted woman stood at the altar in front of the icon and asked for her to place her hand on the tumor and pray for her. She held her hand there and prayed, and suddenly, as she described it, she felt the tumor break into two pieces. They were all astonished. The woman ran into the bathroom, and ten minutes later she came out and said that she had passed blood and that the tumor was gone. She went back to Bulgaria, so the story goes, and called a few weeks later, explaining that the doctors could find no trace of the cancer and had canceled her operation.

I didn't know what to say to this, but I didn't have time to. I was ushered down a flight of stairs with another woman to see the Upper Room. Now I've read that scholars say that this seems like it might actually be the real Upper Room. It was a tiny place, with old stone walls and a reproduction of the Da Vinci's Last Supper at an altar. A copy of the icon was also there on the table.

I was left alone to pray by myself. The room was very very quiet. The feeling is difficult to describe.

When I left that church I went over to the St. John the Baptist Church. It was closed to visitors.

The last church I saw was the Coptic Patriarchate Church, an impressive cathedral in the middle of the Christian Quarter. Huge building. Really beautiful inside. You know, you don't really come to Jerusalem for cathedrals... that's a European thing. Most of the churches in Jerusalem are too old to be huge and magnificent like the cathedrals in Europe. But this was a really nice building.

Finally, I saw the Citadel. Maybe you've heard of the Tower of David. It's the name for the minaret that rises near the Jaffa Gate, associated for centuries with the entrance to Jerusalem. Basically, the Citadel is a fortress built near the Jaffa Gate on the highest ground in Jerusalem. It's over 20 centuries old, and it sits on the remains of the city walls from the 8th century BC.

Pretty neat. And it has amazing views of the whole city. I walked around the walls and looked everywhere. There are all these museums now within the citadel, and I walked through each and learned a lot about the history of Jerusalem throughout all the major periods of history. It's always been so hotly contested.

I'm out of steam now, but one day I'll have to write about our trip to Masada. We left yesterday morning at 2 AM and watched the sunrise. Here's a preview.

I miss rain. Is that weird? I also miss not having to drink a gallon of water every 30 minutes. Why couldn't the Promised Land have a weather system?

So yesterday after class, around 3:00, Yasin, Brady, and my friend Kevin from Toronto went to Qumran. We took a taxi from Jerusalem to the northern shore of the Dead Sea to the archaeological dig of Qumran. On the way there we saw exactly how big a desert this part of Israel really is. The Negev Desert reaches up to Jerusalem, and out the windows of the taxi we saw miles and miles of sand. A few miles down the road was the city of Jericho, the oldest continually inhabited city in the world. Oh, and we saw a bunch of Bedouins herding sheep along the cliffs. And this camel. I need to ride a camel.

Qumran is the place where a splinter sect of Judaism from around 150 BC migrated to start their own community in the desert. They were escaping what they saw as the corruption of mainstream Temple Judaism. They formed their own set of civic and religious laws, adhering to an extremely ascetic lifestyle. The historian Josephus talks about the Essenes living in that area, and it appears that the inhabitants of Qumran might match his description of the Essenes, with their ritual baths where they would bathe twice daily and do all sorts of weird things. For them, the end of the world was just around the bend. Unfortunately, the Romans, as they usually do, wiped the Jewish community of Qumran off the map in 68 AD.

And how do people know so much about the community at Qumran, when all traces of them were wiped out 2000 years ago? Why, the Dead Sea Scrolls, in fact. In caves all up and down the mountains behind Qumran were found tons and tons of scrolls inside ancient pots and preserved for over 2000 years. A bedouin shepherd boy was searching for a lost goat when he stumbled upon some scrolls hidden in the depths of a cave. The scrolls immediately went up on the black antiquities market in Jerusalem, until some guy (forget who) realized that these were basically the oldest scrolls ever found. Under cover, and with the help of the Israeli government, he went around and purchased all the scrolls over a period of a few years and gave them to the Israeli Antiquities Authority. Since then, more scrolls have been discovered in 11 different caves in the area, and scholars have been studying them since.

Well, there wasn't much to see. I mean, the ruins were cool and all, with the aqueducts and advanced water system to collect rainwater (during the two, that's right, two times that it rains there, they were able to collect enough water to use for drinking and for crops and for bathing for the whole year). But we wanted to see if we could get up to the caves.

We walked up a long path until we got to the foot of the mountain. There was a sign there. On the sign was a list of things to be aware of. Let me run through some: You must be able to rappel in order to traverse this trail. The hike takes half a day. Wear appropriate shoes and a hat. Carry 5 liters of water per person per day and drink often. Walk on marked trails only. Beware of snakes and scorpions.

Ummm... we had about half a liter of water each. Yasin had on sandals. None of us knew how to rappel, and we didn't have equipment anyway.

So of course we went.

Our first reaction was, ummm, are we still on the trail? Let's play a game. Try to find the trail in this picture. Here's a hint: it's the steep, narrow, unmarked area between those boulders at the edge of the ravine of death.

As we started to go farther, we realized we were climbing more than hiking. Brady's from Utah, so he's been climbing a few times before. But the rest of us had no idea what we were doing. I live in southwestern-PA, so at least I have an idea of what mountains sort of look like. Kevin lives in Toronto, so I'm sure he climbs glaciers on his way through the bitter-cold Arctic Circle everyday. But Yasin's from Istanbul. It's FLAT there. Yet, with his sandals and all, he was the best climber of any of us. He would jump from one cliff to the next, leaping again before he even had both feet on the ground. And he seriously loved it. Every time we'd get to a lookout, he'd be the first to scan the cliffs for new caves. And he had a smile on his face the whole time.

Can I possibly describe to you how beautiful it was up there? We didn't see a living thing besides a few birds and some plants for 3 hours. The Dead Sea behind us kept getting farther and farther away as we kept climbing father and farther up, and eventually we reached sea level hehe. (Notice the mountains of western Jordan on the other side of the Sea.) I'm not sure what the temperature was, mostly because I can't read Celsius, but I'm pretty sure it couldn't have been hotter. IT WAS SO HOT. We were climbing with the sun still high above us, and all our water was gone in the first 30 minutes or so. G.I. Brady's camel pack ran out of water before any of us even. That was really dangerous, now that I look back on it. We should have brought more water, but we had no idea we were going to be doing any of this.

The caves we found at the beginning were small, maybe only 6 feet high and about 10 feet deep. But there were hundreds within eyeshot. I think we all had the fantasy (just a little) that we would discover some cave no one had been in for 2000 years, and we'd unearth a complete Hebrew Bible. It was ludacris, but we even talked about what we'd do if we found a scroll. Definitely not tell anyone except the Antiquities Authority, that's for sure. You could get killed over something like that.

We took tons of pictures. I probably took 300 pictures on my digital camera. Every so often we'd set our cameras down and set the timer and try to all fit in the picture. This one came out great, except my camera tumbled down a cliff right after this picture took. Luckily, all is well. I'd die without my camera, and my friends laugh at me for that.

We're an eclectic group. A Turkish Muslim, a Canadian Jew, a Mormon from Utah, and a strappingly-handsome Protestant. I feel like that's sort of representative of the whole Rothberg School: everyone is from different faiths in different parts of the world, and everyone has some connection to the Holy Land. Poetry, I tell you.

The caves we went into were all pretty much empty, obviously, but some of them were pretty deep. The ceilings of a few were blackened from years and years of campfires. Some had clearly been used in recent years. There were often pieces of cloth nearby, or even rusted barrels probably used by the Bedouins for storing water. Kevin found shards of pottery in one of the caves. Doubtful that it was very old, but still cool to say we found it. And all around us on the ground outside the caves were seashells, tiny little white shells that, maybe carried by the wind, ended up way up here scattered all over the hillside. The alternative is that the shells are all insanely old and they've been sitting up here since the last time the ocean covered the whole basin, but I doubt it. Strange.

I took this movie from one of the lookouts. Watch me almost tumble to my doom.

The mountains just kept going on and on. According to the sign at the beginning, there were waterfalls and places where you had to swim to get across to keep hiking on the trail. I think we had left the trail long ago. At one point we came to clearing, and we all stared across the desert west, directly into the sun, all the way back to Jerusalem. "Look at that," Brady said, pointing somewhere off into the sandy hills. "I would just love to go out there and keep walking, but you can't 'cause you die."

Brady has actually studied the Dead Sea Scrolls extensively, back in Utah, and one of his professors spends every summer just hiking around the Dead Sea, searching for new caves. Some archaeologists found more scrolls in caves near Ein Gedi, the place where I went a while back to swim. I'm actually going there again tomorrow morning at 2 AM with the Rothberg School for a trip to Masada and Ein Gedi. Stay tuned.

Finally, when all of us were entirely dehydrated and had broken every basic rule of Safety First, we decided to head back. We had to be at the bus stop by 7:00. We found another cave on the way back; Brady recognized it as "Cave 4", the cave where most of the scrolls were actually found, including the almost-complete Isaiah scroll.

We slowly made our way down, slipping a few times in the loose pebbles. Yasin finally hurt his toe, but other than that, we got by with only minor scratches. But I've never been more thirsty in my life. I'm still thirsty today... that's how thirsty we were. So dangerous. The archaeological site had closed at 5, and we got yelled at in Hebrew by the janitor when we got back, but we filled up on water real fast and headed down to the bus stop by the main road. We considered briefly going to the Dead Sea for a dip, but we discovered that we would have to cross a mine field first. That's right: a fenced-off mine field, with the word "Danger" written in about 5 different languages, along with the universal symbol for potential subterranean landmine detonation: an explosion.

We were in the middle of nowhere, yet we ran into a young guy who lives at a local kibbutz. He has family in Haifa. We talked for a while about that, and when we were all sufficiently depressed, did what everyone does and forgot about it.

Ahh, now today. We don't have class tomorrow and like I said, we're going to Masada at 2 in the morning tomorrow, so no one really wanted to go far away, but my friends were all napping today and I didn't want to do that. I decided that I hadn't seen enough churches here in Jerusalem, and today was as good a day as any.

So my first visit was to a mosque. Actually, the place that has been long-revered as the spot where Jesus actually ascended on the Mount of Olives was turned into a mosque a long time ago. If you hand three shekels to the old men who sit outside and smoke narghile you can walk in and see the footprint that Jesus supposedly left behind when he ascended into heaven. I was the only one there. There are 8 churches in total that claim to stand where Jesus ascended on the Mount of Olives. Eight.

I've discovered this about Jerusalem. Before I thought it was really neat if you could stand in a place and say with certainty that the events in the Bible happened there. But those opporunities for certainty are very few. Instead, what I've come to discover is that the important thing is to realize how much that spot has meant to so many people for so long. It's not the ground that pilgrims come to worship when they travel from all over the world. They come to these places to revel in the tradition surrounding the place, and to worship God with all parts of their mind and body, including offering to God their very physical presence in a place that signifies in their mind such commitment to their Faith. And over centuries and centuries of these pilgrimages, a place takes on significance beyond simple historical trivialities arguing for a new location of Jesus' tomb 20 feet away. History doesn't matter so much.

I think that's more an Orthodox/Catholic mindset than Protestant. The Orthodox take pilgrimages; Protestants take tours. And that's not an insult to Protestantism. It's just the truth. Protestants generally focus on the archaeology and history of a place in order to gain a better understanding of their Biblical Text, which is the only thing they have ("Sola scriptura" ...by Scripture alone). Catholics and the Orthodox have long-standing traditions that complement their Faith, and in many cases are more important than textual minutia.

Anyway, this picture is from the altar of the Dominut Flevit ("The Lord Wept") Chapel on the Mount of Olives. It has been held since the 5th-century to be the place where Jesus wept over the fate of Jerusalem when he said, "O Jerusalem!" and prophesized that it would be destroyed for not knowing that God's Kingdom was near. There wasn't much else to this church, except a neat Vatican City flag flapping in the wind outside. Again, the Roman Catholic church gets gypped out of almost every major site in Jerusalem.

I walked even farther down the Mount of Olives to the bottom near the Garden of Gethsemane. This time I went into the Tomb of the Virgin, a beautiful underground crypt were the Orthodox believe Mary was buried. The first tomb here dates to the 1st-century. An old monk keeping watch down there, exactly like every old monk who seems to hover around the visitors in every church I've been in so far, followed me around at a close distance and finally asked me in broken English (they always assume you speak English, you know) if I could make a small donation. Five shekels got me a candle which I took into the tomb. I was about the only person in this church too. Absolutely beautiful. One of the most beautiful churches in the city. You can tell you're several stories underground. The rock above you is so old, and candles draped overhead cast flickering light on ancient paintings and mosaics and so so many icons. Very beautiful.

