Shalom!!

Sosince we got here we have just been crazy busy every day, with orientations, field trips,classes, homework, unpacking (which I still haven't finished!) and of course exploring the city! The classes here are hard, and require a ton of reading every night, it's kinda challenging right now to find a good balance between homework and going out, but I think it will get better as we get more settled in & figure out how to manage our time more wisely! So on Monday,we had an orientation walk through the city. Kay so theres the East side of Jerusalem, and pretty much besides the jerusalem centre, everything else is pretty ghetto, theres trash everywhere, and it's just not a pretty site! Then there is the old city, which is still in the east side, but it has all the little shops where you can barter with the vendors (I am SO excited to go back there, omh there is so much I want to buy! Heaps of cute, chunky necklaces, jeanie pants, jewellery, dresses, ect!). And then there is the West side of Jerusalem, which has the fun nightlife, and we can be there as late as we want, but we have to take a taxi to get back if its atnight, because if we walked we would have to go through the old city which isnt allowed!! But like that part looks like Europe, it's really clean and theres nice buildings and malls and shops and there are performers on the street, ect! The only hing I havent loved so far (besides all the homework!) is that a prayer is chanted 5 times a day, and like one man sings it and it comes out of these loud speakers that project all over town, and they do it at 4:30am! It has woken me up every night since I got here! It's actually kinda interesting, and I love hearing it during the day, just not at 4am! Anyhow, I really do love it here so far and I am excited to explore the city! My goal is to go out and do something everyday, which is actually a lot harder than it sounds! You have to always be in a group of 3, and at night one has to be a boy, and you have to carry a copy of you're passport, cell phone, ID card and insurance card! But Friday we have a free day til 5pm, when we go all together to the Western Wall, and we are going to go into east jerusalem tomorrow night, and we already went out twice today, so so far, so good! And we leave for Turkey in less than 2 weeks! I am so excited! We aren't supposed to upload any pictures to the internet, because it will explode the "bandwidth", but I may just upload a couple!

Even though it sucks we aren't in Jerusalem yet, I can't complain that much!!

 The pool where we spent our afternoon

So a few kids in our group are from Phoenix, so their parents dropped off their cars, and we all piled in, went to wal-mart & bought 2$ mats and floated down the river! It was really fun & the river was really calm, just a few rapids! It was especially nice since it was about 100 degrees today! I definitley want to do it again next time I go to Arizona!

Phoenix!

So we are stuck in Phoenix, but we found out tonight that some of us are leaving tomorrow, some Friday & some on Saturday! I, unfortanately am with the Saturday group, but we've decided to make the best of our time here!

Phoenix is so ho t(hence the shiny faces), it's hard to find stuff to do, especially since we don't have any transportation! Tonight we went down to Mill Ave and got ice cream, and I think tomorrow we are going to rent tubes & go tubing down some canyon!

Trouble at the airport

After we found out we were going to be stuck in phoenix for a week & we got pizza with our airport food vouchers!

 So this morning at 8, I had to be at the Salt Lake City airport, to catch my flight to Phoenix which left at 10:45. The wait went pretty quick and we arrived in Phoenix in no time! We just had a short period of time for our layover here, except all the sudden we found out our flight to Philadelphia was delayed for an hour, which was just fine. But then we found out our flight was delayed til Friday, because of mechanical problems with the plane, and they are fully booked til Friday & they have no other options to offer us, except to put us up in a hotel and give us money for transportation and food! But right now, the person in Provo who was in charge of booking all our flights is on the phone with the airline, fighting for us to get a sooner flight so we aren't stuck here for 3 days! I'm sure everything will just be fine but I hate waiting, I just want to get to Jeru! Okay just kidding I just found out we are staying in phoenix for a week! nice resort, but I want to get to Jeru!

BYU-J

Hi! So facebook in blocked at the Jerusalem Center (which I actually think is wonderful, I waste way too much time on it anyways!) and we can't email any pictures home because it will like overload their internet or something, so I am going to write about my experiences and post pictures on my blog (which hopefully I am allowed to do, who knows, maybe they've blocked blogs too!). I've started a few other blogs, but I always spend so much time trying to make them look cute, which I usually can't do because I don't really know how, and then I look at other people's blogs and see how cute they are, and then I feel bad about how ugly my blog is so I quit! But I've decided with this one, I'm not going to even bother maing it look cute, so please excuse it's blandness! But I am going to try to update whats going on weekly, and hopefully I will have some interesting experiences and neat pictures to share! Also here is my adress, I love getting mail!
Mailing Address (for letters and correspondence):
BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies
Mary Burtenshaw
P.O. Box 19604
Jerusalem, 91196
Israel


This is going to be my home for the next 3 and a half months! if you want to read more about the centre, this is the link! http://ce.byu.edu/jc/