Caesar Jerusalem

... airport and I will try to send a mail when I am there. LN has one local coordinator, Bernard and in another 10 days an American will come for 6 months as interim director (Jonathan). That is really nice to know that there are a few people I can rally count on to figure out the logistics, so I can concentrate on the nurses. The internet apparently is pretty bad therefore I am sending this information from my own house in Jerusalem.

... with McDonald special spiced coffee at 30 shekels and you get yourself a free doughnut! Goodbye second world hello first world again, let the assault on your wallet commence. Wow, Israel is pretty modern. I head to Jerusalem and stay inside the walled city (the old city), the walled old city is small being about 1 km squared and is split into four sections; Jewish, Christian, Armenian and Muslim. I take a ...

... tells me that our cousin Sharone is a lifeguard at the next beach and we should go over and visit him.<br>I'm like tripping over cousins at this point.<br>Sharone just had a baby boy and waited for his girlfriend and the baby to show up.<br>While waiting, I began chatting with Sharon's friend Keren who was hanging out there.<br>She was lovely and we became friends. She also lives very close to me so we decided to meet up again the following week.<br>My cousin's baby was very cute too. I was ...

... amazing. There was prayers going on and amazing singing, I walked around without too much disturbance of others and then sat outside and watched the sun come up for a while.<br><br>Then I walked along the Via Dolorosa which is the walk Jesus took with the crusifix - it is usually very very busy here but once again I managed to beat all the groups and enjoyed it in the relative peace and quiet.<br><br>Next up was my personal ...

... than fact, but here, people seem to be striving more. Squeezing more out of life, you might say. Here, there seems to be a driving force that propels people to want more , to achieve more, to live more , to be more. Again, this may likely be our our biases showing, but we felt so encouraged, so optimistic that if ever a place deserved, this is it. That doesn't mean that things are easy here. in contrast, you see lots of struggling. Even in the simplest thing, like getting on a ...

... the city on the left. The shiny dome on the infamous Dome of the Rock was very prominent. Since it was getting late (around 6:00 pm), we went straight to the hotel (the Sheraton Jerusalem). It didn't dawn on me until we got into the lobby that sundown Friday is the start of the Sabbath (actually, I was corrected by the person at the counter when I said Sabbath - he said "You mean Shabbat"). :-) In the lobby were dozens ...

... and tried desperately to get my camera to take a decent photo in the fading light. <br><br>The sun was getting lower, but still about half an hour from setting, so we decided to keep moving and try to catch sunset from a vantage point further down the road. Waving goodbye to the little boy and his dad, we continued along the highway. We kept our eyes peeled for a nice spot to pull over, but alas, we could not beat the sunset, and so ...

... having to have this watered-down, 'oh all religions are basically the same' kind of approach. I wonder if we can be committed with our very lives to our faith-our distinctive Christian faith-without needing to be arrogant or violent about it. We need to be more committed to learning our history. We need to be more committed to practicing our tradition. We need to be both absolutely generous and absolutely uncompromising about the life-saving truth of the Gospel.

... beach where there was also a hot waterfall/spring which would save us paying 7-12 dinar to use one of the private beaches. Found the place further down the road. Spring looked really nice and looked forward to showering under there once I'd had a dip in the Dead Sea. <br><br>Dead Sea is the lowest point on Earth and has 6 times the amount of salt as in an ocean so hence the floating on top and nothing growing or living in there. Got changed ...

... as clay Manchester United dreidels. I checked out about doing a comedy workshop, but it was too expensive at over $100 for a 2-hour comedy class.<br><br>After going back to the Luries and playing ping pong, I returned to the comedy club with Ricki Bornstein for open-mic night. I've been to quite a few open-mic nights at the Sydney Comedy Store, some very bad ones, but this was absolutely terrible. The host, who runs the club, spends his ...