at the wailing wall

I'll say that today was another good day, even though all of them have been pretty good up to this point. We spent all day in Jerusalem looking at some pretty cool sites.

We started off this morning going to the Western Wall. It's also called the Wailing Wall but I don't like that name. It makes sense though because there were a lot of Jews there praying on the wall and it looked a lot like wailing. I just thought it was cool to actually be there and be able to touch it. I don't mean any offense by the wailing Jews comment, I'm just stating what I saw.

After that we went to the Temple Mount and saw the Dome of the Rock. We didn't get to go in but I did hear a lot of information from our guide that I didn't really listen to.

The coolest part of the day was going to St. Anne's church. It was empty when we got there so we just went in and sat on the pews and started singing. I saw a few people come and and sit down to listen to us while we were singing. We only sang 2 songs and then got up to leave. We turned around to find that about 50 people had come in and were listening to us. They started applauding as we left and I wasn't sure how I felt about that but it was still really nice to know that we made an impression, even if it was on fellow Christians.

After some more churches, we went to see a museum for the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was way better than I thought it would be. There was a lot of information about the Essene community at Qumran (where we go tomorrow).

We also went to Hezekiah's tunnel, which was by far the most fun I've ever had while walking hunched over for thirty minutes in a three foot wide tunnel with water flowing hallway up my legs, getting my pants wet. That's actually a truthful statement, though. It was pretty cool.

We went back to St. Anne's for our own church service after that. I didn't know you could do that but apparently all you have to do is ask.