Hallelujah!

Okay, these are all pictures of my room and stuff. It starts with the hall to my room on the 4th floor, and then goes through it. I tacked it onto this blog post. I love you guys!
Okay family....I would've blogged by now, but guess what. My blog has been in Hebrew for the last two days. Fun, right? Since I speak and read Hebrew so fluently. I finally finagled it to going back to English, after much pleading......Reed will know what I'm talking about. He frequently witnessed me trying to coax my computer to be friend instead of foe.

First I'm going to add some pictures of the center that I took on my first day, and also of my room, so you can hopefully see a few more things than you can find via BYU pictures.

This morning I woke up at 5:50, feeling a little groggy. Luckily I missed the Muslim call to prayer, which happens every morning at 4:00....Dad, aren't you upset you're missing that wake-up call every morning? Then I made a quick call homeward to let everyone know I was here and doing well, and I went to breakfast. For breakfast we had french toast (Jerusalem style) and some fresh fruits and stuff. There was other stuff too, but I didn't have too much.

After breakfast we went to orientation, and they told us all about security and where not to go and when not to go different places, but it's all very hard to follow right now (or it was then) because we had no idea of where things were. But, never fear, after orientation we split into groups and I put my chacos to work on a walking tour of the city.

At first it wasn't too special, kind of like any other city that's a little dirty and there's people all around trying to sell you different things. (That's on the streets, I mean. The whole city is gorgeous from the view of the center. Want to see a picture? let's see if I can get this to work.
.....Okay, doesn't look like it's working. I don't know if that's cause it's busy or what. I'll try to figure it out, sorry. But anyway, once I got oriented, it was really cool, even in the streets. The Hebrew and Arabic on the signs are really great, and the people are all very friendly. They all call out to us and say things like, "Are you the Mormons? Welcome, welcome!" or "Mormons always come to me!" or "BYU?" in thick accents. It's pretty cool.

My favorite part of the walking tour was the old city. We went in the walls through Damascus Gate, which is in the Muslim Quarter, and I was blown away. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't anything like that. The streets were narrow and winding with old stone on the ground, and there were shops selling things everywhere! It was very cool.

I have to go to another orientation meeting now, but I'll try this blog thing again later.

Love you all!