no name

I usually sit here for like 10 minutes trying to think of what to name the blog I am about to write when just now I thought...maybe I should wait until after I write the damn thing!! ...and I still cant think of what to title it...

So last week was fun, we had an ULPAN trip to Jerusalem on Thursday. Mel and I were up by 7 to eat a breakfast of yogurt and bundle up because it was coolllddd and we loaded onto the bus to get going, the bus ride took about an hour and a half or two hours and we first stopped at the Holocaust museum. The museum was amazing, not as intense as I would have expected it to be- I thought the Holocaust museum in Washington DC hit harder- but it was impressive. Definetly bigger and more elaborate with personal stories and visual effects. Mirelle and I were shocked at how long it was taking us to read the informative paragraphs in English, our brains are on overload when we try to speak/read English, I find my brain thinking in Hebrew sometimes. So we walked through the museum and walked around the campus afterward with a tour guide who spoke English, telling us about all these sculptures and monuments that surrounded the museum. We had lunch there outside of the museum sitting in the sun, a lunch that had been prepared for us the night before, from food from the kibbutz cafeteria, and had been refrigerating until the moment we ate it...it was stone cold schnitzel with stone cold corn and stone cold pickles and pita...ewwww! (the same lunch we were served on our last trip to Ramat Hagolan and the same lunch we will probably be served on every future trip we take with the ULPAN) So Mel and I ate the snacks we had brought with us, a green apple, a granola bar and some dry cereal, mmmm.

After the museum we took the bus to the Knesset, which is the Israeli Parliment. The Knesst is where laws are enacted, the prime minister is elected and where the work of the government is supervised. It was abeautiful building, massive and like a maze inside. The works of Marc Chagall covered an entire wall in the Knesset and it was amazing- one depicted the present state of the Jews, one the past and one the future...in that order, maybe because our past links us to the present and the future?

After the Knesset we rode to the Western Wall where we were able to walk around for a whole 20 minutes. Mel and I put notes in the Wall and took pics by it while women stood there swaying and praying. We left shortly after that back to the kibbutz.