Israel Day 6

We went to lots of cool places today. First we went to a mountain palace that Herod build and the jewish people escaped to for a while before the second temple was destroyed. We had a great discussion about suicide becuase all of the people there killed themselves instead of going into slavery. It was amazing because you had to take a tram to get there and it was way up high. Everything was build into the mountain. You could see the ruins of the Roman camps below as they waited there until it was a good time to attack.

We went to Qumran next, which is where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was interesting to see how those people lived back then and how they thought of things. There was a lot of driving today. We had a "stomach experience" there as our driver calls it, and they had Shnitzel which is German food. It was really good, but I didn't expect to see it there. After lunch we went to the Dead Sea and it is so salty you can't even swim in it. My scraped knee from a couple days earlier burned like the dickens :-) You can't sink at all, you just float on the water. It was crazy and I have never felt anything like it before.

We rode camels next and it was really cool. I don't think I have ever ridden an animal before, mostly becuase I wouldn't want an animal riding on me. I tried it though and it was freaky. It stood up really fast and I thought I was going to fall off as I held on for dear life! We went back to the hotel and took showers and some of us went out on the town for the night. We walked around the old city wall and found a really good place to eat. We walked through the outdoor mall and I stopped at a pharmacy and got some stuff to pop my blister because it was just getting bigger and bigger, worse and worse. Hopefully, it is going to start getting better now because it is getting harder and harder to walk. We had some awesome food and had a great conversation with the owner of the restaurant and across the street we found a hot dog stand called "Doggy Style" we had to get Kosher hot dogs there. They didn't sell T-shirts, I asked! We laughed a lot and had fun as we walked through the old city to get back to the hotel. We saw a fight and these 4 guys were kicking this other guy and then someone saw his face and yelled out that he was jewish, and tons of people came to break it up, but not until they saw that. That is just an example of how bad the hatred and tension is here. It affected us all a lot... we all wanted to stop it, but didn't know how to handle it, being foreigners and all, and by the time we started thnking about it, it was over. Things are pretty bad here between lots of people... a lot of hatred in the town of Peace.