brianna kay: Saturday Sabbath

Yesterday was our first day of classes. I attended Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Old Testament was really interesting. I have never had a real interest in the OT, but Professor Judd was really insightful and made class fun! The only draw back is that we have about a month to finish the whole OT so there will be a lot of big reading assignments. ANES is a whole different story. I have never had a strong suit in history and that is what this class is all about. So I am going to have to work my tail off in that class to pay attention and study hard. Especially since that is a two hour class. Yesterday afternoon a lot of people were going into the Old City, but I wasn't able to. I was having issues with my phone and you need your phone on you at all times and working. So that was a bummer, but I did get some studying done here so that was good. After dinner, there was a huge group playing volleyball in the gym. I am not good at volleyball at all, but it was sure fun!

In Jerusalem, a lot of the religions hold their sabbath meetings on Saturday. So to stay with the culture, the Jerusalem Center does as well. It wasn't too weird to have it on Saturday because today didn't feel like a Saturday, it felt like a Sunday. I am sure it will be weird once I have gone a whole week here. It was considered fast sunday as well. They asked us to stay in our sunday attire all day until dinner was over, and we didn't get to eat until 4:00. Usually I am stripping my sunday clothes off and trying to cram food down my throat as soon as I walk through the door! So that is definitely something that I am going to have to get used to, and maybe I will pick up a habit from it?

I didn't go out into the city in between sacrament and dinner because I was still having issues with my phone, but we did go out after dinner. We had intentions to go to the western wall, but we couldn't really find it and it was getting dark anyways. But we did have fun wandering the streets of the Old City. There was this one scary street we did go down that I was a little nervous about. Nothing happened, but I think I will try to stay on the more populated streets from now on.