The past few days have been amazing! On Saturday (the Sabbath here) we went to the Garden Tomb, which many people believe is where Jesus was resurrected. It is a beautiful spot, and very quiet inside the garden walls even though it's in the middle of market streets. It is a very peaceful, welcoming place. In some ways it reminds me of the Sacred Grove, because it's hard to comprehend the place exactly, but for now I just enjoy being there.

Then, yesterday, I went to Tel Aviv! Almost 30 of us from the center went over in vans, and it was so much fun. The picture I have here is of Andromeda's rock--it's the little black speck just to the left of the balcony in the foreground. This is supposedly the rock Andromeda was placed on when she was being offered as a sacrifice to a sea monster (before Perseus came and rescued her).  We walked around and saw lots of historical sites and then swam at the beach,

 which was wonderful! I got a few beautiful pictures of the Mediterranean Sea, but I can't put very many up from here.

Today was incredible because we got to go to Jericho!  This picture is of the oldest building in the whole world! Brother Huff (my Old Testament teacher) said today that when Noah's family came down from Mt. Ararat, they may have settled in Jericho. At any rate, some people think it is the oldest city in the world, and the circular building in this picture was a tower during the most ancient period of the city. 

The lower picture is a view of the Mount of Temptation--that is where tradition holds that Jesus was tempted after his 40 days of fasting in 

the wilderness. It's hard to see in this picture, but halfway up the mountain, there is a monastery (the Quruntul Greek Orthodox monastery) built into the rock--it just looks kind of like a light horizontal line on the mountain in this picture. 

Anyway, we hiked up there and went inside, and it was incredible! You have to hike a steep trail to get there, and then the monastery itself grows out of the mountain. Originally it was just some caves inhabited by hermits, but then they built around those caves, so some of the walls inside are still just the natural rock face. (And some of the floors are just natural rock, too.) There are some beautiful paintings inside on the walls and the ceilings, and in the top chapel of the monastery, they have the rock that they believe Satan asked Jesus to turn into bread. Only a couple of monks live there, so we were lucky that one of them came to the door and let us in. I just loved it because it is so remote, in the middle of a mountain, and then you get there and it is beautiful inside.