Busy market place

Dinner with people from Spain

The view from Independence Park.

View of the Dead Sea from the tour bus.

Pool at the spa.

The Dead Sea! very warm!

Masada. 115 degree heat! :(

Palm trees on the way to the Dead Sea.

Well. The trip is over! It was a really amazing experience. I hope that you have enjoyed reading about my trip. I have had a good time writing about it. Even though going to Israel was an adventure, you do have to come home some time. Well thats about it. I will be posting some of my favorite photos from my trip soon.

Bye!

Okay...........so...............yesterday, we spent the night in Tel Aviv. After arriving at our hotel, we headed to the beach. The water was very warm and very salty as well as very shallow at some points. It was very refreshing. Turns out, you have to pay to sit on beach chairs. Pretty silly, right? Anyway, we're stranded in Newark right now! Yah! :(. I better go.

Kaarina

Chemists on the bus. HEY! get that finger out of your nose!

Our dessert. YUM! :)

Chill! I'm not trying to shoot you, its just a PICTURE! This is one table at the place where we had dinner last night.

Herding the chemists along! Come on.........come on! this way! :)

Well! It's our last day in Jerusalem! Wow, that went really fast! After the conference is over, we are going hail a taxi and head down to Tel Aviv for the night, flying out tomorrow morning. Last night we went out to dinner with all the people who attended the conference. It was a really good meal and the funniest part was that on the bus ride back to the motel, I was able to get some in the moment pictures. Its soooooo funny to catch people when they are doing something like scratching or yawning. Then when they see the picture, they react to it and try not to do this certain thing in public. Anyway, I'll post some of those pics. So, nothing really new to describe! I'll explain our night in Tel Aviv sometime soon!

Kaarina

This is a close-up picture of the Wailing Wall, the women's section.

A 21st century boy on a scene of a busy market street. Haha :)

This is part of the Muslim quarter of the Old City.

This is a ceiling in the church. Very impressive!

This is part of the inside of the church. In the right corner, you can see a women praying.

This is a blurry picture of one of the streets that we went through. As you can see, there are many different things hanging from different places.

Wow! Yesterdays tour was AMAZING! The tour was mainly seeing Christian and Jewish holy sites such as the area where Jesus was apparently killed, buried and rose once again. The Jewish holy site we saw was the Wailing wall. We started the tour off by going to the church were Jeus was buried. It was huge!!!!!!!!!! When you first walked in, it opened up to a large room with many different passage ways. We took on up some VERY steep stairs and came to a place that was a place were people came to pray. In the back off the room, there was a raised platform containing a large metal slab with a picture of Jesus hanging on the cross. On either side of him there were life size models of two women (I didn't know the names of them) In front of the raised platforn was a low shelter with a hole in the middle. Apparently, inside of that hole was were the cross was placed. The room was beautiful. Nearly everything in the room was red, but it had a pleasing affect to it. We then climbed down the stairs back into the main area. In the back, there was a slab of granite that was suppose to be the place where they prepared Jesus's body. If you touched it and then brought the hand that you touched it to your face, it would have a certain smell. Next we went into a large circular room where there was a smaller building were Jesus was suppose to be buried. However the line to see it was far to long, so we went into a small "cave" off the side of the hall. Inside there was round circular area and a smaller doorway that led to a grave. Apparently the grave was for the person that had buried Jesus. Wow, I can't take up his much time explaining all of this! :) If you don't mind, I'm going to jump ahead! After we got out of the church towards the Jewish part of the Old City. To get there, we had to walk through this street that was FULL of shops, cafes and many other things. There were venders on the street selling things from drinks to clothes. The people that owned the shops really, really wanted us to buy something. They would go up to you and shake beads, necklaces and many other things in you face trying to get them to buy them. In fact one guy kept coming up to my mom and I asking us to buy postcards! VERY annoying! The first things we saw in the Jewish quarters was some old ruins of a large street that was like a outdoor market. There were large columns that created a pathway which use to be lined with shops. After checking this out for awhile, we continued down stairs to another place where a large shopping street had been found. After this, we continued onto the Wailing Wall/Western wall. It was very beautiful. After going down a flight of stairs, we sent through security like something at the airport. After this, we entered the main part of the Wailing Wall. There was a large fence the ran across the large area about 20 feet or more in front of the wall. The wall was split into two sections, a section for men and a section for women. The women section was a lot smaller. Walking towards the wall was like walking towards a giant. The two sections were completely silent except for a cough or a sneeze every once and awhile. The wall was over 20 feet tall and was very thick. There were some plants growing out of the wall and falling down it like a waterfall. An occasional pigeon would land in the one of the holes in the wall. After the Wailing wall, we went back to the bus and headed home, the tour over.

Tonight we are having dinner with all of the people who came to the conference, so I should have some things to write about!

