Now I'll play catch up on lots of cool things... Here's Sunday! 9-6-09

Hey there everyone! Why don't we start with Sunday, our free day here at the Jerusalem Center... AND I WAS FINALLY ABLE TO ADD PICTURES, YAY!

So the term free day is wonderful, and it was a wonderful day, but it was a little deceiving. Want to know how? Well, breakfast was at seven a.m. still. So we were free to wake up early still, go to breakfast, and get a sack lunch for the day...and then have free time. Which was very free and very fun. So we started out by eating, and then we got all our stuff together and we headed out into the city with a plan. Here is it: we were going to go to the walking tour of the Ramparts (I will elaborate) and afterward to a Lutheran Mass.

So, we went through New Gate, through the city and around to Jaffa Gate, which is where you buy tickets to get up onto the ramparts. The ramparts are very simple, it is basically just the tops of the walls of the city. It was really cool though, because there were great views of the old city, and outside the city, and we all felt less on edge about keeping track of our bags and stuff, because there was hardly anyone up there that had paid to go up and see. We took tons and tons of cool pictures. That was probably the most pictures I've taken in a long time, and we explored and just made it really fun.


Right in the middle of the day, we went to a Lutheran Mass in German because the organist at the center was playing for their mass. I gues he does it a lot (?). His name is Walter Whipple. His wife is the choir director and stuff like that. They're one of the service couples here, and are really, really nice. It was nice to take some time out of our day and to sit down and listen. I took my journal so I could write while the sermon was being given in german, and we sang with them as best we could. It really was fun.

One other thing that happened at mass was that I had my first experience with telling someone I couldn't say anything about our church. It was really simple, and innocent, he wasn't trying to bait me or anything, but the guy sitting behind us was talking to me and this other kid, James, about being BYU students at "The Mormon University" and everything, and he was just asking quesitons about where we're from and stuff like that and started getting a little into doctrine by asking, "So your church, are you protestants?" And I had to reply, "Sorry, I can't really answer that." He looked a little confused and slightly offended, so I explained that it was part of our agreement to come to the Holy Land, that we would only be observing students and not present anything about our religion to anyone in the area. He seemed okay with that answer, and even hypothesized with us about why, even though we knew the answer. He was finally satisfied by talking about how our building was built after Israel became a country and so our religion wasn't allowed to be intoduced to the area after that. Anyway, it was an interesting experience. I can't remember where he was from, but maybe Germany because it was a German mass. He had a thick accent, but was speaking English.

Anyway, after that we went back up onto the ramparts and finished our tour around the city, still taking some cool pictures, and then we came back to the center.

I'm going to do Monday and Tuesday next, but I have to study for a while before I feel okay about blogging again. I love you all!


Also, ALL of these pictures are from Sunday, when we were on the Ramparts Wall :)