Already onto my 2nd blog post for being on this study abroad!  Woooo!! Haha yeah, so I don't know why but after doing that first blog post I just felt like they took too much time and were a lot of pressure to try to make interesting and blah blah, so I thought I'd just write emails, but that turned into nothing.  So here I am again for round two!

Right now I'm in the Galilee and it definitely deserves a blog post!  I feel so lucky to be here because this is where Christ was raised and where he was for part of his ministry, performing many miracles.  It is a beautiful place and if anything, being here has made the scriptures come more alive for me.    

I've been here for about a week now and am here for a couple more days and I have had the time of my life.  For starters, our hotel is right on the beach in En Gev and it overlooks the Sea of Galilee with the city of Tiberias across the water from us (which is an incredible view at night).  Here's a picture of the view from my back porch!

So as far as what we’ve done, we pretty much go on field trips for a day and then the next day we have our New Testament class for a couple hours and then the rest of the day free to ourselves (which consists of a lot of napping and sitting by the beach).  We’ve been on so many field trips that I don’t dare try to talk about all of them but here’s a few highlights and the significance of each:

Nazareth: Jesus grew up & later announced his Messiahship

Boat Ride on Sea of Galilee: many of Christ's teachings talk about fishing on the sea

Mt. of Beatitudes: Christ delivered the Sermon on the Mount to his disciples

Mt. Arbel: mostly just a good lookout point for the Galilee area

I had a slight freakout when I saw the bouganvilla!  Probably only my Dad will appreciate this picture.

Capernaum: home of Peter, Andrew, and possibly Matthew; Christ moved to Capernaum and performed many miracles here(example- Jesus healing the centurion’s servant)

Gamla: one of the Galilean cities destroyed by Romans during the First Jewish Revolt

Love finding pictures in the scriptures of places we're at!  Overlooking the Jezreel Valley at Megiddo.

Galilee Hike: One of my favorites from this trip.  Good conversation and one of the most gorgeous views I’ve ever seen.  There was a waterfall towards the end that we went swimming in and it was literally the most freezing thing I’ve ever been in.  I will be the first to admit that I went in solely to say that I did it.  (I better get a picture out of it!)

Tess and I trying to look hard-core, like we just finished up an archaeological dig.  (haha mostly just sick of taking normal pictures)

View from the church we went to in Tiberias!  Can you believe that I got to go to church overlooking the Sea of Galilee??  They have a small branch there that we went to that is in a house that was remodeled to fit their needs as a branch.  So weird to think back to the views in sacrament meetings in America of the white walls after having the old city in Jerusalem and the Sea of Galilee here!!

I never realized how lucky I had it watching conference with no problems at home!  Because of the time difference here, we watched the Sunday morning session here on Sunday night(not our Sabbath) at 7 our time and this is what we came up with to watch it.  Besides the spotty internet connection that made it about half an hour longer than it should have to watch it, it was an incredible experience.  Outside, in chairs and hammocks watching conference being projected onto the lifeguard shed.  Surrounded by palm trees, the stars above us, and overlooking the Sea of Galilee (can see on the left side of the picture). You cannot even believe how excited we all were when one of the speakers mentioned the hills of Galilee in their talk.  Such a cool experience to listen to talks about Christ near where he taught.  An unforgettable experience for sure!


I feel so lucky to be here and quite honestly do not want to leave to go back to Jerusalem yet!!  I hope you are all doing well wherever you are! (And are having as good of weather as I am lucking out on this year;/) 

  

FIRST POST IN THE HOLY LAND

                Ohhhkay, well I’ve always told myself that I wasn’t going to jump on the whole bandwagon of blogging, trying to stick it to the man I guess, but I figure that this is probably better than my boring emails so here we go!  I’m just warning you though, I’m not the best writer and I tend to be one of those people who always starts their journal entries with, “I’m sorry I haven’t written in forever,” so that may just be the worst combination that I’ve got going on.  Nevertheless, I’m really going to try to do a blog post once a week(although I’ve already been here four) and I’ll try to keep it short, sweet, and to the point.  Trying to sum up what has happened since I’ve been here is nearly impossible so I’ll probably just include a lot of pictures so I don’t get too frustrated. 

                First of all, getting here was quite the trip.  My roommate from Provo took me and two others to the airport and honestly yeah, I was a little sad but I wasn’t nervous like I thought I was going to be.  It wasn’t until we got to New York that I realized how nervous I really was and how different of a culture I was about to step into for the next four months.  Seeing the Greek Orthodox men with their curled sideburns and knowing that some of the people on my flight to Tel Aviv couldn't speak English very well really started to scare me.  Even walking through the city the first time, all I could think was what I had just gotten myself into.  Since then though, surprisingly this place is starting to feel home to me and I love the city. 

                This picture is one of the first pictures I took here in the Holy Land!  One of the first couple days we got here it was snowing and we woke up to this beautiful view outside of the Jerusalem Center.  They seriously never get snow here and haven’t had a snow “storm” like this in over 10 years I think they said.  

The Jerusalem Center (JC) is seriously the best…although sometimes I feel a little trapped.  It is the most gorgeous building, located on the Mount of Olives and is basically a big boarding school I feel like.  There are about 60 girls and 20 guys here(I could write a whole blog post about that), we live in four-person apartments, and we live in the same building as our teachers.  We sleep, eat, go to school, workout(not me), and go to church all in the same building.  Although it is a little strange to have one of your teachers in your bishopric and to see your teachers and their families at the movies on Friday night, I actually love it here and can already tell that it’s going to be hard to leave.

But yeah, from the Jerusalem Center we have a gorgeous view of the Dome of the Rock as well as the Old City of Jerusalem.  Pretty much everything is all the same color out in the city but it’s really starting to grow on me!

Confession time, I haven’t really spent much money on the souvenirs. I’m still in the phase of wanting to solely buy food and candy.  Ooops.  The picture of the kid carrying those giant bagel looking things, okay those are delicious.  I’ve only had one so far but it really is just like a giant bagel that you open up and put these green spices inside.  Don’t know what it is or what it’s called but I love it.  The glorious picture of me eating is a schwarma, which is a really popular food here.  It’s basically this delicious meat(I’ve had turkey and lamb so far) that they put inside a pita with a bunch of toppings inside-including fries!  Wooo!

We have already gone to so many places since I’ve been here that I’m going to spare both myself and you from trying to talk about all of them.  Basically though, how our weeks work here is that we go to school Tuesday through Friday, have our Sabbath on Saturday, free day on Sunday, and then a field trip on Monday!  So far some of the highlights have been going to the Garden Tomb, Jericho, the Dome of the Rock, Bethlehem, the Western Wall, the Old City numerous times, the Garden of Gethsemane, and we just got back from our trip to Jordan, which deserves a whole blog post by itself.

                I’ve already met so many wonderful people and I feel lucky to be able to study here in the Holy Land!

Sneak peek at my adventures in Jordan.