Day 104

Friday May 2nd

For our second day in Jerusalem we planned on checking out the Dome of the Rock. I have wanted to visit this site since I first learned about it in Amar's class freshmen year at Notre Dame. Relearning about it in my architecture class just reaffirmed my desire to see this amazing and historical significant building. However, luck was not with my as they had it closed to non-Muslims on Friday. This definitely threw off our plans a little bit, but since we were in Jerusalem there wasn't a lack of things to see. We headed off to the Mountain of Olives, the spot where the messiah will return to start the end of the world. This is the oldest cometary in the world as there are thousands of Jews waiting for there chance to leave there limbo and pass judgment when the messiah comes. There are also a number of significant churches on this hill including the Church of All Nations, that features the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus was betrayed by Judas and where he retreaded to pray after the Last Supper. There is also the tomb of the Virgin Mary. We then wandered over and checked out the room of the Last Supper which was later converted to a Mosque and is situated over King David's Tomb. We then went to check out St. Marks Cathedral where the Syrian Orthodox believes the Last Supper went down. Here we had a nun sing to us the lord's prayer in Aramaic which was quite beautiful. Afterwards, we took some expensive cabs over to the National Museum, but since we only had an hour before it closed we really only got time to check out the dead sea scrolls. The Museum did a really stand up job and they gave us these free listening devices that made the experience much more rewarding and memorable as they sometimes had audio re-enactments. In the cab-ride back we had a crazy taxi driver tell us how immoral America was, and how no matter what it was destined for the tubes. He was kind of ridiculous. For dinner we headed off to Tel-Aviv and generally enjoyed ourselves there. We spent some time on the beach and then headed back to Jerusalem for the night.