Real fast: walked past the enormous cemetery near the Kidron Valley, walked past Schindler's Tomb, and walked over to the St Peter in Gallicantu church on Mount Zion. There was a service going on, but I was able to go down into the crypt that once served as a prison. Outside in the courtyard a set of stairs leading from what is now the Armenian part of town south of the city walls to the church. This is the place where Peter (traditionally) denied Jesus 3 times. I wouldn't lie about this, because it sounds too fake, but I definitely heard a rooster crowing as I stood outside. Lots and lots of rooster imagery all around the church. Kind of weird. Although it's probably just from the 5th-century AD (the 5th-century is young around here), Christians have venerated the prison in the church's crypt as the place where Jesus was tortured before his crucifixion. Then I went over to the Church of the Dormition and walked along with an Italian tour group and benefited from a completely incomprehensible yet free tour of the beautiful mosaics and statues inside. That's the place where Mary is supposed to have fallen into an "eternal sleep". It's a newer building, but it's built overtop a church from the 4th-century.

Finally, it was around 5:30 and I made my way over to the Ophel Archaeological Park. It's a new park that basically focuses on the Second Temple and on the entranceway to the Temple which used to stand in the area just south of the Temple Mount. The area was excavated over a period of a few decades, sponsored mainly by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem actually. Very very cool. The best part was probably a 3D video of what the Temple probably looked like, with all the people buying and selling to pay for their half-shekel Temple tax and for their sacrificial animal, and then getting purified and heading into the huge courtyard area on the Temple Mount itself. This picture shows what used to be the main street in Jerusalem, running north-south for a kilometer alongside the Temple Mount. Shops used to sit on either side of the street. The remains of an arch on the wall can still be seen. That was the entrance into the Temple Mount.

Walked around the Old City for a tiny bit before eating and coming up. I've had more schwarma and falafel than I can fathom.

I have all these old pop songs in my head from like 5 years ago. Israeli music is definitely a while behind American music, and all the teenagers and college kids listen to American pop. Christina Aguilera is on repeat in my head... you gotta come and set me free, baby. Come, come, come and let me out. *spit* *cough*

When you've been in a place for a little while, you start to notice ever-so-slight trends in the people who live there. You begin to get a feel for the way people think. You've watched them for a while. You've made friends with the guy who owns the pizza shop in the Muslim Quarter, and a couple street vendors recognize you now when you go past everyday. You've sat with the monk in the Holy Sepulchre a couple of times. You've met some Israelis and learned about their families and their connection to places you now know, using the Hebrew pronunciations you've come to adopt. You've discussed religion with Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians.

And when you've been in a place for a time, even just a short time, you start to feel the collective mood of the city. Yesterday everyone was terrified all day. A suicide bomber had been caught near the Jaffa Gate, the main entrance into the Old City. People were quiet. Security was tighter than ever before, and everyone walked faster to where they needed to be. Conversations were hushed. Fear seemed to settle in on the city, even just in the way people stood at the bus stop, with their eyes flashing from one person to another.

I used to think that Israelis were never afraid. That's not true. Israelis just know how to hide it.

Today the mood of the city was completely different. Just in a day's time people today were more relaxed and more outgoing, friendlier and funnier and more carefree. It's certainly not like it was when I first got here, but the new people from Haifa and the north seem to be adding an element of fresh blood to the city (American and European tourism is zilch right now... now it's Israeli tourism!). And campus is definitely different now with all these new people. Everywhere you go on campus there are new students from Haifa and Tel Aviv, and each has a dramatic story to tell. I won't talk about that now.

Yesterday I went with some people from Hebrew class and two girls from France and Brazil to the City of David. The City of David is the oldest part of the city, the part that existed in First Temple times, basically around 3000 years ago. The city walls included the area south of the city and what is now the Temple Mount, where the first Temple was built by King Solomon.

Along the eastern side of the City of David is the Kidron Valley, the place where the Bible says the events of Judgment Day will take place. Basically it's a deep deep valley that separates the Mount of Olives from the eastern wall of the Old City. A little farther south, where we went, the Valley divides an eastern Arab settlement with the City of David. We're talking a huge drop to the bottom. I mean, it's really far down... obviously imposing enough to be a good site for the end of the world. And all along the sides of this massive valley you can see goats and donkeys and horses, all just sort of wandering around. Shepherds herd their sheep along the cliffs, leading back to their homes built into the walls and on top of the ruins of ancient buildings, who knows how old.

I felt like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window where he looks out and can see into the windows of all the buildings surrounding his apartment. I seriously could stare right into the living rooms of each one of those houses, stacked one on top of the other all the way up the side of the enormous mountain. (Interestingly, Jesus spent most of his time in Jerusalem over there, and a lot of important things in Christianity happened near the City of David, from the Last Supper to the arrest of Jesus to Stephen's stoning.)

Underneath all of that is a tunnel that was built far underground to supply water to the First Temple Jerusalem, sometime in the 700s BC or sometime ridiculously long ago. It was built underground so that it could remain hidden from enemies when they attacked the city. We paid a few shekels and started off down a long staircase into the side of the mountain, and we went down spiral staircases and twisting staircases and narrow, straight staircases, until we were so far down that it was actually freezing cold.

At the very bottom is the tunnel, called Hezekiah's Tunnel. It's mentioned in Kings, I think. The water inside is fed by the Gihon Spring, and it flows down a slight, imperceptible grade. This was the main source of water for First Temple Jerusalem, and its water was used for everything from religious ceremonies to irrigation. It basically allowed Jerusalem to exist.

Let me tell you, it was COLD. It also came up to about my knees at some points, or even higher, and I'm not short. We waded in and walked the length of the tunnel, through the water, for half a mile underground. Pitch dark. No lights, no electricity.

Most of us had flashlights that we used, bracing ourselves with an elbow on each wall, in some places crouching down to the water. We went on at a snail's pace. It was totally silent in there, except for the splash of each step and the drip of water running down the walls from cracks in the stone above. Every so often we'd stop and shine our flashlights up some crevice or into a tiny hole, peering deep inside. It's amazing to imagine that someone actually dug this from down here! No drills, no explosives. You can still see the chisel marks left in the walls. A true feat of engineering. A couple of times we shut off our lights just to see what it would be like down there without anything. I've never experienced darkness like that. Completely awesome.

When we came out, we breathed the fresh air and were glad for the first time to be in a comfy warm desert climate. We split up, and my friend Brady from Utah and I ended up walking part of the way with the girl from France into the Old City. We walked around the Christian Quarter, and came out the Jaffa Gate and walked towrad Ben Yehuda Street. From there we just had cheap shwarma from a falafel stand and walked around. I bought a couple things and, of course, gave the owner a hard time.

My friend Brady looks like the quintessential American. He's huge. He has a camel pack filled with a half gallon of water in his bookbag. His teeth are blinding white. He looks like G.I. Joe. In fact, he might just be a really big plastic action figure.

That's not a bad thing in Israel. A lot of Israelis have parents from the US, and others were born there themselves and made aliyah (immigrated to Israel) a year or two ago. In those cases, all the people I've met are originally from New York, New Jersey, or, guess where, Pittsburgh. But not everyone has some American conncection by any means; it's important to remember that. And certainly not everyone speaks English. Whoever told me that it's not important to learn Hebrew because everybody speaks English is a liar. You pray that the place you go to eat will have an English menu, and that the menu will not be so horribly translated as to be useless. But Americans are loved here, really. Israel and the US agree on most things. not to mention that Israel wouldn't exactly exist without the US, nor would it have survived so long. It's just the young people who lose patience with us when we try to count out 17 shekels in a crowded store. They listen to our music, they drink our Coke, they watch our movies. American culture is here, more so with the Jewish community than the Muslim community, but it's still here.

Brady and I met an Israeli on the bus who goes to Hebrew U, and for about 20 minutes we talked about everything. It was fun. She said it was refreshing to just joke around with a couple of Americans. She's only used to talking to Israelis. That was really neat. And last night, after we got back, I sat on the lawn with a bunch of my Jewish and Christian friends and we had a little argument about the authorship of the Bible. It's great to talk to people about this stuff who have actually read up on it. Very cool.

Anyway, today after class the school had a field trip to Tel Aviv. I went and walked around with Yasin and Brady and a guy named John from Connecticut. What a different city. Compared to Jerusalem, it is so secular. The difference is blaring. It's a beach town, you can tell. I don't know how else to describe it. You would never see people dress like that in Jerusalem.

It's a newer city, actually founded in the early 1900s. But it is larger than Jerusalem. It actually is the officially-recognized capital of the country, not Jerusalem, which Israel maintains to be the true capital. Tel Aviv has skyscrapers and modern building architecture and wide paved streets. It sits on the Mediterranean, and the whole city is completely flat. It's also a lot hotter than Jerusalem; since Jerusalem's in the mountains, the nights are cooler and the humidity is not nearly so bad. In Tel Aviv it's almost unbearable.

We walked around an arts festival for about an hour that was going on, and then we trudged all the way over to Jaffa on the sea. Jaffa is one of the oldest cities in Israel. It's older than Jerusalem, actually founded by the Egyptians. It's mentioned in the Bible as the port where Jonah took off to run away from God. It's been a major port for centuries and centuries, even taken by Napoleon on his way through the Holy Land.

We walked around the ruins of an Egyptian palace and columns lined with hieroglyphics. Our tour guide got lost and we ended up in a sort-of shady place in a tiny village near the archaeological site. A bunch of little kids started following us around, yelling things that no one could understand, until finally someone picked up their camera to take a picture and they all started waving. They just wanted their picture taken.

Yasin was impressed with the incredible Turkish history of the place. The area was taken over by the Muslims and subsequently passed into Crusader control, passing back and forth between Muslims and Christians before ultimately ending up in the hands of the Ottomans. Muslim architecture was everywhere. Four mosques lined this little city-within-a-city. Against the backdrop of the Mediterranean, each was quite beautiful.

We watched the sunset and piled back onto the bus. I fell asleep on the ride back home. SO tired everyday.

I am ok. Everything is fine. You don't know how much it means to me to get all these emails from people asking if I'm alright. Let me just say, Jerusalem is safe. Thank you so much for caring and for being such amazing friends. I really am lucky to know so many great people. But please please please don't worry about me. I'm not the one with any problems right now.

A lot of things have changed since Thursday.

On Thursday night I went down to the Old City and walked around with some people. There were about seven of us. We went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and got there at 9, right as the doors were closing. About a hundred people had gathered outside with cameras, watching as the doors were closed by a Muslim man, whose family had been entrusted with the task of locking the doors of the Holy Sepulchre for over 400 years. We walked down to the Jewish Quarter and went to the Wall. We took pictures for a while and decided that we were going to walk around the Jewish Quarter and get some food. We stopped in some little pizza place and ordered a couple slices and sat out on the street. It was dark, maybe around 10:00.

Suddenly we heard sirens. We didn't know what they were for, and we assumed it was only the police. Then we heard a boom in the distance. It was distant, but the sound was unmistakable. The streets were crowded with people, and they all slowed, feeling something was wrong. Suddenly we heard yelling inside the pizza place. I stood up and sort of jogged over to see what the yelling was about, and I watched the owner switch on an old TV on the ceiling. BBC International, in English. People were gathered around, shhsh-ing each other, as the news became apparent. I snapped this picture right before another group, about 10 Jews, walked in who had been running around, looking for a television. I ran back out and called my friends in, and we stood and watched the news in English for the first time since we've been here. More and more people started trickling in off the street. All in all maybe 50 people crammed into that little place, and we were all silent.

Israel is at war. There was no denying it. Haifa had been attacked. Hundreds of missiles had been fired into Israel. Beirut's suburbs were being decimated by Israeli airplanes, and Hezbollah had retaliated with an attack on ships blockading their ports. Dozens were dead. Hundreds were injured. President Bush was on the screen, calling for Lebanon to put an end to Hezbollah's terrorism. Hezbollah's leader had responded only by saying that Israel would pay dearly for these attacks, with missiles capable of reaching far south of Haifa. The UN had called an emergency meeting. The US was pressuring Syria. Diplomacy was "dead".

Tempers started to flare in the pizza shop. The footage of Israeli citzens being taken into ambulances was too much for these people to bear. They stood up and started yelling. What was going on? Haifa? The third largest city in Israel? And the Galilee too? This was the first time in decades missiles had reached that far south. 30 years. Grown men had tears in their eyes.

