Jarom in Jerusalem: Ein Kerem and the Zoo!

Today was awesome as well! Several of us got on a bus and went over to En Kerem-> the place where John the Baptist was born. I’m not sure if that is actually the place but there were like three churches there dedicated to it. Most of them were focused on the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth when they were both pregnant. There was a Russian Orthodox Church that had very new looking decorations (I’m used to really old decorations), a Catholic church with a well in a chapel (apparently Mary and Martha met at a well) on the bottom level and another chapel dedicated to Mary on top. On the bottom there was a group of nuns from Ethiopia singing there, and the top chapel or church had about 12 women from the bible depicted, along with a pretty neat depiction of Mary. The last church supposedly had the birthplace of John with a fourteen pointed star and some neat decorations. One of the girls with us who is majoring in organ performance played the organ there and it was neat. After that we ate our packed lunches or bought pizza and ice cream- which I enjoyed very much. Then a few of us who were going to go home decided to go to the Israeli zoo instead. They call it the biblical zoo but besides from a few scripture verses here and there, the fact many of the animals had lived in Israel, and a “Noah’s Ark” theatre where they talked about conservation, it wasn’t super focused on the Bible. But I really enjoyed it. They seem to let the animals get closer to the people here it seems to me. Maybe it’s because they can use electric fences and don’t worry as much about lawsuits- I’m not sure. It was really fun walking through, looking at Penguins, birds, lizards, tigers, bears, lions (used to be lions and bears in this land) Indian elephants, giraffes, rhinos, hippos, lots of deer-like creatures with crazy horns, etc. etc. Besides the elephants, one of which got down in the water right below us and was playing around, my favorite was visiting Lemur Land! You got to go into a big open area where there were lemurs everywhere and you got to get really close and the lemurs were dancing around playing around. I forgot how cool lemurs were. Well, we took public transport back to Hebrew University (after getting on and off three different buses) and we limped over to the Jerusalem Center, being pretty tired from our whole day. P.S. public transport is fun, both sitting by different people (there was an Ultra-Orthodox Jew reading the Torah and commentary) as well as a Muslim woman, Orthodox Jews and lots of Reform Jews, but it was most fun to just look out the windows at all the Jewish neighborhoods we drove through in Northern Jerusalem getting from West Jerusalem where we were at, until finally reaching East Jerusalem. P.S.x2; Ramadan is starting tonight- so Muslims fast during the day for 40 days, and I hear things slow down economically and inflation goes up because no one wants to be in their shops. We’ll see if or how it affects our experience here.