Scrolls, Zoos, and the Beach

That pretty much sums up my week so far. A few days ago we were able to go to a muesum in West Jerusalem and see the original Dead Sea Scrolls. They were so sweet! It's even cooler because at the end of the week they are going to lock them away in a vault and not have them available to anyone, even researchers/translators because they are deteriorating so fast. So we were one of the last people EVER to see them!! We had a forum about them the night before we left and I learned a ton about them. One of our professors here actually worked on translating some of the pieces. So he knew everything about them. The Isaiah scroll was the most impressive. It's about 8 feet long and was written about 150 BC - that's almost 1000 years older than the oldest copy of the Bible we have!

The afternoon of that same day a bunch of us went to the zoo! It was so much fun and I took a ton of pictures (most involved us acting like the animals behind us). They even had a replica of Noah's Ark - becuase everything here relates back to the Bible. :)

Yesterday we all went into Tel Aviv and spent the whole day at the beach. It was amazing! I have now swam in the Pacific, Atlantic, and the Mediterrainian! The beach was by far my favorite one that I've been to. The sand was so soft and fine (but REALLY hot) and the water was actually warm! We stayed at the beach all day and ate the best ice cream ever! I think the life guard might have been yelling at us a few times to not go so far out, but none of us could understand him so we did it anyway. (There were some really cool rocks out there that we HAD to go see) The only bad part is that I didn't bring my camera because I was worried about all the sand and water getting into it. So I didn't take any pics but hopefully I'll be able to get some from others that had theirs. Oh, and I got really sunburned. My back hurts so bad today. But those are just minor details. :)