We hurried back to campus, and students had filled the dimly lit sidewalks with their hushed voices in rapid Hebrew about the latest news. I know a lot of Israelis here now. Whereas on Thursday so many Israelis had been stoic and unmoved, now emotions were flying. Most of the Rothberg students here had been to the Galilee or to Haifa in the last few weeks (and some were even there that night). A lot of people here have family in Haifa. And absolutely EVERY Israeli student knows at least 10 people in the army. But the fear of the next attack struck everyone that night. Helicopters rushed past near the treetops, and strange planes hovered in the sky before shutting off their lights and disappearing into the night. Sirens blared in the distance, and the unmistakable sound of gunfire echoed in the Arab neighborhood to the east.

Gere and I had plans to go to the Galilee this weekend. We were going to leave after class on Friday and take a bus to Tiberias, in the central Galilee. We had it all worked out, but this recent news was just too much. We had a hostel picked out and everything, planning on visiting all the places Jesus walked in the New Testament, and swimming in the Sea of Galilee and visiting the Jordan River. (But it's good that we didn't go. This morning I learned that Tiberias was one of the places hit by rockets this weekend. A friend of mine said that he knows someone who was staying up there who saw one of the actual explosions. We would have been in the middle of all that.)

Well, we wanted to do something. We could have stayed in Jerusalem, but we wanted to forget about the last couple of days and go somewhere, anywhere, just to get the news off our mind. The prospect of a vacation was still something of a possibility in our minds. So we decided to go to the Mediterranean. (Shucks, tough decision hehe.) It's not far from Jerusalem. We would have gone to Tel Aviv, but since we're taking a school trip there on Tuesday, we went a little farther north to Netanya.

The beach was indescribable. I had never felt the Mediterranean, but it's true, the water is perfect. The sun was hotter than I've ever felt it (much much hotter than Jerusalem), but the water felt like slightly warm bathwater, waves crashing onto a sandy beach that stretched for miles along the jagged coast. The town itself was bustling with Israelis (we assumed they were on vacation, but we later learned we were wrong). Gere and I had a great time, just floating, avoiding the jellyfish, and enjoying the sun.

We walked around for about two hours, going from one hotel to another, looking for a place with vacancy. No one spoke English. The sun was so hot, and we were carrying our backpacks filled to the brim with clothes and water bottles and whatever else. Shabbat was approaching, with the sun dipping further and further into the sea, and just as we were seriously considering sleeping on the beach for the night, we found a really cheap hotel overlooking the ocean. For about 30 dollars each we had a decent room with an amazing view of the Mediterranean. We went back out and watched the sunset from a balcony overlooking a steep cliff above the beach. I'm not exaggerating. It was one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.

We were enjoying our respite from the world when a group of helicopters charged their way up the coast, heading toward Lebanon. The surreal silence of the beach was replaced with shock and fear, as Israelis pointed at the sky and cried out in voices drowned by the roar of the helicopters. It was at that point that we snapped out of our fantasy and realized exactly how far away the border was, and we remembered what a small country Israel actually is.

Yet we still talked about things that night, about Christianity in Lithuania and America, about what we were studying and what we wanted to do, about our families and the things we ate, about my experience growing up in a small town, about his experience growing up before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, about Bush's perception in Lithuania and America's perception in the world. And looking at these things just two days later, I can't tell you the world of a difference I feel now. I want them to still matter like they did that night, but I'm having trouble finding relevance.

The next day we woke up and took a taxi to Caesarea, an ancient Roman city built along the Mediterranean, with beautiful ruins overlooking the sea. I look at these pictures now, pictures that I took just yesterday, and they don't fit! The news of fighting these last two days has made them unreal! I can't explain how hard it is for me to talk about that trip. It feels like it happened so long ago. We didn't have any news for a day and a half, and it was enough to make everything seem trivial when we returned. Does that make any sense?

I needed a connection to the world. We were literally wandering around Roman ruins, backpacks and swimming suits, happily soaking up the sun and the cool air coming off the Mediterranean, no idea of what was taking place just a few miles north. The day is a haze now. We saw an ancient racetrack used for horse racing, described by Josephus as the place where rich men could sit and watch the sea, and the city's amphitheater, where we walked up to the very top for a breathtaking view of the city and the ocean. We climbed down through passages and tunnels leading into the remains of bathhouses and basements and cisterns, and finally walked over to enjoy an amazing lunch and some of the best fish I've ever had. The waitress asked us where we were from ("English or American?") and asked us if we were afraid. Afraid? We hadn't considered it. She said she lived a little north, and she was terrified. "You know, the Israelis, we are used to suicide bombings in Jerusalem," she said, "but these rockets can come to any of us, anytime."

It hit like a load of bricks. Even the Israelis were afraid.

The blues and greens and stones and the magnificence of the place faded into a blue. We wanted to get out of there. I don't even know what to do with all the pictures I've taken. Do I post them here now? Does it matter? Maybe if I put them here you'll have a better feel for the contradiction that is Israel: such beauty and such fear.

We took a taxi to Giva Olga and waited there for the busses to start running again after Shabbat. We said very little, each of us absorbed in our own thoughts. The city was filled with people from the north, as well as a ton of Russians immigrants living in the area who Gere could talk to. We learned that those who could afford it were down here. Everyone else was still up north hiding in bomb shelters.

When the bus finally came, it was on its way from Haifa, and it was completely filled with refugees from the north. They stood or sat in silence. A few teenage soldiers were on the bus as well, guys and girls alike, sitting separately, quietly. The bus radio was on, a voice talking in rushed Hebrew. I felt so disconnected, and I needed the news urgently.

The first thing we did was check the Internet. More rocket launches. More casualties. More bombings. All my friends had stories to tell. All had been affected in some way by what had happened. Those who had been in the north on a longer weekend were visibly shaken. Rumors spread that we would all have to go home.

We had an assembly today for a security briefing. All the Rothberg International Students piled into an auditorium and listened to the director of the University and a radio talk show host "expert" assure us that nothing was wrong. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is perfectly safe, the president said, which it may be, but what about the country? After 30 minutes of nonsense, saying at one point that Jerusalem right now is "the safest place in the world", he asked for questions, and about 20 people raised their hands. "What happens if a rocket reaches Ben Gurion Airport?" "Is there an alternate route to Tel Aviv?" "What is the likelihood of increased suicide bombings in response to the bombings in Beirut?" "How can we contact Europe in the event of a communications shutdown?" But the talk show host kept avoiding the questions. "Israel is used to war," he said in his broken English. "We will win this war. In 3 or 4 days, this fighting will end, and Lebanon will thank us for ridding them of such a disease. The world will thank us."

Then the questions became more pointed. One fearless American stood up and asked how Israel could justify launching blanket attacks on civilian schools and gas stations and homes in Lebanon in an attempt to weaken a specific enemy, independent of the Lebanese people. The president was offended. "Israel is my home. Some people in this world feel that I have no right to call Israel my home, but it will always be my home. I will not go back to Argentina" (direct quote). He said that "we are morally right" and that "God is on our side." That got everyone going. The audience started talking amongst themselves, some loudly expressing disgust and others shouting in agreement. One guy raised his hand. The president asked, "Where are you from?" "Seattle," he answered. "Oh, Sleepless in Seattle?" the president joked, chuckling to himself. "No, actually I slept just fine in Seattle."

A few people are going home. I don't know why, but I guess certain people are just choosing to not deal with any of this. In some cases with a lot of the younger people, it's the parents. In other cases, some are simply too afraid to walk to class, thinking a rocket's going to fly out of nowhere. The thing to understand is that Jerusalem is surrounded by Arab Muslim neighborhoods. Its holy sites are sacred to Muslims everywhere. It is out of the range of the longest 100km Hezbollah missiles. There isn't a chance Jerusalem will be attacked. Israel has one of the strongest air forces in the world, and a military bigger than all its neighbors. Iran has on its border thousands of US troops sitting in Iraq within a few hours of Tehran. This fighting with Lebanon seems contained to the north, and the Gaza operation is contained to the southwest... far far away from here. The truth: 1/3 of Israelis in this country are sitting right now in bomb shelters, but not anyone in Jerusalem. The hotels in Jerusalem have been completely filled for the last two nights with refugees from the North. I just talked to the head of the dormitories (who happens to live on my floor), and he said that 160 students from the University in Haifa are on their way to Hebrew U to finish their studies here. I went with a couple people to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for mass today, and there are noticeably fewer foreigners in the city, but the Israelis here are still out working and buying things and driving around and taking buses and eating in restaurants. Classes will not be canceled.

And as far as Israel's justification to attack Lebanon to the degree it has for the past few days, my professor Barak made a good point. I told him that a lot of the people I had talked to thought that Israel has no right to launch an attack on the massive scale that it has in Lebanon, but he put it this way: if one, even one, rocket were to land in the United States, "not in some big city like New York or DC" but "someplace like Annapolis where no one is sure where it is," can you imagine what the US would do? How justified would America feel in defending itself? He is right, I think. This will be a long war.

(This is the Mediterranean from a lookout a few miles from Jerusalem. The Gaza is to your left, Tel Aviv is to your right, and the West Bank is behind you.) Walking to class today, people were whispering. Some students had gathered around radios sitting in the grass. There was no laughter and there were no loud voices. I had no idea what anyone was saying, but I could guess.

I knew Israeli forces had gone into southern-Lebanon yesterday, but I had no idea what that really meant. I mean, the Gaza Strip invasion had happened the day I left for Israel, and that had been going on the whole time I was here. I had seen a little of the affects of that fighting, but I could only see it (visibly) in the increased Israeli troops throughout the city. Certainly this wouldn't be a major problem either.

I was wrong. This morning Israeli planes bombed the airport at Beirut and knocked out most of the roads and bridges connecting southern-Lebanon to the rest of the country. Israel is now blocking the ports in Lebanon... a technical act of war. And Hezbollah has said they will launch rockets into Haifa if the attacks continue.

We had a "security update" today in class. The head of the Rothberg International School burst into the room and interrupted class, basically telling us that Jerusalem and the Galilee were still safe, although the Golan Heights and really anything north of the Galilee were probably not a good place for a weekend visit.

As he explained this, he was stopped by the distant sound of gunfire away in the hills out our window to the north. He skipped a beat, and tried to pick up what he was saying, but we were all staring out the window now. He said something about watching for increased security in the city, and for more people carrying guns, but we've all become so used to it now. Two weeks here is enough to harden you to that. And warnings have become useless. We've heard them everyday, and we all know they don't mean anything. Did warnings protect those students in the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria four years ago, where we eat lunch every day? Did warnings protect the victims of the suicide bombings of the last Intifada, in all the places we walk around West Jerusalem, marked now with memorials? What about the soldiers who were just captured or killed, 19-year old boys sent into military service whether they liked it or not. You want to know the truth? You might not know it, but according to the Jerusalem Post there were 17 suicide bombing attempts in the last week in this city. Warnings? Israelis don't listen to warnings. They live their lives everyday, selling food in the market or walking through the dusty streets, going to work or to eat or to pray. 6 out of 10 Israelis know someone who was wounded or killed in a suicide bombing. Military service is mandatory here for all people out of high school. Teenagers walk around with their girlfriends, full uniform, Uzis strapped around their shoulders, hand in hand. They smile and keep walking. If anyone feared the warnings, what could they do?

So we went on with our class.

Barak is humorously laid-back. At the end of the most intense class we've had so far, he said in his half-smiling way, "So you learned in one day what you should have learned in 3 months probably."

We're moving faster than before. We covered all 7 of the major verb forms today, which each contain imperfect, perfect, imperative, jussive, cohortative, active participle, past participle, infinitive construct and infinitive absolute forms. For each sub-form there are 10 types to memorize, with vowels that shift depending on whether they follow gutturals, and alternative spellings for pausal forms at the beginning and end of verses. We've (theoretically) learned 200 or so nouns and verbs, plus proper nouns and prepositions, and we've gone over irregular verb and noun endings for the most common words. We've covered the construct and appositive forms and learned how to supply adjectives to nouns or groups of nouns. Root forms, patterns... there are no vowels in Hebrew. Each word consists of nothing but consonants which, depending on the vowels you put in between, change tense and mood and aspect and gender and number.

In other words, I'm tired. We spend a lot of time in class. So much time in fact that I feel like I'm not taking advantage of this beautiful country and everything it has to offer. We have class tomorrow and Sunday, so I get a one-day weekend when everything is shut down anyway for Shabbat.

On Tuesday I decided that I was tired of losing so many hours each day to Hebrew, so after class I walked down to the Old City. I went in through the Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Arab Quarter, filled with people selling fruits and food and cold drinks. Everyone was talking loudly, children chasing each other down the street and men yelling out prices, old women sitting on the stones wearing their black headscarves in the hot sun, a pile of vegetables at their side.

