So the first leg of my adventure is over. It was kind of a bittersweet day today, leaving everyone on the tour who i've grown so close to and who all adopted me, but then finally getting here to Safi and starting to dig. I hate having to do things like that. But I am here, my new home for the next for weeks pretty much. The last couple days have been absolutely amazing, as it all has been. We've been staying in jerusalem over on the west side and went into the old city a couple days and every night, absolutely wonderful. Friday night we went down to the western wall to celebrate with everyone ushering the shabbat. We pushed our way through the crowds to touch the wall, and then danced around with all the young jewish girls. I went to the wall twice, it was a marvelous contrast, all the way up to it people are singing and dancing and mingling around, and then you get to the wall where there is a quiet solemnity, both times I went i would take a few minutes and just watch the faces and hear the mutterings of the shabbat prayers, saw people placing their prayers in the cracks. it was a beautiful site, you could see the devotiona and feel a sweet spirit of prayer. And then of course i went out with Christi and Mary and joined the circle of other younger girls and clapped and pretended to sing along with them and danced in the circles, it was great fun, a rejoicing for the shabbat. then last night we went down to ben yehuda street which comes alive at the end of the sabbath and all the shops open and people are out meeting up and watching the world cup on all the cafe screens.

We also went to the old city for a little shopping, we thought we did pretty good,

I am getting the hang of bargaining , though i always had Paul doing most of it, he was pretty great at it. We did go into one shop with the most obnoxious guy. He would talk and talk and talk, half the time we didn't even know what he was syaing, something about Jesus being his neighbor but just a prophet and because we were mormons we would just end up changin our minds and becoming muslims the next day and some other weird stuff. We think it was mostly an attempt to get us side tracked and keep his prices higher, but we made it out of there alive and with what we wanted.

Yesterday we also went to church at the Jerusalem center. it was quite wonderful, the room for sacrament meeting has three glass walls, so when you're sitting there you look out over the city that whole hour, it was fantastic, it was also fun to be there on fast sunday.