First Week in Jerusalem

I am currently at the BYU Jerusalem Center! It is a beautiful building, made mostly out of limestone, and it is up near the top of Mt. Scopus looking out over Jerusalem. I've been here since last Wednesday. I'm going to try updating here as often as possible as I start to see more of the city and travel around to Egypt, Jordan, and the Galilee. 

The old part of Jerusalem is currently enclosed by a kind of fortress wall built in the 1500's. It only costs 8 shekels (about $2) to go up to the top of the wall and walk around the perimeter of city, so a group of us went and did that today. It was very interesting! Jerusalem is a multi-layered city. Its streets are built on top of layers of rock from ruins of the ancient city, and then there are gardens and buildings and trees planted on the rooftops of those buildings. So sometimes when we were on the wall we were very high up from the ground, but then we would come to a stretch where the rooftops would become the new ground level, so we would feel much closer to the ground. There are actually giant palm trees and houses just sitting on the roofs--it's very pretty.

I might post a few photos later, but the Internet connection here is small and we're not supposed to do a lot with pictures over the Internet! They don't really capture the feeling, anyway, but some of them are fun to look at.