I was going to Jerusalem's stone ramparts, a walkway along the top of the old city walls that offers views of the entire city. The walls were built by the Ottomans in the early 1500s, but they were built mostly on top of ancient walls that dated way before that. For 16 shekels (less than 4 bucks) I was able to walk around all of the Old City, seeing the streets I've come to know from a totally new perspective. The two hours I was up there, I was the only one walking around.

I walked south from the Jaffa Gate first, walking past some tiny, unremarkable windows that, when I knelt down to look through, peered into a vast ancient cistern. A little farther down I saw a grassy area inside the city, an acre wide, that had been blocked off near the southwestern corner of the walls. Who knows what could lie under there. Out of the walls I saw one beautiful church after another, alongside old cemeteries, and the southern Armenian neighborhood that stretches far past the Mount of Olives and down into the Kidron Valley, where the Bible says God will bring all mankind on Judgment Day.

I got off somewhere near the Western Wall and walked back, through the Armenian Quarter, to the Jaffa Gate. Then I went north, past the major Roman Catholic presence in Jerusalem and around the Christian Quarter. This is where things started to get really interesting.

I could see almost the entire Old City. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre sat proudly in the middle of a mess of buildings and streets, and off in the distance was the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Three faiths with some of their most important sites, all in a row. Everything was mixed here. Outside the walls was a heavy-Muslim section of town, and street noise from down there mixed with the church bells of the city. Islam and Christianity sat side by side. I walked a little farther, up and down steep steps, worn away from all the centuries, where one slip would send me over the wobbly little railing.

I found a side path that had no railing, and walked down a set of stairs into the wall itself. It was so dusty and dark down there that I used my camera flash to find my way. I slipped coming down the stairs and skinned my knee, landing in a pile of wood. I was in a room that hadn't been used for years, probably. I learned later that there are many such rooms like these, storage places for Ottoman, and later, Israeli and Jordanian armies when they camped on the ramparts.

Farther down the ramparts I saw an archaeological dig in the middle of the Muslim Quarter, square-up against a playground and a bunch of houses. I had no idea what that was about.

I took this movie of the Damascus Gate when I passed over. There's more to say, but I can't. I have to explain what I did last night.

Yesterday after class, some of us took a trip to the Judean Hills to see the caves used during the Bar Kochba Revolts against the Romans in 132 AD. Since the last revolution, which ended in the destruction of the Temple, the Jews had been wanting to get rid of the Romans for good. A man who took the name of Bar Kochba (which means, 'son of a star') led a revolution against Rome. It actually worked for a few years. They minted their own coins and even regained control of Jerusalem for a short time. When they were finally overcome, the revolutionaries took to the hills west of Jerusalem and hid in these caves, down winding paths on their hands and knees into huge underground chambers where they held out for years. From these caves they launched the first guerilla war in history, striking the Romans and running away to where they couldn't follow. Of course, things ended badly for the Jews and Judaism was outlawed, a situation which didn't exactly improve under the early Christians or later, under the Muslims.

We went into these caves. Some had enormous entrances, which fit everyone inside comfortably at once. The one we spent the most time in was so tight that we had to get on our stomachs to fit in. The clautstrophobes among us stayed at the entrance. I actually (surprisingly) managed to go in. I seriously loved it.

We crawled one by one with flashlights down a path that twisted and turned and came out into an open space, far below the surface. From there, we stepped down a wooden ladder (which had a broken leg) and stepped into an open room that was used during the revolt. I'd say the ceiling was probably 30 feet high, pitch-dark of course. Little paths in the ceiling served as air holes, and the room was lined with candles, which we lit. There was a set of stairs leading into another room below, but it had been blocked off almost 1900 years ago. The guide said that other caves in the area sometimes have another room below them like this one, and then sometimes another room below that.

The two people in this picture are Yasin (from Turkey) and Alison (from Squirrel Hill). The three of us hung out most of the day, along with a girl named Diane from Switzerland. She's one of the most interesting people I think I've ever met.

After the caves we took a trip to a Kibutz (a little socialist-esque living area typical in the deserts of Israel, where people work and live together and share all things in common). We went swimming in the swimming pool there and had a picnic dinner. The four of us sat in the grass and talked. Diane's grandfather is from Turkey, one of the 12,000 Jews in that country and one of only 100 of a particular group of Jews that remain today, peculiar to Turkey (I forget the name). Her grandfather married a French woman and they moved to Switzerland. She speaks French, German, English, Italian, and fluent Hebrew... and she's 17.

Well, Yasin is obviously Turkish, as I've said, and a Muslim. He plans on studying Jewish-Muslim relations for his PhD. Well, he was throwing out statistics and talking about the Jews in Turkey, and he and this girl were just amazed that each other was Turkish. And then they spoke Italian for a minute or two, just for fun I guess. Amazing.

It was night when we left, and Yasin and I sat on the bus together for the ride back to Jerusalem. We talked about things I've never been able to talk about before. I've never sat down with a Muslim and talked about the relations between our religions, or asked questions about the Quran, or really ever talked to anyone that extensively from that part of the world. We talked about how Muslims believe Jesus to be one of the most important prophets, alongside Moses and King David from Judaism. Jesus is the third-most mentioned man in the Quran, even more often than Muhammad.

And we talked about why Muslim extremists do what they do, and how they misinterpret passages in the Quran relating to the long-expired war between Christians and Muslims. I told him about the unusual religiosity of the United States, and the Christian influences in everything that happens in America. I explained Protestantism, and he talked to me about his studies in the Vatican and the people there. We talked about Pittsburgh, which he had heard of (everyone I've met here has! hehe), and about its heavy Catholic population and negligible Muslim population. And every so often we'd find some little quirk about English that he just thought was hilarious, and I'd explain to him how to say something, and we'd laugh. He offered me a place to stay in Rome if I come to visit, and I extended the invitation in Pennsylvania. He's looking to come get his doctorate in the United States, or wherever he can find a professor who will work with him, but one of the schools he's looking at is Ohio State! I told him my parents both went there and we talked about the culture of rural America versus Turkey.

When we got back, Alison and I waited with Diane at the bus stop until her bus came to go to where she lives in the city. As the three of us stood there, she and Alison started talking in Hebrew to a couple of soldiers next to us, and within about 5 minutes we were all talking, me in very little Hebrew with hand signals, and the soldiers in broken English. We found out Diane could sing and we asked her to sing in French. She started to sing a beautiful Jewish song, and we all stood in awe. The moon was full and we all just listened quietly to her little voice sing words that sounded so strange and so wonderful.

It was a cold night, and I slept under a sheet for the first time.

It's so hot here that my hard drive overheated. That's right. I no longer have a laptop.

It would bother me more, but I've just had the best weekend of my life.

On Friday night a couple friends and I walked around West Jerusalem and stopped at a nice little restaurant on some side street. Of course, since it was Shabbat, any restaurant open would have been nice, but this place was amazing. We sat outside on the street and enjoyed the evening air.

I opened the menu and saw the most beautiful thing my eyes have ever beheld:

Fried schnitzel, stuffed with parmesan cheese and topped with bacon. Served with mashed potatoes.

Let me translate: Meat, cheese, and pig. Oh, what joy to eat something that wasn't even close to being kosher. I felt bad ordering it until it came and I had that first delicious bite. And it was Shabbat too... oh well.

Feeling pleasantly stuffed and ceremonially impure, we took a taxi back to campus.

The next day, a bunch of us had had plans to go to Masada, or at least to Qumran or Tel Aviv or something. Unfortunately, we realized a little too late that there isn't a single bus that runs on Saturday in or out of Jerusalem. It ended up working out though; I had wanted to go to the Israel Museum since I got here, and it was actually open for half the day.

Our taxi driver spoke no English at all, and we couldn't speak Hebrew obviously. But we discovered that he knew French, and Noah had fun with the French he learned in high school.

The Israel Museum is most famous as the research facility for the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, on the way there, we passed through a mini-model of Jerusalem as it would have looked around 60 AD. There was a walkway that wrapped around the model and led to the bottom, roughly corresponding to the Mount of Olives. We could see Roman-style buildings, different divisions for religious buildings and residential areas, and, of course, the Temple.

It's cool to get an idea of what the city looked like in Bible times, especially since I am so familiar with the layout now. I can navigate through the streets really well now. It's still fun to try to get lost.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in Qumran, just about 20 miles east of here on the shores of the Dead Sea. A Bedouin shepherd was searching for a lost sheep in a cave when he came upon dozens of jars filled with scrolls. In one of the greatest miracles in archaeological history, the scrolls were discovered to be 2000 years old. They offered pieces of writing left by a splinter-sect of Judaism (probably the Essenes) from the 1st-century AD. Their writings contained many books of the Bible (proving the historical accuracy of the text which has passed down through the centuries) as well as important information on 1st-century life and religion, and they remain today more or less the oldest surviving Biblical writings.

(This is one of the only pictures I could take all day, and it's really blurry. I got yelled at by a bunch of people for taking pictures on Shabbat.)

We walked around in awe. Amazing exhibit. Fragments of scrolls on display along the walls, with a nearly full scroll in a special case in the center of a large room. I've read parts of the scrolls in translation before in a Judaism class I once took, but to be there and to stare at the actual thing... wow. And the best part: I could read the Hebrew letters on the scrolls. No, not understand them, but I was actually reading aloud something that had been written before the birth of Christ. And a few of the scrolls were in Greek capitals. I understood a little of those. Not much, but enough to make my day.

The rest of the museum had art exhibits and archaeological finds from all over the Middle East. It makes you realize how much of a baby the US is. Israel: "Here we a piece of the oldest city wall ever discovered, dating back to the 4th millennium BC." America: "We have the Indians..."

A quick walk through the Old City led to as many exciting winding staircases and rooftop grand views as it always does. Unfortunately, everything in the Jewish Quarter was closed. The Wall was amazing, with many more people than usual, though I couldn't take any pictures. We went through the Christian and Armenian Quarters... packed with people. Everyone seemed to be out.

You know, I've noticed something about Israel. You're either Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. You can't be nothing. You have to be one. I have a friend here who is an atheist, and it doesn't matter. She's labeled a Jew, whether she wants to be or not. When she passes through security, she's a Jew. When she gets into a taxi, she's a Jew. Israeli politics follow her around, with every step through the Muslim Quarter and every approach to the Western Wall. She gets smiles and jokes from the Jewish street vendors, and scowls from the Christian and Muslim vendors.

But I am to blame too. I assign a religion to everyone I meet. When you pass from one part of the city to another, even just walking a few hundred yards, you watch as the makeup of people melts and blends from one religion to another... but there's no room for the unaffiliated. You accidentally bump into a man in a narrow street, and you each look at each other, and for a brief moment, you're both afraid. You read him. You guess his religion. Then you act accordingly. This is the game that you have to play. You play it when you enter a church or a crowded market. You play it when you're arguing with a vendor to knock off a few shekels from your cigarettes. You play it through every security checkpoint you pass. It's part of life here.

We played this game Sunday morning.

Noah, Ian, Emily, and I were going to the Temple Mount.

You see, a few times a year, for a few hours, the Temple Mount is open to non-Muslims. One of those times was from 7:30 to 9 AM yesterday morning. The four of us walked down from campus at 7 AM.

Sunday morning is so different here. Sitting on the curb, kids were waiting for the school bus. Traffic was already heavy, moving in and out of the city. A couple old men were at work behind the hood of a car on the side of the street, and some Palestinian construction workers were pouring cement in a parking lot.

We walked in through the Damascus Gate and walked through the Western Wall plaza. People had filled the wall already. We passed through another security checkpoint and went down a path that led to another. After the last set of metal detectors, we walked up a long wooden bridge next to the Western Wall. Peering down we could see the Jews at prayer.

We went through a gate and everything seemed to stop. Just a little beyond the shadow of the door was an empty stone plaza, skirted by age-old trees. The sun in front of us had just come over the crest of the Mount of Olives, and it cast long shadows on the ground. Not a sound. Groups of security guards sat near each other along the wall, Israelis soldiers in one group, police in another group, and Muslim guards in another. We heard birds in the trees, but the plaza seemed to stretch on endlessly and silently in all directions.

Then we saw the Dome of the Rock.

It appeared from almost nowhere beyond the thick trees. We walked in silence to a fountain in the middle of the square where we could look up and see it. Unreal. It was the most beautiful building I've ever seen. The colors glistened in the sun... the solid-gold roof reflected the morning light and shot it in a million directions.

We stood and didn't say a word. We walked almost magically up the stairs to the empty platform where the Temple once stood. Now before us rose a building, perhaps with only half the beauty of that Temple, but still beyond description.

