making up for lost time...

today was our last long field trip.

it was a very sad day in the life of jessica ellis.

i'm gonna miss this.

our first stop was to qumran... 

where we were diligent scribes...

and took a bath in a ritual bath...

i don't know if that is actually ok or not. 

;)

i've only been waiting my whole life to see this.

and i think only my dad can really understand my excitement at seeing cave #4.

this is for you dad!

another shot of cave #4

jars that were found inside of the caves, that contained many fragments of scriptures.

i didn't tell you about my eye.

you see the little red blotch there?

i was giving someone an airplane ride...

and my knee made contact with my eye.

you didn't know i was that flexible, huh?

but it sure makes for a good story!

(you also didn't know airplane rides could be dangerous!)

my ariel and i on the bus!

heading toward MASADA!!!

this bus ride was awesome...

we totally made up a song to help us study for our ancient near east class.

 masada

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

:)

at one point, the jc students had to walk up that.

no joke.

i would have died.

luckily, we got to ride the tram up.

this section of masada is called the hanging palace

this is a view looking out from the top level of the hanging palace - you can actually see the bottom of the seige ramp that the romans built in 73 ce...

what no one else saw, was the guy taking a picture of the crazy american chicks.

i saw you buddy.

this was the room where they found the "lots"

this is the room where the remaining 10 zealots wrote their names on pieces of pottery, and one piece was picked. that person was to kill the remaining 9, and then finally take his own life.

this is what happened - they set fire to the fortress, leaving only enough food to show the romans that they died willingly - and not because of starvation.

walking down to other levels of the hanging palace

i don't know why anyone would want to take a hot bath here...

that sounds totally ridiculous to me.

today was a day for songs.

megan and i made up a sababa song.

(sababa means cool in hebrew)

it goes to the tune of hakuna matata.

i know you want to learn it.

so here ya go.

sababa masada

it's a wonderful place

sababa masada

it's a zealot craze!

it means no romans,

for the rest of our days...

it's our live free - die hard philosophy!

sababa masada!

(sababa... masada... sababa... masada...)

have you seen enough cisterns yet?

i didn't think so.

this is jess.

jess likes to pretend to be a bird.

or maybe she's just trying to find an excuse to air out her armpits...

we'll never knowwww...

see the dead sea?

it's way up there in the top left...

the seige ramp as seen from the top

ninja pic.

or maybe we should just call this "zealot stance"

jeffie (haha... jefferson), meg, and i

the synagogue where the leader of the zealot movement probably convinced everyone there to take their lives rather than become slaves to the romans.

the next part of the field trip was to a wadi by the dead sea.

we went to wadi david (the biblical story related to this is when saul and his soldiers fell asleep in the same cave where david and his followers were hiding. david had the opportunity to kill saul, but chose instead to cut a piece of his clothes off. he later used this to prove to saul that he was not trying to kill him)

there were tons of beautiful waterfalls, but considering it was mid-summer, they were probably fairly small.

now, when you read about the "valley of lemuel"

...think of this.

i like ashley's idea.

it was hotttttt.

we look way too nice and composed in this picture...

this is more like it.

holding to the iron rod is a little bit difficult when it burns your fingers off...

the dead sea is back there somewhere...

so i will have to work on getting ahold of some pictures of us in the dead sea. 

but, i didn't trust myself to take my camera anywhere near that water.

i'm so proud.

this is like a rite of passage for me!

anyone that wants to be a part of the sandal-tan club should contact me asap.

so that we can get an awesome tan picture too.

:)

finally caught up. well, kinda.

so i finally caught up with the trip to galilee, but in the process, i managed to get behind on all of the more recent happenings here at the jc.
after getting back from galilee, we came to the BRUtal realization that the summer was almost over.
we don't like to talk about it much.

so it's crunch time!
in other terms, we are all suffering from a serious case of jclds... jerusalem center last-days-syndrome. and i don't think there is a cure.

our first free day back, we decided to go to ein karem. we had tried to plan this like three other times, and it never worked out. but we were determined to make it happen. unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of information on how to get there. so, i knew what we were doing when we got there... but i'm not sure how happy dan was with my answer to his question of "so, you know how to get there?" ummm yeah! vaguely. 
but get us there i did.
and i made friends on the bus.

we got super lost, ended up in some russian church area (which we did actually want to see, we just didn't know that at the beginning), and then finally made it to the city of ein karem. we just managed to take a little detour in getting there first.

look at the little green picture.

it tells you how to get a concussion. 

that's ein karem. 

we wanted to get over there...

but we were stuck over here.

hmmmm... 

problem!

so we finally figured out the name of the russian-golden-dome-complex that we got completely lost in.

we came all the way to ein karem... the birthplace of john the baptist... to see

wooley mammoths?

the church of the visitation

we barely made it on time to get into the church of st. john... but the nice old monk finally took pity on us and let us run inside and see it... hallelujah!

this was a stone cave... which, like the church of the nativity in bethlehem, is the traditional site of the birth of john the baptist. 

a painting of the baptism of jesus christ

look familiar?

after ein karem, we went to the israel museum... we had four pages of items that we had to find. i usually hit my museum limit after about 2 hours... so by the end of 3 hours, i was loopy... by the end of 4 - i just wanted to sit down on the ground and go to sleep. just carry me home mommy.

i still don't know the purpose of this giant apple core.

but it's cool anyway.

and you gotta have pics with cool things.

the next day was a field trip day! woohoo! (but man oh man... it is getting hot outside!) we have this new plan: huddle in the shade, walk out into the blazing hot sun to take pictures, go back into the shade and listen to the amazing brother mulestein enlighten our understandings.
we went to the burnt house (a house that belonged to a sadduceean priestly family right before the destruction of the 2nd temple in 70 ad)

herodian ashlars. just so you can get a sense of the size of these babies. 

the double gate of the temple. according to jewish law, you would go in the triple gate and out the double gate, except in times of mourning, when you would go the opposite direction.

a miqva.

(a ritual cleansing pool)

the unclean people would go down on the right hand side, and wash themselves, and then come up the left hand side. notice which side i'm on?

;)

this is rubble from when the roman soldiers destroyed the temple walls.

most of it was removed, but the excavators left some of it so that we could see what it looked like before. 

this was the stone where the trumpeter would have stood. 

it is also possibly the "pinnacle of the temple" to which jesus was taken and told to throw himself down onto the street below. 

we all fall down!

i think i'm doing some kind of thriller or lady gaga impersonation.

ariel and i casting the sellers out of the temple.

they look pretty terrified huh?

we are pretty scary.

today, it got to 39 degrees. that's in celcius. basically, anything around 40 is do-not-leave-the-house-because-you-will-melt-like-a-wax-candle-weather... you wanna know what that is in fahrenheit? that's 102 DEGREES! and guess what's even more exciting - we get go to MASADA tomorrow.
talk about wrath of hades.
it's gonna be hottt.