See ya! :)

Hey everyone! I'm having Internet problems, so the pictures will be coming soon!!!!!!!! Hopefully. Lets see, oh yeah! I made a mistake, we will be going on the tour TODAY not yesterday. Oops! Yesterday, I did about the same thing that I did for the past 2 days! Swim, read, T.V. Yesterday evening we went out for dinner at a place called American.............oh I don't remember with some of the people from the conference. It was very, very nice! The place where we ate had fountains, palm trees, flowers of all kinds, a fountain with fish and many many other things. We got there by walking, after getting lost half way there! However, we did walk through a older part of the city where most of the Jews live. The streets were narrow and full of trash, there were houses on top of the shops were the owners lived and there were some VERY small grocery stores which had half of the store outside! It was a kind of shock to go from seeing the newer part of the city and then all of a sudden seeing a lot older part! After a very good dinner, we went outside to wait for a taxi. After awhile 2 finally came to pick us up. The taxi's speed never dropped below 40, YIKES!! We arrived at the hotel around 12 where we crashed onto the bed, very tired. Hopefully I'll be able to show the pictures that we took yesterday! Tomorrow, I will give out a very long blog about the tour that we are going on today! See ya!

Day Three! Right now I'm sitting in the University with chemists allllllll around me, typing on a computer about our adventures yesterday. During the day, I hung around the motel room, reading, swimming and watching T.V. The pool at the hotel is AMAZINGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! nice and cool! perfect for a hot day. That evening, my mom and I went shopping at a small outdoor "market". After eating pizza, not that great pizza! we went walking around shopping. Many of the stores on the street are shops FULL of JUNK! No offense shop owners. There are bead shops, clothing stores, antique shops full of good luck charms :), shops for beauty stuff all made from Dead Sea salt!, plant shops and many other ones. After we were done shopping, we went to go and get ice cream from a little shop. The flavors varied from Twix to Lemon-Mint ice cream. My mom got chocolate truffle, while I got lemon-mint and cherry chocolate. After we got our ice cream we walked back to our hotel. On the way back, we saw these gaurds with guns :(, kind of scary! Tomorrow afternoon we are going to tour Jerusalem, so the next blog will be more interesting AND have pictures! Shalom!

Bus trip- around an hour through the desert. We saw camels, palm trees covered with dates, camels and small villages. The small villages were like Indian villages, they have a leader and they live and cabin like things made out of tin roofs and cardboard. When we got to Masada, which means fortress, we got out of the bus and walked into 115 degree heat! After riding up a cable car, like the one in the Sandia’s except a LOT shorter, we came to the fortress. This place was inhabited by Jews when the Romans wanted the Jews as slaves. A group of Jews escaped to the fortress to hide from the Romans. The Roman’s found out about the fortress and knocked over the walls that surrounded it. That night the Jews had to decide between death and slavery. They finally decided that death was the best choice and they killed themselves that night When the Romans invaded the “camp” they found the dead body’s of the Jews and a couple of women and children, still alive. After the tour, we went to a spa near the Dead Sea. There were some good parts and some bad parts of it. The good parts were that there was water and after an hour in the hot sunlight, that was very good! The bad part was the whole place smelled like sulfur. Yeck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The other bad part was that the only water that was there was very warm which wasn't that refreshing. We went to the Dead Sea and floated around. The water was very, very warm when you stepped in and nearly burned off your angles, however the farther you walked out, the less warm it got. When we reached a deep place, I lay on my back and it was like floating on a water bed! After awhile, however the cuts that I had started to burn and sting. We spent the rest of the time at the spa in a very warm pool. So all in all, it was a pretty good day. More later!

First Day!!!!!!!

Greetings Friends! Today we traveled to Israel, or was it yesterday and today?? Dada, Flynn and Devin dropped us off at the airport in Albuquerque on Friday morning. After 12 hours, we were only still in New Jersey. How disappointing. Highlights of New Jersey included seeing the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty when flying in. Oh, and the Pigeon flying around the airport! And trading in our 20$ bills for 20-Sheckel bills. They are shiny and green, very pretty. And who is that guy on them? THEN we got on the big plane to Tel Aviv. Each person got their own entertainment system with games and 197 movies to choose from. We did indeed watch a few. After a meager dinner containing ravioli, a sad little salad and some cookies we did try to sleep--hahah. Finally they turned on the lights and brought breakfast at New Jersey breakfast time—omelet for Kaarina and Indian food for May. Now we are flying over Athens, Greece. In about I and half we will be arriving in Ben Gorion Airport in Tel Aviv where we will have to take a taxi to Jerusalem. The taxi ride was long and very beautiful. There were harbors of grape vines and orchards. They also seemed to grow sunflowers fields! The hotel that we are staying in is in a neighborhood that is very Jewish. The men wear black and around their waists they tie long strings which, are suppose to mean that they have a connection with God all the time. Anyway, I better go! The adventure has begun!

We miss you all; especially Dada, Flynn and the Devin-monster.