Israel Jorda and Egypt

This is one crazy world, especially when you head for BFE. There is some really cool stuff out there in the world worth seeing. Here is what we found on our trip. We went with some really great friends Ollie, Renee, Mark and our sister Lori. They all added something fun to the trip.
We started in Israel. . .we stayed just within the old city walls of Jerusalem. There was so much to see there. It was Renee and my first time there, but Jeff, Mark, Ollie and Lori had all gone to the Jerusalem Center through BYU for school.
The Garden of Gethsemane was probably my favorite spiritual place on the whole trip. The olive trees in The Garden are 2000+ years old. So they are the trees that were there when Christ was there. Here we are in The Garden.

This is the West Wall where all the Othodox Jews were. There were thousands of Jews there on Easter praying and putting their prayer papers into the wall. It was quite a sight. It got really loud at night.

This is the Muslim quarter in Jerusalem. Us girls got yelled at for standing in places women aren't supposed to stand. Ollie and Renee got in trouble for holding hands. The Muslim women are troopers, covered in black from head to toe in the heat. Yikes. This is the crew. The temple in the background is The Dome of the Rock where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac.

This is mud from the dead sea. Everyone went there to float in the sea since it is so salty. From this picture can you can tell who was the most into the mud scene. Mark, Jeff or Renee- Jeff wins. Whole head covered minus the eyes.

These pictures are of the city of Mosada, quite an amazing story to go along with the place. Basically Jews fled from the Romans to this city built way up on a plato by the Dead Sea. They lived there for 2 years while the Romans used Jewish slaves to build a ramp up to the city. When the Romans finally breached the wall around the city all they found were the bodies of the Jews. When the Jews knew the Romans had broken the wall the men killed their families and then themselves to save them from slavery. This city is amazing though. Nothing but rock everywhere. The picture of me shows how high up we are. The little square rock shape in the backgroud is actually one of the old Roman forts. It is so far down from the Jews city it looks like a little ant farm from up there.

Our trip to Jordan was interesting. As we crossed the border control we ran into a small bump. For some reason the guard there did not like Jeff. He searched his entire bag asking him what every item was. He would hold up a book and ask Jeff, What is this? Jeff was patient. When the guard found the satelite phone it was like he struck gold. He let eight people pass through the border without even searching there bags and hauled Jeff off to interrogation. We all got to watch Jeff (threw a crack in the blinds) be questioned by five Jordan guards smoking cigarettes and yelling. Everytime Jeff would try to reason with them about the phone they would start saying, "You want to stay the night here? Are you trying to argue with me?" They were crazy. They kept the phone but the next morning Jeff went back, picked up the phone, crossed into Israel and mailed it home. We did get to see Petra though. We hiked it in amazing speed. It is a place worth seeing if you ever go. You hike down this narrow canyon and then bam! There are buildings like this carved in the rocks.

Lastly we went to Egypt. A crazy country. I loved Cairo. I think the taxi rides there are a real experience. I would fly there just for the taxi rides. I will post pictures of Egypt later. . .I just don't know where they are. Here are the highlights. We had our hotel scaffolding catch fire- watching them try to put out a fire was comical, but sitting in the hotel with the power out in a sand storm in the middle of the night not so fun. Taxi drivers are wild. They send you with a guard from the border to Cairo which is very helpful when you happen to get in a car accident on the freeway. If you get in a car accident there you just leave your car where the crash is (even if it is in the fast lane of the freeway) and wait for someone to show up and pay you for the damages they caused. I was sure we were going to get nailed while sitting in the van waiting. There are no driving rules there. We got bit by mosquitos on the west nile. Dont go sailing there at sundown in shorts and a teeshirt especailly if there is no wind. We were sitting ducks once again. Lastly we saw some old famous tombs, and went to the pyramids. It was a good time.
Here are some models that were there posing for a photo shoot. We were lucky to get a few shots of them.