Monday (6/1) - Exam Time

The students all have their first exam today, based on everything that they've learned under the teaching of Dr. Wright, the director of JUC and our 3-week class here in Israel. Dr. Wright has been teaching courses on the geographical significance of the Holy Lands (and many other courses) at JUC for many many years, and he has already become somewhat legendary among our students, mostly for how while most of us are getting tired at the end of a long day in the field he is still plugging away, cracking corny jokes, hiking up and down mountains with the greatest of ease, etc. Some students have already begun fashioning tales of what his younger years must have been like, wrestling lions in a pit in the snow, or riding with bedoin across the deserts. The truth is that he grew up in Palatine, Illinois, but myths are more fun if you ignore trifling details like that. :-) He has been great. Here's a small sample of what we are getting everyday -- this is back from our first day in Jerusalem, and we're standing in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre:


Anyway, we had a free morning and most people spent it studying and worrying about how hard or not the test was going to be. The test was the hour after lunch, and pretty much everybody came out and said they felt good about it -- they said that it was the kind of test where if you hadn't studied at all, you were screwed, but if you had studied, you were fine. A well-written test, in other words! I spent the morning trying out Hebrew Doritos. Whoah! I love how Hebrew reads right to left, so the name brand on the bag does too. They taste *almost* like regular Doritos (which I grew up on, but you practically can't find anymore), but they don't taste exactly the same. This is true for many foods here. The peanut butter, for example, is less sweet and more oily. Hmm. More sugar, please!

The rest of the afternoon was in-class preparation for our coming 3-day trip down south. I attended some of the class, and then spent the rest of the afternoon (as I had spent most of the morning already) working on an academic research project that will hopefully get published someday soon. My break in the middle of the afternoon was an exploration of the Protestant Cemetery of Mt. Zion, which is attached to the south end of our JUC compound. (trivia: the JUC campus is actually owned by the Anglican Church of England, from whom JUC has a very long lease arrangement on terms agreeable to all sides) There are a few relatively famous people buried here, including Horation Spafford and William Flinders Petrie.

I like cemeteries a lot -- they are such peaceful and reflective places to walk through. One of my favorite memories of visiting my brother in DC was one day when I just walked randomly amidst the war graves in Arlington National Cemetery. So, I enjoyed this exploration. Most of the graves are from the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, so there's a rather old-ish feel to the place. Well, old but definitely not ancient, considering the surroundings. What really struck me was seeing graves inscribed in English, German, Hebrew, and Arabic all side by side. It was a neat picture of the nations coming together under the image of the cross of Christ here at Jerusalem.



In the evening, I worked some more on research writing, then my roommate "Dr. J" and I and everybody else worked on packing for our 3-day trip. Ack, the bus leaves at 7, and morning will come early.