Day 12

10/22/10 7:30pm (10:30am PST)

Today wasn’t too shabby. First… surprise, surprise, we visited a church! It was the church where Mary fled to as a refuge in order to protect herself and her unborn child. I believe it was Elizabeth who took her in? I remember something about both Elizabeth and Mary both being pregnant and then Elizabeth’s baby (John the Baptist?) rolls over/kicks or something acknowledging that the other unborn baby in close proximity or one tummy away, was the messiah. I could have butchered that but oh well. After that, we visited Israel’s Holocaust memorial/museum. It was pretty incredible. We only had about an hour and a half there and Talia and I stuck together the whole time (because we were all free to scatter w/out our guide) and we only got through half of it before we noticed it was time to meet up with the group on the other end. Had lunch and that’s when Selwyn, our guide found out that the museum we were going to next closed at 2pm and we found this out at 1pm. We all hurried and tried to eat but we arrived at the museum (that houses the Dead Sea Scrolls) too late L Luckily, we are going to squeeze it into our schedule tomorrow. After dropping by the museum, we headed toward the west bank to visit Bethlehem. I didn’t know that Bethlehem was in Palestinian control. It was kind of scary/cool/intense driving in. We saw the giant sign, as we were driving in, that mentioned that no Israeli citizens were allowed to enter. There we met up with a new guide who showed us through the Church of Nativity where Jesus was born. It was sort of confusing because when I imagine where he was born I imagine a barn with straw and animals but this was a church. The wait to get in was an hour and a half. The parents and me ended up getting in earlier because of the wheelchair but it was soooooo crazy packed in there. We got to see where he was born and then where the manger was/where he slept. So special. After that, we went to a gift shop that was an official stop practically on the itinerary and then we were on our way. It took a little while to get out of Bethlehem because we had to cross what is the equivalent to the Palestinian border where there is heavy heavy security. At this point people were tired and not paying total attention to what was going on outside of the bus, but my attention was definitely awoken when a Palestinian officer walked through our bus with a machine gun in his hands. My stomach dropped. Seriously. It felt unreal. It looked like a toy. Yikes. Finally at the hotel. Looks like I’ll be up late tonight working on a midterm. Damn.