The Last Four Picture Are:

1 - View of Jerusalem at night from my room in the dorms

2 - Petra: This picture shows the landscape in Petra. Very
beautiful. On the other side of those mountains in the
distance is Israel.

3 - Petra:
The ancient city of Petra is carved into stone
mountain sides. The first picture gives an idea of
just how enormous and well preserved these structures
are. To get to this place we hiked for an hour up 800
stairs. This was originally created as a tomb about
1700 years ago and later converted to a church, which
is not in use right now. You can find us in the
picture at the bottom of the doorway.

4 - Jerusalem from my window yesterday, Dec. 27 when we had a nice snowfall!

Enjoy!

Danny

Hi everyone,

I could type half of a book about the last several weeks, but I'll just keep it to a page.

About three weeks ago I took a weekend trip to Jordan! We left Friday morning for a 4.5 hour bus to Eilat at the southern tip of Israel, crossed the border there into Akaba, then a two hour trip north through the Red Mountains to Petra.

Jordan was quite a different experience from Egypt. First of all, their Dinar is stronger than our dollar! I will add that our dollar is declining and the exchange rate to shekels has decreased from 4.7 to one when I arrived to 4.2. This saddens me. Regardless, we managed to keep expenses down.

People in Jordan spoke English quite well. This was not the case in Egypt. It turns out that the children don't learn English in school in Egypt but they do in Jordan. This made finding our way around much easier.

Our destination was Petra. For those of you who have seen Indiana Jones, the Last Crusade, the temple of the Holy Grail is in Petra. We watched the movie at our hotel during the night. The following day we re-enacted the entire film accordingly and I brought the Holy Grail back with me. It was tough to get it through customs at the border but they eventually allowed it.

Petra is a 2000 year old city carved into stone mountains. Therefore, all of the tombs are preserved incredibly well. The ruins were the most stellar I had ever seen. I promise pictures soon.

Back in Jerusalem, we had a talent show with the international students. I gathered three partners (two guys and two girls in all) and put together a salsa dancing routine. We had six days to practice. The organizers decided that there would be judges for the show. We danced our routine and won! They are giving us a free dinner at a nice place downtown as our prize. The video is on the internet and I promise to send the link in my next Email.

Coming up to date, Julie (my gf) arrived yesterday to visit and my mother and sister will be coming in a week. Hooray! December is a huge visitor month and everyone and their dog is having at least one visitor. And it's true, because there's Americans who actually adopted a lost dog from the Lebanon conflict last summer and keep it in their room - which is a horrible idea.

Happy Early Channukah to all.


Danny