Day 82

The balcony at the Church

View from the Church

Wendy and I in front of the Church

At Yardenit

Yardenit

Saturday. The 19th of November.

This morning I slept through breakfast, I saw no point in waking up early to eat. As I usually do on Sabbaths. I stuck around my room all morning, going through my talk. I also had another study group session and we went through the second half of the study guide. A total of four hours of just finishing the study guide. I didn't contribute much this time, because a few kids in the group are just very opinionated and outspoken. So they weren't really interested in my point of view, so I just stopped sharing it. We had lunch then headed out to go to church. We drove to this little house right on the sea. Only my class was going, because Hapers class had gone earlier in the morning. When we walked in it smelled like freshly baked bread, I think we were all hoping that they were going to us. But nope. So as you know I had to speak. I actually asked my professor if I could speak first, so that I didn't have time to start panicking. The chapel is just a living room basically, so there is no need for a microphone. So I just stood at the pulpit and spoke. I literally read straight from my paper the entire time, speed through the entire thing. I had timed in advance four times, every time it was longer than ten minutes. My actual talk didn't get even close to that. Let's see, I was also so stressed that I forgot to take off my jacket so I was pretty much sweating like a pig while I was speaking. Pretty much it was completely the worse talk ever. I kept looking up and Huntsman was right in front of me and was completely turned in his chair not even paying attention. Obviously that was encouraging, also he was one of the few people that didn't tell me good job afterwards. My main goal of my talk was just to impress him, you can say I miserably failed at that. It was rough. But as soon as I sat down I didn't even care anymore. I was so happy when I sat down, despite the fact that my talk had gone south. Because I was done! So happy. When the meeting ended we went out onto the balcony and took pictures. Everyone, minus a few, complemented me on my talk. It was really nice of them. But I kinda wanted everyone to just completely forget about my talk and pretend that it had never happened. We then left the 'church' and went to Yardenit, it is a baptismal site on the Jordan river. It is actually where Bro. Ludlow was baptized. It is pretty commercialized, but if you walked down far enough then it was more natural. It was fun walking around and seeing people baptized themselves. There were also tons of plaques everywhere in dozens of different languages that said the account of Jesus' baptism. It was getting dark while we were there, so by the time we got back to the Kibbutz it was pitch black outside. We then had dinner and I went to another little shack and watched The Help with a bunch of girls, something like eight of us on two twin beds. It was a fun night.