I felt like I should update this for some reason. I can’t think of a specific event to write about though. We are starting finals tomorrow so we have all been pretty deeply immersed in the various texts. Nevertheless we have made a few outings here and there. Yesterday we went down the street and took a look at the wall. The wall the separates Jerusalem from the West bank. Yeah, its down the street from us. Solid concrete, about 45 feet tall, barbed wire on top. There are holes in the concrete near the top that make it look like you could move them pretty easily with a helicopter. Its covered by graffiti. It is so similar on the surface to the great iron sign of oppression from the last generation but at the same time it has drastically reduced terrorist attacks. No one likes it, but it produces results. What do you do?
Today was also interesting. We had the whole day open (most people stayed in to prep for the two nasty finals coming up tomorrow). First thing we headed to the Franciscan monastery Terra Sancta, which is the largest that I’m aware off in Jerusalem. On a side note the Franciscan’s run most of the catholic sites around here. They have a 200 year old door that has a bunch of signatures carved into it. One of the names in Hyde. It is probably the building a certain apostle stayed at some time ago. The rest is conjecture.
After that tour we didn’t want to go home to study so we went to a sweet shop that has some ruins in it’s storage room. It appeared to be a supporting pillar for the original Church of the Holy Sepulcher destroyed long ago. Maybe its true.
Next we found some stairs that got us on the roofs of the old city and messed around up there awhile. Next we were walking down a street and noticed an open door at the John the Baptist Greek Orthodox church. It was small and wildly decorated. TONs of Icons. We were the only ones there and struck up a conversation with the lone Priest there (think Dumbledore only not an actor and not as old) We spent an hour listening to him tell us about the paintings and various traditional interpretations of scriptures. It was really cool. He invited us back to see the church at night, lit up only by oil lamps. He even let us sneak a picture of the fragment of John’s skull.
Our next stop was lunch in Hurva Square. It was nice to sit and people watch for a while. We were waiting for some students to meet us there. We spent three weeks arranging and reserving three tours of the Hurva Synagogue (the biggest in the old city consisting of an 80 ft dome comparable to the Dome of the Rock.) Now since we did this 3 weeks ago we forgot about finals, as did everyone else. So initially we were expecting 80 students to come. It soon dropped down to 40 due to cost mainly. In actuality only 24 people showed up for the tour. We learned around this point that there was a 250 shekel fee for canceling a tour. So to avoid paying the fee we split up the 24 people that showed up into the three tours resulting in very small touring groups which looked really suspicious. They led us slide though. We got lucky on this one I think. The synagogue was actually designed by a Muslim after the design of the Dome of the Rock and Hagia Sophia. Which in turn were patterned after the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. So the synagogue was patterned after the Mosque that was patterned after the Church. I think the Romans invented the dome so it all goes back to the pagans.
After that we saw some graves, listened to a cool organ, then went home to study. The day before the two worse finals we have and I spent 8 hours wandering the old city. Oh well, after all, why are we here?
Oh, someone cut our phone lines, thats why I haven’t called. I guess its a rough neighborhood.
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