Day 107

Wednesday. The 14th of December.

This morning I got up and ready by 6:30, because the plan was to go to mass at St. Annes Church with my normal group of girls. So a few minutes before then I was downstairs and ready. No one was showing up so I sat and ate an apple thinking they were all just running late. Five minutes after I went to their rooms and knocked. No answer. I assumed they all had just decided not to go and were still sleeping. So I was bummed and went back to my room. Well breakfast rolls around and not a single one of the girls were there. What great friends. Apparently they all decided to change the time to a few minutes earlier and it had slipped every single one of their minds to tell me. As if. I had been planning what we were going to do all day long with them, psych guess I wasn't invited. Sorry I though you guys wanted to be my friend. So after realizing my abandonment, I pouted around for a little while then decided not to let them completely ruin my entire day. Whitney was great and invited me to go out with here for the day. We first went to the Israel Museum, which I was super excited to go to one more time. Since the first time I went was the second day I was in Israel, so this time I actually knew what things were. And I wasn't looking for specific things. I went through it by myself for a couple hours, I think I've decided that I really like museums. We met up at noon and left the museum, we walked through a very distant part of West J. We walked all the way over to the shuk and we got some doughnuts right out of the fryer. They were so hot that the jelly melted a bit and got all over my hands. I was super sticky, so we walked over to Ben Yahuda street and went into a nice bath and body wash-esq store and scrubbed our hands clean with delicious smelling soap. We then got falafel for lunch. I was stuffed, but neither Whitney or I had ever had a crepe here. So we invested in one filled with milk chocolate, white chocolate chunks, and cookie crumbs. Pretty much it was delicious. And worth it even though I was super full. While we were walking over to the Old City we saw signs that pointed to the 'underground prisoners.' Well we were curious and followed them. We ended up at a prison, well an old prison it was used during the British Mandate period and had been turned into a museum. We decided to pay the ten shekels and go in, it reminded me of Alcatraz a bit. It was interesting but most of the signs were in Hebrew, so I didn't quite know what the museum was all about. We finished up at the museum and walked over into the Old City, we went over to Shabans to help Whitney pick up the t-shirts for all of the students and faculty. We carried the hundred shirts just outside the city where Sister Omar picked us up, there was five of us though. But she let four of us sit in the back, as long as one of us was hidden. She let three of us get out just around the corner from the center so that they didn't see that she was breaking the law. I helped Whitney sort out the shirts. Then I managed to grovel for the girls that I bought candy for the other day to pay me. I was then able to pay of my 45 dollar debt to the center. Who knew I had printed so much to rack up such a bill? Right before dinner I watched the video of the play that the little Ludlow girls were in with their family and a couple other students. It was cute. For dinner the kitchen staff had set up a huge fun meal for us, too bad I was so stuffed still from earlier. Whitney and I then handed out the shirts after dinner, I was the money man and asked everyone to donate five shekels because the shirts cost more than the Shekel Shack had made. Pretty much Whitney was paying for everyone's shirts. Right after that we took a group photo with everyone in their shirts. We then went to the forum and had a farewell. We played the three videos we had made for our professors, while we were waiting for the slide show to be ready. Once the three videos were done, the slideshow still wasn't loaded or something. So a handful of students did some improv and performed for us. Eventually the fifty minute long slide show was ready. The girl that had made it spent a lot of time on it, but I wouldn't watch it again. I would not have made the show anything like she did, majority of the pictures were just of landscapes and of her group of friends. It was a bit of pain having to watch the whole thing. When it finally finished I went to my room and did a bit of packing before I went to bed.