Look Mom, a post!

Well, I promised a real post. :D And there will be 3 sections to this one. :D heehee.

Shabbat we had our service at a church in Jerusalem, It was a strange church. It was like a charismaticky baptist church. Very interesting. :D After that we went and had amazing non-kosher pizza. :D We're always very glad for the chance to get non-kosher anything. haha. So, after the pizza we went into the city, and the girls all decided to get scarves for something we were doing later. Ashley and I got our scarves, bargained down with Jared's help, and then we went to the Christ Church cafe. We sat on the patio out there, and Ashley wrapped my scarf around my head like an arab woman. It was funny, because at the cafe they have free hebrew and arabic Bibles, and after I left, trying to act arab, my roomate Molly went up to get one, and the woman working at the counter told Molly that she should take an arabic Bible too. And Molly said that she doesn't know how to read arabic. The woman replied that it was for Molly's Arab friend. Molly clarified that I was only wearing it, and not arab. The woman said "Wow. I'm arab and she fooled me!"
Do I look arab? Judge for yourself. :D



Okay, so last Sunday our whole group went down to Jerusalem, lugging our water bottles and work gloves and lunches along with us on the bus, and showed up at about 8:00 AM in the City of David (hill in jerusalem where David first built his capital) at the site of an Archaeological dig that was going on there. Here's what I said to my mom after coming back, when I talked to her on skype that night. :D

Well, they have the whole area divided up into Bilks (squares about 10x10 feet)
surrounded by sandbags. and ou have a team on each one,
mine yesteray was me and an israeli guy and girl (Yo'av and Ochel)
and then today we had another guy (Yonatan) and basically,
you have a ton of buckets, and you start at one end of the
square and use pickaxes to go down in a line about 5-10 inches
and break up the dirt, and then you take shovels (more like hoes)
and put the dirt in buckets, saving out pottery/bones/or like..glass bits
and when you fill up all your buckets and there's no more empty
ones availiable, (which happens for everyone at about the same time)
everyone makes a chain and passes the buckets up to where
they get dumped on a dirt pile at the top. Then we start again.
if we find like. big rocks, or rocks that are set in, we go
around them and try to keep digging down,
and kinda clean them off,
cause they could be part of a wall or something

Here's a picture of me and you can see the dig activity in the background.

Thanks Whit for the picture. :D

We did the same thing on Sunday and Monday, in case that wasn't clear. :)

Then Tuesday I had Jewish Thought and Culture for 4 hours, and then Hebrew for another 2. It's pretty crazy, I'm about brain dead at that point. :D

So then on Wednesday we went to Yad Vashem. It's Israel's Holocaust museum. The building is a long triangular prism shape, when you walk in, on the wall there is a big video playing, I'm not sure of what, but it showed many people laughing and going about daily life, as a contrast to what would follow. The building is a long hallway with many rooms jutting off to the sides and you follow a path, and each room chronicles a different part of the Holocaust. It was one of the most intense experiences I've had. The weight of depravity is huge indeed. At times i almost cried, at times I felt so sick inside that I had to close my eyes and just breathe. The hardest for me was hearing about all the children hurt and killed. Families torn apart, never to meet again.

At the end of the time we spent there, we went out of the museum, and followed Bill Schlegel to the Chilren's Memorial. This was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. It's a room under ground that is dark. It has in the middle a pillar of mirrors and around the walls mirrors too, and somewhere there are many candles and the effect is that you stand there with the low deep mournful music playing and hear the names, ages, and homelands of the dead children read and you can just see black, but with dots of light stretching out far and far. Bill told us to hold on to a name and try to remember it. Here's mine.

Hadassah Rosen. 5 years old. Poland.

That night we watched Schindler's List. It was thought provoking. And sad, but it was a very good movie to experience.

Well, Much love. :) Tomorrow's Shabbat, and we're going to Jerusalem. Again. :D We love Jerusalem.

Love Savannah!