Le Quinzième Jour, Mardi. (The fifteenth day, Tuesday 5/31)

Tuesday started off heading to the site of a current archaeological dig. Actually, dig is a loose term here, because what we really did was sift. Several years ago, they decided that the secret (/illegal? I think...not sure) mosque in the Temple Mount needed an emergency exit, so they got approved to dig out all of the land from that area, totally destroying the artifacts down there and dumping all the dirt into a certain area. There is now a project going on to sift through all of that dirt and pull out anything of value. I guess over 90,000 people have worked on it since the project began (which was six years ago, I think).

After hour introduction to the history of it all, which unfortunately took a whole hour, we divided into our two groups. The other group got to do the work first, so my group went to see some sights in the area for 45 minutes while we awaited our turn. I'm not really sure why we went to the sites we did other than they were an acceptable distance away for us to get to them and back. We went to the to graves that are considered the sites of the graves of two people that I don't remember. But honestly, it doesn't really matter because there is like a .03 % chance that the sites are legit. Sooo whatever.



There were tons of Israeli soldiers out and about over these several days though, because I guess they spend a fair amount of time getting the military involved in Israeli pride and possession. Makes sense to me. See, in Israel there is mandatory military service required of everyone unless that person is legitimately disabled. Guys serve three years and girls serve two and this service is immediately after high school. I guess after all the stress and tension of it all most kids work for a bit and then go abroad for like a year after that. So people here don't generally starting working on the direction of their life until they are like 24 or 25ish. The reason there were so many soldiers around during these few days specifically is that June 1 was Jerusalem Day (kinda like our 4th of July I guess?) and there were big celebrations. Lots of people were around, but especially touring groups of military.

My group then went back for the archaeological sifting, which was fun though rather anticlimactic. No, I did not make any great discoveries. I can't imagine doing it all day, every day. Ugh. I didn't get any pictures personally, but I believe there is at least one of me somewhere...I'll try to get a copy of it.

columns outside of the entrance to the children's memorial

We then spent our afternoon at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the city. Boy, was that something. There really weren't any places where photography was allowed, but we went into the memorial for the children who died, which was a room full of shadowy mirrors and a few candles that reflected around and made the appearance of something like 15,000 flickering flames. It was crazy. And the actual museum part itself was just room after room of artifacts and information about the Nazi takeovers of all the countries, the different countries' responses, life in the ghettos and concentration camps, death marches, and all of that stuff. We didn't have nearly enough time there, but it was really powerful and heartbreaking.