I did not want to approach the building, simply out of respect for the Holy of Holies which had been so near. But as I walked around the Dome of the Rock, I think I felt something that I really hadn't yet since I had been in Jerusalem. The silence of the square seemed to echo the reverence that the Jews have held for this place for the 1900 years since the Temple's destruction. I felt a connection to the past, away from the crowds and the noises and the sights and smells of the Old City. It was a very personal moment, for once.

Suddenly the sounds seemed to come back, one by one. I heard a church bell in the distance. The voices of children came from over the wall in the Arab Quarter. We walked around a little more and saw the many buildings around the courtyard. Strange arches and rooftops and what seemed to be a mosque filled the outskirts of the Temple Mount.

I took this movie. And Noah took this photo of me. What an experience.

By the time we had walked back out and taken a taxi back up to campus, it was time for class. We had class from 10 to 4, and I had one of the best classes I think ever. I hung out with the Italians (haha) at lunch and we talked about how hard it is for them to understand Americans when they speak. Yasin, who's studying in Rome, talks to Laura all the time in Italian, since her English isn't great. And he helps her in class when she can't understand what's going on. I sit next to Laura sometimes, and every so often one of them will lean over and ask how to pronounce something in English or how to spell something. I really like Yasin and Laura. They're such nice people. (I talked to Yasin about the Dome of the Rock. Since he's Muslim, he went there a couple days ago, and they didn't believe that he was Muslim. He had to bring out his Turkish identity card and prove it, showing the little field for religion in which he has listed, 'Islam'.)

Gere and I met at 5:15 to walk down to the city to go to church. There was a Roman Catholic Latin High Mass at 6 PM, according to the Internet, but it turned out that by the time we got there it was almost over. We knelt in a crowded church for the last five minutes of the mass. All around us were services going on. The Greeks were doing their service nearby, with chanting filling the main part of the church. An organ could be heard way upstairs, and a choir seemed to come out of the basement. The Russian and Armenian Churches were finishing their services. A priestly procession made its way out of the Tomb itself, hundreds of people standing outside with their heads lowered in silence. When the priest had said his final word, they all started pushing their way in, trying to be the first to go inside.

A big, burly monk pushed people out of the way, yelling something in Russian, and the crowd fought back. People fell on the ground. Grown men and women were pulling at each other and fighting.

We stepped back from the crowd and found a young, clean-shaven monk who was standing alone in a corner. We went up to him and started speaking English, asking for the Mass schedule. We didn't get very far. "I speak no English," he said. Gere, realizing the monk was Polish, told him he was from Lithuania. "I am from Poland," the monk said. They both started speaking at once, Gere in his broken Polish and the monk in his broken Russian. Close enough. "There is a Mass going on right now," Gere reported. "It's in Spanish."

Ahh, Spanish. We walked into a little room and went to our pew, crossing ourselves and kneeling. I could follow the Mass, both because I know a little Spanish and because I'm familiar enough with the order of the Mass. It's fascinating to me that you can be in a completely different part of the world, surrounded by strangers, and the Mass is the same. We gave the sign of peace to a group of Mexican pilgrims and three Spanish nuns. When will that ever happen to me again?

On the way out I took this short movie of the Russian Church.

Finally, we walked over to Ben Yehuda Street in West Jerusalem. We went to meet about 10 of our friends at a little pub in some winding street, set up with projectors and TV screens for the final game of the World Cup. Every Israeli in the country was for Italy, and somehow a tour group of French Jews happened to be at that very place where we were watching the game, chanting for France. That was exciting, let me tell you.

Italy won of course, in a shootout. And, of course, I took this video.

This morning we woke up early and met at the cafe on campus to take a taxi to the central bus station. It ended up being me, Noah, Rachael, Emily, Ian, Jake (from Albany), Annalisa (from Atlanta), Ya'ara (from Israel), and her boyfriend Nick (from London).

The bus. We got to the main bus station in West Jerusalem a little late, and there was only one bus going from Jerusalem to Ein Gedi the whole day, so we had to run to get our tickets. Well, we got there and ended up waiting in line anyway to get on the bus, but when it finally came and everyone in front of us started getting on, it seemed to us that, physically, there was no way everyone there was going to fit with all their stuff. Do you think they'd sell more tickets than seats? Will we have to wait for another one? Turns out physics, conveniently, doesn't seem to exist in Israel. We were in the 25 or 30 people who didn't have seats on a very hot bus, but we all got on anyway and stood in the aisles.

Bus drivers in Israel are horribly good, if that makes sense. Like a taxi driver, a bus driver will go through red lights, weave in and out of lanes, signal with a fist out the window, and at every stop, curse the driver out the window next to him, speeding off at two or three times the speed limit. Sudden stops, sudden starts, and sudden death. But they seem to (almost) never get into accidents. They're probably the best drivers in the entire world.

On our caravan through the desert, we saw absolutely stunning scenery, steep mountain cliffs and passes winding in-between, with an occasional Bedouin shepherd leading a line of sheep, or a group of run-down tin huts in the middle of nowhere. I would have taken more pictures if I could, but I was standing shoulder to shoulder with people in the aisle, and we were moving way too fast anyway. We were driving on an empty two-lane highway, continually going farther and farther downhill, to the lowest place on Earth.

I've never been hotter than that in my entire life. We got out of the bus with all our stuff for the night, and the heat hit us like a brick. I'm not lying to you when I say that by the time we walked 5 minutes to the beach, we had burned.

If you look out across the water in this picture, you can see the hazy outline of the mountains of Jordan. The Dead Sea is only 10 miles or so wide, if that.

We changed and walked down a hill to the beach. It was less of a beach and more of a pebble pit, and the ground was far too hot to stand on without sandals, but it was amazing. And the water: I can't explain to you what it felt like to climb down across the rocks and step into that water. It was as warm as bath water, and before I even got ankle-deep, I could taste the salt. It's 26 percent solid, apparently. And by the time I was knee-deep, I felt like I was floating. I leaned on my back, and that was it. I didn't touch the bottom again.

We had so much fun. We just sat there and floated, soaking up the sun through the sunscreen which had almost definitely come off the second we go in. We were afraid to dip our heads in, for obvious reasons, but that wasn't a problem anyway since they bobbed in the water like cork.

We floated and floated and floated. It was surreal. I can't explain the sensation.

A lifeguard stand was set up nearby, staffed with people who barely spoke English but dealt with American tour buses all day. Every so often a bored, apathetic voice would come on the loud speaker and yell at a couple of teenagers who had floated too far out. The best line was, "Come back or you'll float to Jordan."

The girls almost immediately found the mud. It's supposed to have some sort of therapeutic qualities, but I think it's just a big joke to watch tourists coat themselves in thick, black gunk. It didn't feel any different than I imagined it would, but Ya'ara and Emily were thrilled.

I tried to go underwater and touch the bottom, but I couldn't get more than an inch or two above my head. That little science experiment was probably the stupidest thing I could have ever done. I opened my eyes and couldn't see. And my lips burned like someone had ripped them off and poured in salt (wait a second...). I floated paralyzed for about 5 minutes, trying to open my eyes as tears poured down my cheeks. I scrambled back to the shore (it's impossible to swim, really), and ran across the blazing hot beach to the shower.

(The rocks looked like they were covered in glaze.)

Of course, I had to get a picture of me floating in the Dead Sea. I took the biggest rock I could reasonably lift and put in on my stomach, and I could still float.

The only bus for the entire day came at 2:45, so for the couple people who wanted to go back, we had to hurry up and figure out what was going on. We showered in oh-so-fresh water, dried completely in about two minutes just standing in the sun, and walked over to the only restaurant in Ein Gedi. Chicken, corn, pita bread. I was in love.

We walked up a large hill to this youth hostel, planning to check in and stay the night. Our original plan was to go hiking in the evening tonight, wake up tomorrow morning and go to Masada or Qumran by taxi. There are amazing trails in the mountains just in this picture, with little springs leading to waterfalls and exotic plant and animal life in an otherwise lifeless desert.

When we got to the hostel we rang the little buzzer and were let in through the gate. We climbed up a steep set of stairs through a garden and into the main lobby. Then we realized how expensive it really was: 30 dollars a person. Not that that's enormously expensive (it is expensive for Israel), but the real problem was that we would have no way of easily getting anywhere on Shabbat tomorrow. Terrific. We ended up just going back to the bus stop and waiting for the 2:45 bus.

We're going into the Old City tonight. Not sure what we're doing. Can't be out too late though. I really want to go to Masada tomorrow morning.

So after class, Emily, Noah and I sat down on the lawn and figured out exactly what we're doing tomorrow. Tomorrow's one of the two Fridays we have off, so about five of us are going to the Dead Sea tomorrow morning. We're taking a bus to Ein Gedi, a little town that overlooks the Dead Sea, with its beaches and mud pits and all. Also nearby are hills where you can hike through an oasis and see waterfalls and catch an amazing view of the desert from the top of a mountain. So we've heard, at least. Tomorrow we're leaving around 8. We'll be there all day and we're staying the night in a youth hostel. Total cost: like 20 bucks.

The next day, on Saturday, we might go to Masada south of the Sea, famous for its hilltop city that was surrounded by the Romans during the revolt in 70 AD. The Romans built a ramp up the mountain to attack the city. It took three years, but when they finally reached the city walls, the Jews inside committed mass suicide. Or, we might go to Qumran, famous for the Dead Sea Scrolls. Or we might do both. Whatever. Life is good :-)

Quick story. So around 6:00, Gere and I decided that we wanted to walk around. I have to be up early, so I can't really be out late, but we decided that we wanted to go somewhere we hadn't yet been.

We walked to the middle of campus so that we could head down toward the city, and we ran into a couple of girls we both knew. The one's from Squirrel Hill, by the way. (Let me take this moment to explain that every other American here has some relative or family or other connection to Squirrel Hill. Not joking.) So we thought it would be fun to all walk together.

Well, we headed north, because none of us had been that way before. There's a little Arab neighborhood there. And there's also a ton of little kids. Little kids = happy and safe, right? Wrong.

They had kites in the sky overlooking the desert, a perfect photo op, and we walked over to where they were flying. There were a bunch of little kids running around on bikes, scooters, rollerblades. I would say there were maybe 10, but I swear to you they kept coming out of nowhere.

I whipped out my camera, and I was flashing pictures when a couple kids spotted us and ran over. We had no idea what they were yelling, but all of a sudden a pack of them swarmed around us and wanted their pictures taken. (That's all any of the kids in Jerusalem seem to want when they see you. A picture. If a tiny little boy stops you in some street and asks you for a shekel, just take his picture. And then you have to show it to him. They all love it.)

Well, they look cute now, but after they had all had they fair share of pictures, the four of us started to walk down one of the streets into the neighborhood. It was a really beautiful old street with houses on the one side, sloping down to the desert way down below. We could smell the food coming from each kitchen as we passed the open windows, and every so often we'd hear laughter and voices and the clinking of plates.

Out of nowhere, the kids came zooming from behind us on their bikes and rollerblades, screaming something in Arabic. They almost ran over Alison. They were laughing and yelling at the same time, and they jumped off their bikes and ran over and stood in a row blocking the street. The boys stood with their arms crossed, serious looks on their faces now, and the lone girl walked over with her stick and started hitting me in the leg. The four of us looked at each other and decided it was time to turn around.

For some reason, the boys started getting really upset. They were yelling loud enough now that a woman in one of the houses had come out on her porch and was yelling back at them. One kid punched Gere in the side. As we sort of jogged back out onto the main street, another boy stood in front of us. He had a little pebble in his hand. We yelled out for him to set it down, but with a smile on his face he threw it right at us. It was a tiny stone, but it scared us, and I yelled for him to stop, but he had already picked up another. By this time all the kids thought it was fun to pick up rocks and start throwing them. We ran out onto the street, Gere and I covering the girls as rocks came form all directions. We didn't get hurt, but we did get hit.

After that, we walked the girls back. Gere and I walked around for a little while longer, staying much closer to the main street. It was getting darker anyway. People were out everywhere, and we could hear the Muslim evening prayers over the loudspeakers in the neighborhoods around us. Gere actually knows the translation of the prayer, and he said it for me. Really interesting.

Walking down a road, we both simultaneously stepped in the biggest pile of crap I have ever seen. It covered the whole sidewalk. What sort of animal in God's creation could have left that? We looked off to the side of the road, and there, about 50 yards away, was a camel.

Of course we had to go look at it. And of course we had to step in more crap on our way to the fence where it was tied behind some random church. It was probably the oldest and saddest looking camel in Israel (not that I've ever seen a whole lot of camels), and I kind of felt bad for it, but we had to take pictures. A lonely camel, Gere said, taking one last picture. And it stank.

We walked over to a clearing near the Mount of Olives (really not too far from campus, actually) and we saw the Old City just as the last light from the sun dipped under the horizon.

