A friend requested that I do a post about what a normal day is like here in the Jerusalem center. So I'm just going to go through my day today, give an idea of what we do here every day. One thing to realize though is that really, there is no such thing as a normal day here. The class schedule changes from day to day, week to week. We generally have church on Saturday, free day on Sunday, field trip on Monday, and then classes the rest of the week. Emphasis on generally.
Today is Friday. I woke up, went to the gym, took a shower, breakfast, turned in a paper for my Palestine class, then went Old Testament. I've been trying to go to the gym every day I don't go out into the city or have a field trip, because I'm really afraid of gaining weight. Apparantly it's a thing for people to gain weight while in the Jerusalem center. It's super easy to see why. Three all you can eat meals a day, plus a ton of amazing food out in the city...if I can come out of this place the same weight I was when I came in, I'll be happy. In Old Testament today we talked about the tabernacle, then Joshua, then back to the 10 commandments because we ran out of time to move on to Judges. Next was our Judaism class. We finished talking about the Torah and the Talmud today, and did a brief overview of Jewish history in the middle ages. Not a lot of good things happened to the Jews in the middle ages.
Lunch, hummas today (fresh, real hummas and pitas are the best ever!), then to Palestine class. We talked about the law systems of Islam, and kind of how they formed. After that, I went to a class taught by one of the professor's 12 year old daughter on how to write the letters of the Arabic alphabet. She's been taking Arabic in the international school she's been attending, and so she imparted her wealth of knowledge to us.
An hour break, and then dinner! Today was ice cream day! I got passionfruit and cookies and creme. So good, and so good together. Mmm, passion fruit. They do a good job at this cafeteria making Mediterranian style foods, while still having enough Western foods and variety that we don't get tired of it.
And that's a normal day for us here. Notice, I spent the entire day in the Jerusalem center. One of the religion professors here told us that after a month we'll all be singing "We all live in a limestone submarine...." I'm starting to feel it.
Over the course of the semester here we take a total of 15 credit hours. However, they break the up the courses into two terms, make the first term about a week longer than BYU's spring term, and front weight it. To put that more simply, I'm taking 10 credit hours of classes for the rough equivalent of a term or a block class, and then 5 credits for the remainder of my time here. In a normal BYU term, you generally don't take more than 7, and the limit is 9.
To put that even more simply, we have a ton of homework, at least 6 hours of class on the days that we have class, and we're all dying a little.
But, it's Friday night, tomorrow is the Sabbath, and I'm going to Turkey on Monday! In the words of my friend, Bryce, "We live in Jerusalem, and we're going to Turkey. Dang." So while classes and homework are crazy, we're going to have a week-long extended fieldtrip, and it's all going to be great!
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