Today was an exceptional day! We had our conquests field trip, which took us to the following places: the Wadi Qelt, the city of Jericho/Spring of Elisha, Herod's Winter Palace, the Tree of Zaccheus, and the ruined walls of Jericho/neolithic tower.
The Wadi Qelt is the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, and boy I never would have traveled that road--it's SUPER sketch. The potential for problems is enormous (not that it would be easier to go any other way, but still...). It was really cool, though (besides all the heat!) From where we were you could see the city of Jerusalem off in the distance, and the city of Jericho down in the Rift Valley in the opposite direction. I looked for the place they would've taken the picture we have in the back of LDS Bibles lol. Very neat experience!
The city of Jericho sits at about 850 feet below sea level (I was wrong putting it at 1300--that's the Dead Sea, which we saw but didn't get to visit). It was EXTREMELY hot and miserable; why anyone would want to live there at ANY time of the year is beyond me. It had a sign that says 'the oldest city of the world' but I'm not so sure about that. Anyway, the city is actually pretty big for being such a barren wasteland. They have a spring called the Spring of Elisha (named for the event in the Bible) that continues to give a whopping 1000 gallons of water per HOUR! We sang "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho" on the bus on our way there (of course).
We saw the remains of Herod the Great's winter palace, and talked a bit about his ruthlessness. Of course he was a very effective ruler because he didn't tolerate opposition, but as Augustus said: "it's safer to be Herod's pig than to be his son." Apparently he also had tons of really nasty health problems when he finally passed away, and of course the terrible story about the killing of Bethlehem's babies and the Jewish nobles slaughtered when he died. Interesting, huh? lol
Not much to say about the Zaccheus tree. It's a big tree, and I guess nobody really thinks it's the tree he climbed but it's the type of tree he WOULD have climbed. Wahoo.
We went to a place called Tel Jericho, where a lot of excavation has been done in the past 50 or so years and some cool things have been dug up. There are remains of a wall that collapsed (sound familiar), it's neat you can still see the outline of the bricks that fell. I guess there's a big controversy about the dating of the wall coinciding with the account in the Bible, but oh well. The first excavator there (a lady named Kenyon) also dug up an old tower dating to the Neolithic period (at least 7000 BC), known as the oldest man-made structure to be discovered on earth. It was neat to see something 9000+ years old, and fun to think about how much mankind has come since then. I was pretty excited :)
Other than that, obviously it was my birthday and I had a good day. I was sung to a few times lol (which is of course embarrassing but at least they care), and we went out to West Jerusalem after dinner and FHE; we got ice cream at McDonald's because it was the cheapest thing we could find haha. 9 of us went, all guys, it was fun. We wandered around the main street (called Ben Yehuda) for a bit too, saw a bunch of fun kippas (the piece of cloth Jewish men wear on their heads) and also a random street performer wearing a clown nose, silly pajamas, and an engineer's hat standing ON TOP OF A STREET SIGN (?) playing a recorder towards a lady on the street in a wheelchair that played along with him on another recorder. Definitely random, and it was epic. Then we got taxied back to the JC in a Mercedes lol. I got to talk to my family and Krystal, which made the day even better. I was super tired and went to bed but feeling satisfied--definitely a birthday to remember!
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