Dusty City

Today you can't even see the Old City from the Jerusalem Center. It's about a 15 minute walk to get to it so if you can imagine the distance...it's not very far. There is some kind of white dust floating around everywhere. I went to Rockefeller Museum this afternoon with my roommate and Craig and the walk back was a pretty quick one due to the dusty air and Natalie having class in 5 minutes. It was nice to get out of the center, yesterday there was a good chunk of classes and an assignment that I had to finish. Although staying in the Center has had its interesting moments this week. Yesterday all of the students got a tour underneath the center. The center is built on the slope of the hill of Mt. Scopus. All of the pipes and electrical systems are underneath the building sloping down the hill as the dorm rooms do. This way if there is ever a problem with electricity or plumbing they can fix a good portion of the problems from underneath the rooms. Pretty amazing architecture really. I was caught off guard by the lone chair faced against of the cement wall of the Jerusalem Center basement...don't want to find out what you have to do to get there.... At the bottom of the hill is the place where all of the students that have been on the tour can sign their names. I was hoping I would see my best friend Miranda's name. No sign of here but I did see Sarah Jane, my roommate Fall 2009 and several good friends of mine from my days at BYUH. My name is now written in sharpie to be forever remembered in the basement of the JC.

The University of Utah singers performed here last night so we got to have dinner with them yesterday. They talked about how much they were enjoying the city...the sites...the shopping...bartering. True to form- the blonde girl had gotten the most free stuff so far. The concert series here are meant for the local community so students at the center get last dibs on actual tickets. We pretty much are on constant standby unless you are a host/hostess for the night. It was unique for the U of U choir to come. The center series are generally reserved for BYU choirs and local performing groups. Lauren and I sat with a lot of the singers at dinner, they were all really nice and fun to talk to. They made a couple Provo jokes but we still love them anyways. A group of us went to go listen to their sound check afterward, they invited us up there after they heard that a lot of us might not be able to see the show. They were really amazing. Probably one of my favorites was a version of "Circle of Life" from the Lion King....really made my night. What might have made my night even more was the dessert they gave us at dinner. I was banking on the fact that they would give us something good to impress the singers, and they did not disappoint.

I'm slowly slowly working on my Arabic....it comes pretty well in class but for some reason when I got out into the city still all I recognize is the casual marhaba you get from people passing you on the street. Egypt taught me that the best way to learn Arabic is to get an Arab taxi driver.

It's dangerous not bringing a laptop to the Jerusalem center. This means that when you have assignments you have to do them in the computer which means non-solitary study time and generally unproductive study time. Example A...last night...I went to go work on my Islamic assignment...got talking about the synonym tool on Word which lead to the defining of 'stoic' which lead to a 'study break' which turned out to be an hour of playing basketball. This lead back into running into and talking with more people. But the assignment is over and we had some good laughs so end of story it was all worth it.

Off to Islamic class...turning in the paper that has stressed out 80 students all within the same week.