On our walk back, Gere told me that today was Lithuania's State Day, celebrating the day that the first king of Lithuania was crowned in 1253. I wished him congratulations. He's hilarious.

When I got back to the room, Ben told me that the quiet guy next door who barely speaks English, an Israeli who goes to school here, is excited to talk to me. He heard somehow that I was a Christian, and he is too. Isn't that neat? In a place where religion defines who you are to such an incredible degree, your religion (and the way you practice it) gives an impression of you that stands firm, without someone knowing anything else about you. That impression doesn't ever disappear either, for better or for worse. And though I haven't talked to him yet (he's not there), just imagine for a moment how difficult it is to be a Christian here. We're few and far between, as far as I can tell.

Ahhh... McDonald's. It's true, a burger in a little side-shop McDonald's in West Jerusalem tastes about the same as one in Pennsylvania. No cheese, though. I should have opted for the McKabob, but I hadn't had American food in a week, and it was the Fourth of July! If all I can get is processed, artificially-flavored, imported, greasy beef, I don't know how much more American I can be. Happy Fourth!

It was just another day here, obviously. Woke up at 7, class, homework, no fireworks. I mean, no one really cared that yesterday was American Independence Day. My friend from Lithuania asked us what we were doing last night, and I told him how I had gotten together a bunch of Americans and we were going out to get burgers and pizza. "Today is the anniversary of our day of independence," I explained. "Congratualations," he said. Uhhh... that's really funny actually.

(Here's another picture of campus.) Class is getting really hard. We're moving at a pace that is simply mind-boggling. I can pronounce things well enough now... the issue now is vocab and grammar. We're being thrown vocab faster than we can read it, and with alternate spellings for everything and rules for changes in vowel sounds, it's easy to get lost in the 6-hour class. Luckily, Barak is an amazing teacher. He's quiet and sort of hard to get to know. But then he'll say something just pure gold and the entire room will start laughing, and he'll just barely crack a smile. You sit there and wait for that, smiling, waiting for when he laughs. His English is pretty good, but he'll ask the Americans questions every so often in class. "How do you say..." We have fun in class talking about differences in English and Norwegian and Italian and Turkish and Danish and Arabic and Aramaic and Yiddish... you get the picture. Everybody is just so bright. Yasin, the Turk, talks to the two Italians in Italian during the breaks, since he's now studying in Rome. I can't keep track of all the languages everyone knows, It's interesting, but everyone here seems to know Ancient Greek. I (sort of, barely, not really) talked to a girl from Denmark in Greek, and I realized that everyone in the world for centuries has read the same letters I have and made the same sounds, no matter what language they speak. I want to learn Latin. I'm sure it would feel much the same.

On our break for lunch today I walked around the parts of campus I still haven't seen (it's really a huge campus). From one vantage point I looked out and saw nothing but desert. In the far distance was the Dead Sea. It was so hazy on the horizon that I couldn't tell where the sky began. The Dead Sea. It takes a walk around a mountain to realize that you're in a little oasis in the middle of nothing but desert.

(As I stood on the mountain, a couple of helicopters passed overhead on their way toward Gaza City. I hope you're following the situation, because everyone here sure is.)

Also, let me explain to you the cat situation. Jerusalem is the stray cat capital of the world apparently (not joking), and everywhere on campus or in the city is a cat, sleeping, sitting, walking, running, diving into bushes as you walk past. They wander into buildings, cafes, dorms, dorm rooms, all of which is great news for me since I'm highly allergic to the air when there's no cat hair floating in it. I've had a cat rub against my leg under the dinner table, but when your dinner table is in a restaurant, it's a little disconcerting.

Insects here aren't bad yet. It's too early in the year I guess. It's getting hotter every day, though I feel it getting hotter every day. I keep seeing really really big beetles now, the sort that land near you and you mistaken for a large rock. The birds are strange, but I can't get close enough to one before it flies away.

My friend Noah, Emily from San Francisco, Ian from Norway and I get together every night and we study now. We go through our homework and our notes, and really get a lot done when we aren't goofing off. A girl named Julie from Montreal will join us sometimes, even though she's not even in Biblical Hebrew. Normally we'll hang out in the cafe on campus, but last night I was told by British Airways (that was a disaster trying to keep in touch with them, let me tell you) that my luggage was in Tel Aviv, although it had been misplaced. What? "It's in the country, sir." I was asked to wait in my dorm so that if they found my bag they could drop it off "maybe sometime in the evening". So on the Fourth of July, even though I had organized a trip with about 15 people to go downtown and eat burgers and watch the World Cup, I got screwed over and had to wait in my room.

My friends are terrific. They waited for me. Our little study group came to my room and we did homework here, and the guy from the airport did show up! CLOTHES!!! No more borrowing things or buying random t-shirts for ten shekels. After a shower and my first entirely new pair of clothes in... never mind. It was around 9:30 when we finally left campus, and all of us went to a New York-style pizzeria in West Jerusalem. The pizza was actually really good. A lot of Americans were out and about. People were passing out fliers for Fourth of July parties, and a group of Orthodox Jew street performers were dancing to American music in the Square of Zion, a major pedestrian shopping district west of the Old City. Then we went to a place called the Yankee Pub. We watched Italy beat Germany in overtime. No one in Israel really roots for Germany. (Pause and think about that for a second.) I can't explain to you how exciting it was when Italy won. Unreal. People were shouting and jumping on tables and running into the streets, singing and chanting things in Hebrew or Arabic, holding hands and embracing strangers. I wish I had my camera.

I guess it's a good time to explain what I did last weekend. On Shabbat – Saturday, that is – my friend Gere from Lithuania, Rachael from Virginia, and my roommate Ben and I walked from campus to the Mount of Olives.

The Mount of Olives is where Jesus spent a lot of time. He taught the disciples the Lord's Prayer (The Our Father) there. A church stands on the exact spot where tradition (since Crusader times) holds that he taught them. The church is also next to the spot where Constantine's mother Helena built a church to commemorate the Ascension. We walked into this church, past a little Arab village (it is East Jerusalem, after all), walked down a steep path, avoided some little kids who wanted to give us directions in exchange for dollars, and into the entrance to a little courtyard with a sign that read "Pater Noster".

There was really no one in there at all, just an old man near the entrance, with his head lowered and his hand extended, looking for a few shekels. All along the walls of the courtyard, which was really a maze of walls, stand paintings of the Lord's Prayer in dozens of languages. An inner courtyard was reserved for the saying of mass, and all around were these old tile paintings. Really beautiful. A quick trip through a gift shop and a talk with some old French women, and we kept walking down the hill toward the Mount of Olives.

Gere is a Roman Catholic, a traditionalist who I really enjoyed talking to the whole day about our views on the role of Church tradition and the value of the mass. Rachael is a non-denominational Protestant, and she sort of stuck with Ben most of the day. He's Jewish, and everywhere we stopped we would explain to him part of the history of the Church or the story of the Gospel itself. He also served as our translator for the day :-)

We came to a clearing and saw the Old City in full view, with the largest cemetery in the world sloping down to the foot of the city gates. What a view. Graves, all in white stone, were piled almost on top of each other, stretching farther than I could even see. We walked all the way down a ridiculously steep hill to the Garden of Gethsemane, and saw the very spot where Jesus prayed the night he was betrayed. The Garden is in a courtyard within the bounds of yet another church called the Church of All Nations. If you were a woman, you couldn't even walk into the courtyard unless you had something covering your head and shoulders. Luckily shorts were ok. In the garden are the 8 olive trees, so so old, which are traditionally believed to be the "silent witnesses" to Jesus' prayer that night.

Inside the church itself, a monk dressed in full Friar Tuck garb greeted us in some strange language and escorted us inside the beautiful church with its dark blue ceiling and unlit walls to the rock where Jesus is said to have prayed the night he was arrested. We slowly went up to the gate and peered in. All of us were to afraid to go inside and kneel down and kiss the stone, as you're supposed to when you approach a relic. We saw an Asian woman come in and do it, kissing the hand of the monk and literally weeping as she knelt down to the stone.

Other than that woman, we didn't really see anyone else around. It was so silent in there, that we didn't dare say a word. We left without taking a picture.

We had just come down the steepest mountain any of had ever walked, and there was no way we were going back up. Why not go into the Old City?

The gate to the Muslim Quarter was right in front of us, and we walked up a hill to the city gate and went inside. The streets are so narrow. The pavestones were worn and chipped, and people filled the streets. There were really only Muslims and just a few tourists here. We were stopped in traffic trying to get down the main street by a wedding procession. It was really exciting to watch the bride and groom get in the car and drive off, cameras flashing, wedding guests fighting to get a good view.

We tried to take a side street to the left, which is almost visible in this photo. As we walked down the street, a group of kids sitting on the side of the road said quietly, "The street is closed." We didn't know what that meant, since it obviously wasn't, so we kept walking. About 5 seconds later, Ben grabbed my shirt and stopped. "That's the Temple Mount." Two guards were sitting near the gate, Arabic signs above their heads, an empty courtyard beyond. We did a 180 and almost skipped back to the main street. The Temple Mount is where the Dome of the Rock stands, on the site of the original Temple. Non-Muslims are forbidden to enter the Temple Mount (except on very rare occasions) and most Jews believe that it is a sin to go there anyway because they must be purified to enter the "Temple".

After that scare, we all wanted to sit down. We realized how hungry we were. We entered the main street through the Muslim Quarter. People were everywhere, cars trying to fight the traffic, delivering fruits and vegetables, and every few minutes a tractor would charge through carrying loads of lumber or seeds or garbage, or whatever. On the right side of this picture is a pizza shop. We stopped there and sat on the street, ate really good pizza and some sort of freshly squeezed orange drink, and watched the street life. I wish I had taken more pictures. Cars literally would hit each other trying to get around the street, and neither driver would react, they'd just keep driving. Little kids played hide-and-go-seek, running into traffic or jumping into storefronts. Old men sat and talked. Occasionally a Hasidic Jew would walk past, or even a Christian monk, but for the most part we saw only Muslim men and women in full dress.

I know this is a sensitive issue, but I want to make this clear: I didn't feel uncomfortable. Our waiter was amazingly kind. Americans passed us. Children were everywhere. We were with Rachael, and she didn't have any problems. Ben told me later that he felt uncomfortable, and I felt awful about that, but he said that he's been to the Muslim Quarter before and he's never had a problem. In all of the tourist books ever printed about Jerusalem, the Muslim Quarter is one of the top attractions. Street vendors were just as unfriendly to us there as they were anywhere.

Next was the Christian Quarter. For Gere and me, the place we had wanted to go most since we got to Jerusalem was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a massive, ancient church marking the spot of Jesus' tomb. It is the holiest site in Christendom, and possibly the most famous church in the history of the world.

The church has had many additions over the years. In the deepest corners of the basement are walls where the illiterate Crusaders, wanting to leave some mark of their visit to this church, scribbled crosses into the stone walls. On the main floor is the actual tomb itself. I stood in line and waited to go in. A Russian monk walked me in to the room separating the outside from the tomb itself, and I stood in candlelight and waited my turn to go into the tomb. Finally, I walked inside and kneeled at a little table filled with candles and icons and incense. After about a minute, the monk called for me to come back out. I want to go back. I wish I could explain that moment.

We explored the rest of the church, which I'd love to talk about but I have to go get falafels with a couple people in about 10 minutes. To make a long story short, we saw the Rock of Golgotha, where the cross stood, and left the church after exploring for about an hour. We walked over to the Wailing Wall which was FILLED with people for Shabbat. As many people as were there the first time, multiply that by 10 and that's how filled the square was. We walked up to the Wall this time, and I touched the stone. I brought out my camera to take a picture and I was almost sacked by about five Jews who harshly reminded us that picture-taking is forbidden in the Jewish Quarter on Shabbat. Oops. Wow.

Off to get a falafel now. 8 shekels. That's less than 2 bucks. Write more later!

Yesterday morning I was awakened by the sound of mortar fire.

I didn't know what it was for sure, but I got that feeling that something was wrong. This overwhelming sense of fear rushed through me. I thought it was a bomb.

Turns out that it was just a rocket fired from Jerusalem, probably toward Gaza. "Just" a rocket. Oh good. I talked to a former US Army engineer, and he said that he's been around mortar shots long enough to know that it was. It was a distinct ka-chunk, and no sound of impact.

Still no luggage and no internet, by the way. No word on that yet.

Class is amazing. Let me describe to you the people I've had class with for the last two days.

