Jerusalem

I am so dead tired right now, so please excuse any grammatical errors in the following blog!

Brooke and I attended church at the BYU Jerusalem Center this morning (aka "the Mormon University"). The ride from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was beautiful, and what's even more beautiful was the price of the taxis. It costs us about $10 each for a 40 minute ride. Not bad. Church was wonderful. The building is incredible, and the room we had sacrament meeting in had the most unbelievable view of the entire city as the backdrop behind the speaker. It was very hard to concentrate on the speakers because of the enormous windows behind them. Words can't describe it. All of the students there were very friendly to us. [okay this is Brooke now because Stacy is about to fall out of the chair--she is so tired! She's getting all emotional, or looks like it anyway] We had a munch n mingle (yay free food in a foreign country) and a bunch of the kids were going to the garden tomb, so we tagged along. The city was relatively quiet since it was Shabbot, and we went right into the tomb, had a tour guide tell us all about the skull rock where Christ may have been crucified, then took us down to the tomb. One thing he kept saying was "it's not the place that's important, but the person." So who knows if that was where He was crucified, but the tomb felt real. Even if it's not, it still feels real. We sang "I Know That My Redeemer Lives" in church, and with the surroundings, you could picture the Savior's Life. Those words echoed through my mind while we were at the tomb.

Then Stacy and I headed by ourselves to the Garden of Gethsemane, thinking it was closed, but thought we could walk by it and Orson Hyde Park is just up the hill from it. But it was open! And empty! We went in by ourselves, and at the opposite end from the entrance we met the gardner. After talking a bit, he actually let us in the gate to take a picture and then he gave us some leaves and not-yet-ripe olives from the tree. We had a few more minutes by ourselves before a hoard of foriegn-speaking tourists poured in.

We then hiked up the hill to Orson Hyde Park (aka Mormon Park--Literally everyone here loves the mormons. It's great. One taxi driver made the comment "You know, I can always spot the Mormons. There is something special about them. I don't know what it is. Something about the way the walk and talk. . . . I don't know what it is or why."). Hyde Park is where Orson Hyde dedicated Israel I guess. I honestly don't know all the history, but it's on the Mount of Olives. It's a winding path leading up the mountain, and when you are on the top, you have a breathtaking view of both old and new Jerusalem. We were beat after that, so we jogged some of the way down and caught a taxi back.

Dinner tonight was some eggplant concoction (it's the second time we've had eggplant -- yum) and scrambled eggs with a plate of fresh vegetables. They love veggies here. Sometimes we have no meat, just veggies. And we talked about how Paris is one of the best places in the world to live.