Storm at the Gates

It was pouring rain in Tel Aviv when we landed Tuesday afternoon. With my last final ending Monday, 24 hours was too long to wait before heading down here to Israel to begin the next semester! The flight was just over three hours, so after drinking my last cappuccino in Rome, I headed to the land of . . . more cappuccinos, and mochas, and lattes, and mediums, smalls and grandes: Israelis have discovered and fallen in love with the coffee culture.

Sounding out the Hebrew signs is tons of fun: you work hard sounding out ארומה only to figure out that the cafe's name was 'Aroma' transliterated into Hebrew letters.

So it was pouring rain when we got here. Apparently we were stuck on the highway for an hour behind an accident--I found that out later because I was asleep at the time . . .

We made it to our residence without other mishaps--two of us were the advance party for the rest of our group who still had finals to take before flying down. So Wednesday morning we sent out to find our school in the heart of the Old City.

We went through hell to get there. Or at least we went through Gehenna: dropping down into the former garbage dump, now cleaned-up park before climbing back up to enter Jerusalem through the Jafa Gate. The streets were still wet and the sky was still overcast--

We certainly weren't prepared for the brilliance that shone over the city today.

Jafa Gate

So I headed back up to King David's Tower to walk through the timeline of the city found at the museum there.



From the top you had a beautiful panorama of the city: skies freshly cleaned by the torrential rains of the day before.


Behind the golden Dome of the Rock you can see the Mount of Olives; to the left you can see the white steeple of the Church of the Redeemer.

This promises to be an exciting semester!