There are about 20 of us. We sit in an old room. Like everywhere else, no air-conditioning, of course. The professor is an Israeli, obviously a fluent speaker of Hebrew, but also pretty good at English and Biblical Hebrew, and he knows at the very least Spanish and French also. He's a young guy, maybe 30 or so, and sort of ambiguously ethnic, like a lot of people here. He could be Muslim. He could be Christian. I know he's in fact Jewish (he wrote out a good portion of Genesis on the board in Hebrew, from memory). But it's interesting to cycle through the possibilities while looking at him and watch as your perception changes slightly. Interesting sociology experiment probably.

(This is a picture of my campus, by the way.) Everyone in the room is brilliant. I was talking to this one guy, an American, about Greek grammar of all things, and I asked him where he went to school. "I'm working on my Masters at Harvard Divinity." ... ok, so you're going to the best seminary in the world. Nice to meet you.

We went around the room and said where we were all from. One from Mercer County (!!), one from Ohio, two from Chicago, one from DC, one from San Francisco, the guy from Harvard who's from Wisconsin, and me. That's 7 Americans. Then we have two Italians (as Barak, our professor, said today, "Every good Biblical Hebrew class needs an Italian so they can reduplicate their consonants for the rest of us. We have two.") and we have three Norweigans. The Italians don't know each other, and the Norweigans don't either. There's an older woman from Toronto, and a guy from Istanbul who's studying in Rome. I made friends with him yesterday. I'll explain in a second. Yasin is his name. He sits next to the girl from Ohio. Mix of cultures there. Then there's a guy from Spain and a girl from Japan and a couple other guys who only came the second day, so I don't know where they're from.

Mount Scopus is beautiful. How can I explain it. The campus is a palace. A fortified palace that is. It sits at the highest point in the city and has a fence with stationed security guards everywhere. The place locks down at about 8:00 PM. I took a walk around on Thursday during one of the two breaks in our 6-hour class. I wanted a view of the city from the west part of campus, looking toward the city. There was a door leading out onto a platform, which seemed harmless enough. There were signs, but they were in Hebrew. Somehow I ended up on the roof. Immediately I came upon the most impressive view of the city I've seen yet. The Dome of the Rock and old city were in clear view, and the eastern city lay in between. I took a short movie. Click here (Quicktime, 9mb).

There are Israeli students walking around the campus halls all the time. They're in class right now. Their school year is different than in the States. Most of them are helpful when you stop to ask them where the hell you're going, and you can tell they're usually excited to use English.

We read the first couple verses of Genesis yesterday. I didn't know what the words meant, but I could pronounce each of them, sort of. It's actually really difficult to get around all the guttural sounds and throaty consonants. "Make a coughing sound when you see this letter." Excuse me? We spent the entirety of the first two days on the alphabet, the vowel marks, and the little dots that go above, below, or within certain letters for different reasons. My homework is to read as much as I possibly can today.

After class yesterday, around 3:00, those of us who paid the 30 bucks (US) took a tour bus down to the old city and went on a walking tour of the Jewish Quarter and the Wailing Wall. We started off south of the city next to the City of David. And the first place we went to was actually King David's Tomb.

Like a lot of things in Israel, David's Tomb isn't necessarily exactly where it probably really is, but it's been traditionally believed to be on that spot for centuries. I mean centuries. And on that spot is a synagogue, a mosque, and a church. A group of Christians on a different tour passed by us and went into the Upper Room (yes, that Upper Room). We could hear them singing through the stained glass windows above our heads as we stood in the courtyard. They were singing some familiar hymn, in chorus, and it was actually really beautiful.

Suddenly a man from some other corner of the courtyard started screaming. He was yelling as loud as he could in some repeated Arabic so that he could drown out the Christian music. Our tour guide quietly explained that some Muslims will do that in Jerusalem if they hear Christians singing.

We made our way up to the Upper Room. A lot of the people on the tour were Jewish, so the tour guide told the story of the Last Supper. I took the time to walk around the room. A stray cat was sitting next to some ancient inscription. So strange. I had a dizzy feeling. This wasn't the actual Upper Room, was it? It was smaller than I imagined, but it was at one point, as the New Testament says, on the edge of the city, near where Jesus had been preaching that day. The problem is that the room was built during the Crusades, but it certainly could have been built right over top of the original site. The Crusaders did that a lot.

On our way out as we walked over to the city wall to get into the old Old City, there was a break in the trees where we could look out and see the security fence that divides up the West Bank now in so many places. There it was. You've read about it, you've seen it on the news, and there it is. It's only an actual wall in some places, like this one, where Palestinians had been shooting down from their camp at the Israelis.

(This guy followed the tour around. Friendly.) We walked through the Zion Gate and ended up walking through the Cordo again, the same place where I was a few nights ago. This time I learned a little of the history of the street, that it was unearthed just a few years ago when Jews regained control of this area after the 1967 war. Over the centuries Jerusalem has been sacked and burned and rebuilt and sacked and burned and rebuilt... and each time things have just piled up on top of each other. But the city never seemed to be much older than a few centuries BC, and surely never of the size and splendor described in the Bible. However, new archeological evidence has finally revealed layers even deeper than was ever imagined, proving that Jerusalem was an enormous city in the time of David, and there are signs of habitation from way way before that. We're talking pre-Trojan War. Do you understand? Hundreds of years before that. Maybe more. A woman in the City of David, in Jerusalem's southern section, is unearthing what appears to be one of the largest temples ever found, indicating that Jerusalem was indeed the seat of a kingdom long ago. So much more will be learned from this research.

Turns out oral tradition and the Bible are right a lot of the time when science was thought to contradict it. For instance, an old mosaic map of the city of Jerusalem from the 5th century AD marked the location of a pillar which is no longer in that spot, but which corresponds to an open area known in Arabic as the Pillar Gate. Scholars assumed the name was a mistranslation, until this map was discovered recently. For 1500 years, that pillar wasn't there, but the name for the gate survived in the colloquial language for centuries. And this map proved that there was, indeed, something there. Scholars were wrong. Who knows, maybe that was King David's tomb?

I walked around with this kid I met named Gavin. He's from Princeton. We had a really good time actually. We're going to the Christian Quarter today. He's Jewish, and he explained a lot of things to me, about the Wailing Wall in particular.

The Wall left me speechless. As we approached it, you could feel in the air a sense of reverence and silence. It's the most sacred place in Judaism, save for the Temple itself. If you don't know, the Western Wall is the only remaining portion of the wall that surrounded the Temple Mount, on which stood the Jewish Temple, which was destroyed when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD. The Temple had been built to replace the first Temple from so long ago. The destruction of the Temple has been the defining moment in the Judaism of the last 1900 years, leaving Jews with no choice but to totally reshape their religious rites to work around that crucial part of the instructions laid out by Moses. Ever since, Jews have made a pilgrimage to this very site to pray at the Wall and weep over the destruction of the Temple.

The Wall is divided into two sections, one for men and a smaller section for women. You can't approach the Plaza unless you have something on your head. I had a cap which I wore, though everyone else seemed to have a kippah, those things some Jewish men wear on the back of their head, or they were Hasidic, in which case they had on black suits and hats. There were a lot of tables set up for Shabbat (Sabath), which started a dusk, and men were already sitting there reading their Torahs. Others were standing, bobbing forward every few seconds, reading aloud. And they seemed to come from all over the world. Young boys, middle-aged men, all with their hair done a certain way, and different hats. I wish I knew more about it.

I didn't want to take many pictures from right there. I was even afraid to touch the Wall. I did walk into a little indoor portion of the Wall on the left, which you never see in the pictures you see on TV or anything. I touched the Wall there, just for a moment. There was a place that they had under glass where you could look down and see all the way to the bottom of the wall, where the street level used to be. Let me tell you, the portion of the Wall which you know of is literally just half the height of the original Wall. And it's still there, underground. You can walk through the excavated portion. I'm doing that with Gavin later.

I took a video, though I felt sort of awkward with a camera that close. Click here (Quicktime, 13mb).

The security was unreal. It's a different world, it really is. I don't know how else to say it.

The other part of the 30 dollars was a Shabbat dinner at the Regency Hotel. Good good food. I wasn't the only Christian there, so I didn't feel bad not knowing what I was doing. Fish, chicken, schnitzel, potatoes, and various things I had never heard of. I ate a lot of them, and wimped out with the things that looked too crazy. Met a lot of cool people. Met some guy from the US Army who lives in Boston who described Israel as being a land of contradiction. "I've been everywhere on this Earth, and there's no place like Israel. It's a beautiful country, and they'll be a security checkpoint with an electric barbed wire fence. The people are amazing and really kind, but they segregate like it's the 1950s." True, really.

I'm listening to real Middle Eastern music right now on my pocket radio. Do you know what the most popular song is in Israel? Kelly Clarkson's Since You've Been Gone. Umm, what? I took scissors to my hair today. I could have donated my sideburns to Locks of Love. It was time... too much hair is impossibly hot in the desert. But I haven't shaved yet. I can't. I don't have a razor.

I'm going to the Mount of Olives in about 5 minutes with my friend from Lithuania, the girl from Virginia, and my roommate Ben. Everything's shut down today for Shabbat. It's wild. You can't get food, the University's closed. If you want to eat you basically have to go to the Christian, Armenian, or Muslim Quarters. Wish I had bought something other than cereal. I'm leaving now. Write more later!

As the sun came up over the Mediterranean, I stared far into the horizon and watched Israel come into view. It was breathtaking. The Middle East was right there in the window, and here I was about to land in one of the oldest and most culturally significant places in the history of the world. An old Israeli woman next to me who I hadn't spoken to the whole trip was so excited when she found out this was my first time in Israel that she started crying. She gave me advice for exchanging money and bartering with street vendors, looked through my Jerusalem travel guide with me, and had a childhood story for every place in it.

Then I found out my luggage was lost.

I didn't really expect my luggage to make it with me. I had been switched from one flight to another more times than even I could explain to the nice lady at the Lost and Found counter. Anyway, I was so immersed in the moment, listening to everyone around me using a language I had never heard outside of Fiddler on the Roof. And I mean EVERYONE. Suddenly, all those Americans on the plane were fluent speakers of Hebrew. And everyone assumed that each other knew Hebrew. Most signs were in both languages, but billboards were in Hebrew only, and signs and menus at the lobby restaurants were too.

I wasn't even tired at this point, even though it was just before 6 AM and I had slept an hour on the plane. I found my way outside and looked for a shuttle to take me to Jerusalem. A man approached me and, watching me stand there dumb as he started in Hebrew, said in broken English that I could take a shuttle to anywhere in the city for 45 shekels.

Now a US dollar, as the Israeli woman from the plane told me, is worth about 4 and a half shekels right now. That's way up from just a few years ago when it was worth about 3 shekels. That means that things are relatively cheap for Americans right now, even though Jerusalem is a relatively expensive city. I had withdrawn 500 shekels as soon as I got to the airport, so I forked 45 over and jumped into a hot, stuffy extension van with a Jewish family from Spain and 3 students from the US.

As we drove toward Jerusalem, which is only about 30 minutes away, the land around us started to become more and more varied, with hillsides cut away long ago with old stones for farming on the steep slopes, and finally to enormous mountains with ancient ruins on top. I wish I could describe to you what I saw. My camera kept clicking, and my mouth kept dropping every time we'd turn a curve and an entire ancient town would come into view.

Nothing compared to Jerusalem.

The Americans and I started talking. Two were students from Virginia and the other was a teacher from Colorado. I was really glad I wasn't the only one coming to the University early, because orientation was to start at 9:00, and it was still about 6:30.

We were let off at the top of Mount Scopus, the tallest point in Jerusalem. All around us (though we weren't even looking at the Old City side yet) was the city: dilapidated (but beautiful) buildings, crammed into tiny spaces in the hillsides and on top of other buildings, with impassable streets between. It's like Pittsburgh hehe. Since I had no suitcase to pull, I helped the one girl from Virginia pull hers up two flights of stairs to a security checkpoint with a guard who spoke not an ounce of English. Now we were stuck.

Apparently he hadn't heard about the Rothberg International School starting today, and he wouldn't let us in without student IDs. Security is so tight here. There's one pedestrian entrance into the campus, and it's guarded 24 hours a day. If you make it through the first checkpoint, you have to pass through metal detectors and armed police before getting anywhere. It was like that on the ride into the city too: we had to stop twice at security checkpoints on the highway.

So we stood there, and it started to get hotter, and we were all exhausted. Just as were about to sit down and pass out on the sidewalk, a young guy walked by, Jewish-looking, nice face, who said in a calm English voice to follow him. He shouted something in Hebrew, the guard moved aside, and we walked in.

His name was Aharon, and he was one of the instructors of Hebrew for this program. He led us through a maze of security, at one point pushing our luggage past beeping metal detectors and bewildered security guards and yelling things that none of us understood, but we got to the registration desk with all of our stuff finally around 8.

