Jarom in Jerusalem: A few more days...

I feel like I haven't done a whole lot this last week. This is mostly due to midterms which ruin all Jerusalem Student’s lives, as well as the fact I got sick last week and still have a little tail end hanging on. So between studying frantically and lying in bed sick, not much spectacular has occurred. The exception to that was the field trip we went on yesterday. We went to the national park of Neot Kedumim. There we kind of did a biblical tour or some important plants found in the bible. These included olives, grapes, wheat, Barley, Figs, Hyssop, among other things and how they were used, where the bible mentions them, among other things. The tour guilds allowed us to heard some sheep, which was funny because we had no idea how. We looked on how olive oil was made and looked at olive trees. Olive trees will flip their leaves around to face up to reflect the sun when they’ve had enough of it. Also, the olive pit had oil so they used huge stone rollers to crush the pits. We looked at carob trees, grapes, pomegranate trees. We mashed our own Hyssop to make Zatar, a spice for food. We made some wheat “pop corn,” some hyssop tea, and our own pitas. It was fun. We saw a recreation of a primitive water wheel as well. At the end a Torah writer from Yemen came and showed us a 200 year old torah scroll, as well as the “secret” ingredients used to make the ink from the scroll. Pretty much they made the ink from most of the stuff we’d been looking at, from amber from a certain type of tree to little growths on oak trees to the skins of pomegranates. On the way out we saw a snake that had been crushed by the bus. It was silvery black and big! I’m afraid I don’t have many super cool pictures from Neot Kedumim, just mostly pictures and trees and what not. I’ll post something though.

Oh hey actually there was something pretty cool we did last week. We went into a big tunnel where the Israeli’s are doing excavations right next to the temple mount. A whole ton of the old wall of the original temple is still there on nearly every side. (The Jews pray at the western wall because it’s the only part that has been exposed in the past. There is a huge piece of stone called an Ashlar that is the largest stone in any ancient building ever! They don’t know how the people moved it there. There was other important features like Warren's gate. Also the other day we explored the underside of the Jerusalem center. There is an underbelly to the Jerusalem center where they have all the water filters, AC, pumps for fountains, as well as room for additional growth of the building. Anyway, Shalom!

At Jappa or Jaffa with Tel Aviv behind me.

Sand Castle made at Tel Aviv last week.

After a hard day at the beach... Fools mock but they shall mourn!

BY a Huge Ashlar with some friends. The biggest stone ever used in construction starts at my left and goes back to that one guys head behind me. (Very scientific explanation). and of course it went in and up as well, which you can't see.