I won't talk about the registration process, or the fiasco with contacting the airline after finally getting a permanent address in Israel, or the fact that I had no passport-sized photos for my student ID (since they were in my luggage).

I moved into a dorm room on the third floor of an old apartment building with my roommate from Cleveland. Two beds with a mattress about an inch thick, one wide desk, a sink, a closet, and, surprisingly, a fridge!!! We immediately went to a nearby convenience store and got bottled water. I also had to buy a towel and washcloth (again, with the luggage), but since they had no washcloths I bought to towels and ripped one in half with my teeth (would have used my pocket knife, but again, with the luggage). I had to change my clothes, and I needed to shower, and Ben (my roommate) gave me a University of Maryland t-shirt that he had extra, brand new. He bought it originally for his cousin who lives here.

The Internet wouldn't work until tomorrow (typing this now offline), so that was upsetting. I just passed out for an hour, even though I wanted to get out and see things.

When I woke up it was time for a free bus ride/tour of outer-Jerusalem, and a trip to the Jerusalem Mall. I ran into the kids from Virginia again, and I met a girl from Denmark, a kid from Norway, and two girls from Paris. The girl from Denmark said that I looked very European, and that if she saw me somewhere else she'd think I was Swedish (really?). Good to know if I ever need to conceal my identity. We all walked around the mall together. I bought cheap sunglasses (my two dollar pair broke on the flight) and we had a good time.

I don't know whose idea it was, but someone decided that we should leave the mall and take a bus into the Old City. Absolutely. We found a bus, spent 5 shekels, and went downtown to a place called Yehuda Street, a pedestrian-only shopping district west of the Old City walls. It was getting dark, and a bunch of people had come out to walk around in the cool evening air.

The seven of us walked around, found a place to eat, and had falafels. I had a turkey pita-bread thing with humus and a ton of vegetables I would normally have never looked at for long. It was pretty good, actually, and it was cheap. I had a potato-pancake (or something similar... all Hebrew menus and bad English Israelis), pita-bread and coke for 20 shekels or so. That was the first thing I'd eaten since London.

Then we did exactly what I've dreamed of doing my whole life. We weren't far from the city gates, and even though it was almost dark, we figured there were enough tourists around for it to be safe to go through the Yaffa Gate, the main gate into the Old City of Jerusalem.

So there we were. That image at the top of this blog... that's from the Jaffa Gate at night. (I took my own version here.) Hasidic Jews on their way home, wearing their suits, top hats, and full beards. Vendors shutting down their side stores for the night. Tourists standing on top of the walls, taking photos of the Old City. And us, making our way inside.

We walked down the main road dividing the Armenian and and Christian Quarters, sort of the highway through the Old City on its way to the Temple Mount. We followed this street for a while and then turned off a little ways down.

We immediately went down a path that started to go underground. We were not in the Jewish Quarter, in a market that ran along the border of the Armenian Quarter, a long tunnel so old that it had been covered over by buildings over the centuries. It now served as the main commercial district in the Jewish Quarter.

Although it would have been a lot busier during the day, I was so glad we got to see this at night. It was stunning. The stones in the road were probably put their longer ago than anyone could know. Mosaics on the walls, some well preserved and others left to decay, lined the walls, and strange little passages to who-knows-where jutted off from the main corridor. Every so often an old Jewish man would walk by, or a couple of students, or Israeli children riding bikes through the tunnels. At times it was dead silent, and at other times a group of old men would be sitting alongside a shop, talking in strange loud voices.

If it weren't getting so late, we could have explored that place forever. Roman columns stood in one place, and a crowd of students had assembled there for a lecture on something or other. The lights from the walls cast a yellow glow on everything. And from above, you could just catch the faint smell of some kitchen far above on the street.

We walked out of the tunnel, apparently having gone south toward the city wall. I later learned that this was The Cardo, a reconstructed area of the city from the Byzantine era when it served as Jerusalem's main thoroughfare.

Not far away was a parking lot with a bus station. After decoding the sign we learned that it could take us to the main bus station. We stood for a while, and I walked off to stare in awe at the city walls and the view south of the city into the City of David. Then I heard something.

I walked a little farther away, following the sound. It was a low rumble, like a far-away truck on a highway, but I decided it couldn't be that. As I walked a little more toward the city gates, I thought I heard a moan, and then another, higher pitched.

I realized suddenly what it was. The Muslims were praying over their amplifiers, off in some Palestinian camp below. Their voices were musical, going up and down in long long voices, sometimes high, sometimes so low they barely caried across the distance.

I heard my friend Noah from Virginia shouting that a taxi was here. I darted back to the bus stop and jumped into a cab with the 4 others (the girls from France had left earlier). We crammed inside, and for about 7 shekels each the driver took us back up to Mount Scopus, through the Mount of Olives, past the Church of St Mary Magdalene, all lit up. We drove straight up to campus, really not far north east of the Old City.

Unbelievable. I followed Noah down to his dorm, borrowed a pair of boxers and a t-shirt for tomorrow, and found my way to my building. The night air was so relaxing. Kicked a few stray cats out of the lobby and tried to get on the Internet and write home, but it's still down. And apparently Israel flew into the Gaza Strip this morning in full force? Is that true? I have no idea. News is on everywhere you go in this city, but whether its TV or radio, everything is in Hebrew. I need the Internet!

As we made our approach to London, we broke through the clouds and I saw England for the first time. It suddenly dawned on me that I could possibly spend the entire day in London, since my flight wouldn't leave until 10:00. I mean, for whatever reason, I hadn't really processed the fact that I had 7 hours to kill at the airport. I might as well go into London, I thought. You have no idea how excited I suddenly was.

We landed, and the first thing I noticed were the cars. You now, wrong lane. Then I heard people talking. We walked out of the plane and I was inundated with an accent I couldn't understand, which is unfortunate for me because they're English, speaking English. People on their cell phones (their "mobiles"): Cheers, mate! Catch the football match on the telly? I went through customs and asked if I was actually allowed to leave the airport. Yes, I could, but they suggested I give myself about 2 hours before my plane was scheduled to leave, just in case. That still gave me 5 hours, minus the 2 it would take to get there and back. Three hours in London. The cost: 6 pounds. Not bad, mate.

So the London Underground was everything I imagined it would be. Deep, deep tunnels, lots of people. I had an all-day pass so I could basically go everywhere in southern England for free. The city stretches for miles! I can't explain to you how expansive the city is. It took an hour to get into central London, and when I surfaced, I realized why.

London basically has no skyscrapers. Everything is built out instead of up. There are a few really big buildings here and there: you know, the famous ones. Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, St. Paul's Cathedral. Well, those are the ones that I could name off the bat. And so, I thought, why not go see them. And the Thames. Have to see the Thames. And that new Ferris Wheel thing. And Piccadily Circus. And London Bridge. And the Tower of London. And...

You have to understand: at this point I had had about 2 hours of sleep in two days. I had been at three different airports, was suffering from jet lag, and had my bookbag stuffed to the brim with my laptop crammed inside. It seriously weighed 50 pounds. To make matters worse, I'm the type of person who wants to do as much as possible, even when it's physically unhealthy (hence why I'm awake right now).

So I set off. Remember what I said about London being really spread out. Well, the sites that I arbitrarily set off to see were in completely different places from each other. I got off at Piccadily Circus, a sort of London Times Square, with places to shop, busy intersections, double-decker buses, guys sitting on the sidewalk playing guitar, you know. Then I practically sprinted around the city, snapping pictures, bumping into people. It was a race against time. I was only limited by the shutter speed of my camera. I don't know what most of the buildings were that I took pictures of. It didn't matter. I had a blast.

It took about half an hour of this for me to realize that I wasn't heading toward the Thames at all, but had wandered into Soho. I bought a cheap map. The streets of London look like the city council was eating spaghetti, vomited onto a sheet of paper and started naming the mess of noodles after dead queens. No attempt at perpendicular intersections or pedestrian-friendly crosswalks, not to mention that every time I tried to cross the street I had to make myself forget every instilled sense of first-grade safety laws and look LEFT. The penalty for this mistake would be certain death. Traffic was horrendous.

The Parliament building was my favorite. I crossed over the Thames on the Millennium Bridge and could see the London Eye, the world's tallest Ferris Wheel. All around that side of the Thames were crowds and crowds and more crowds. And there were all sorts of people asking for money in creative ways. The best were these guys who had spray-painted every inch of themselves to look like statues. They stood frozen in a pose, and when ever some inquisitive soul would drop a coin in the jar at his feet, he'd suddenly jump out of place and move into a new position. The more money, the more things he'd do. I watched a guy make about 20 pounds in a few minutes that way. That's like 40 bucks.

Ran over to see Westminster Abbey, although I didn't see the front of it. I tried to call home from one of those neat British payphones, but they wanted 18 pounds just to connect to the US, even though I had a calling card. Darted off to St. Paul's Cathedral. Beautiful, except it was being renovated. Huge place though. Rode the Underground to what I thought was London Bridge. No luck finding it. Then it was really too late to do anything else. I got fish and chips at an authentic little pub and watched Brazil beat Ghana in the World Cup. People are crazy about that here. Even little kids. Little toddler girls in the street were talking about how England is playing. I don't think ESPN talks about how England is playing.

This is me exhausted. I don't even remember taking this picture. I'm joking, but seriously though.

So it's been raining for about a week straight in DC, and everything is flooded. I mean everything. Roads have washed away, buildings have been shut down, and CNN is even reporting that a tree has fallen on the front lawn of the White House!!! In fact, the flooding is so severe that the air seems to have gone underwater. Every plane into DC today and most of the ones leaving have been delayed or canceled. My flight from Pittsburgh to DC was, of course, the latter.

I was originally supposed to leave Pittsburgh at 4:30 PM, so naturally I got to the airport ridiculously early, at about 1. Half-hour wait for the ticket, hugs and kisses to the family, and off I was, through an amazingly non-threatening security line and into my seat in an empty gate. The airport was all decked out for the All Star game, and with my Steelers shirt on and my head held high, I was feeling more Pittsburgh-y than usual. In other words, I was happy.

By about 4:00 it occurred to me that my flight was canceled. A line had been forming at the counter which for some reason I ignored. I was busy building this blog and Leaving on a Jet Plane was on repeat in my head.

I jumped up and ran over to the counter. Oops, sorry. You're going to have to make your way to the back of the line. Where? Over there, see? You mean by the bathrooms? No, beyond that. Over by the parking lot.

About an hour and a half later, I reached the counter. I had been talking to a couple of businessmen from wherever. EVERYTHING was shut down. People had been stranded at the airport all day. DC was a mess. Nothing was flying in or out. But by this time my flight from DC to London was boarding. It, apparently, was not deterred by the weather.

When the lady at the counter heard I was going to Tel Aviv, she winced. Pounding the keys for a minute or two, she muttered that she had nothing until Saturday. Saturday. My voice probably made clear that there was no way I could get to Israel any later than Wednesday. After making a phone call to London, she discovered that there was one seat left from Pittsburgh to DC and from DC to London. What would happen after that was a mystery. "Ask if the Israeli airline will honor a British Airlines ticket." Hmm. I pushed my luck and asked if United would reimburse me for my hotel in Jerusalem. "Can't. Act of God," she said casually. How ironic.

So I waited until 6:30, which wasn't bad, and walked out a little gate with a bunch of disgruntled businessmen and into the rain. United had made up for their debauchery by offering the go-cart of their fleet, a tiny tiny plane with 3 seats in each row and a cabin just spacious enough for me to cuddle in with eight teenagers on a "Euro-trip". They were actually fun to talk to, luckily, and I had an audience to point out the many landmarks of Canonsburg as we flew overhead. I could see my house, the high school, and the Pizza Hut Italian Bistro.

We were in DC airspace three iPod songs later. We burst through the clouds into a storm, with floodwaters EVERYWHERE. Overpasses were covered up. I could see the water just lapping on the top of highways as cars struggled to get through. What a mess. Traffic was backed up for miles. At that moment I was glad to be flying. We touched down comfortably at Dulles at 7:30.

Then I found out my flight to London was delayed. 3 and a half hours. I give up. I grabbed a piece of pizza, struggled with the language barrier, and found a corner of the airport with Internet access and an outlet. I called the travel agency that booked the reservations at my hotel in Jerusalem for Tuesday night, but eh, not a chance. I'm just going to lose that 70 bucks.

The lights are flickering (I can't make this up), people are huddled around on the floor talking about where they'd rather be, and I'm sitting here dozing off, dreaming of the warm British-accented hum of a transcontinental 757.

I actually just talked to a kid who's on his way to Oxford. Can you imagine studying in Oxford? Wow.