It (Was) Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

IT SNOWED! Again. The first snow this year was during our trip to Egypt so we missed it, but it snowed again on Tuesday. We got about 1/2 and inch, but it was really wet slushy, nothing like y'all have been getting in the West, but snow nonetheless. When it snows here, the city shuts down. It snows so infrequently that it is not worth the effort and expense to do wide-scale snow removal, so they clear the routes to the hospitals then just sit tight till it melts which is usually by the next day if not that afternoon. Our Palestinian teacher canceled class because he was ill and it would have been difficult for him to drive here from Bethlehem on the slick roads. The Arabic students didn't have Arabic for similar reasons with their teacher, so we got a half-snow day since we still had the classes taught by the teachers that live here with us. It was bittersweet because we had all this free time, but there was a storm raging outside so we all stayed in. Most caught up on homework or vegged around watching movies and enjoying a break. I did a little of both.

Today we had a field trip to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum. It is a beautiful and fairly new facility. It's a very sobering place as you may expect, but I liked it and I'd like to go back. We had a 3 hour tour and felt like we hardly saw anything. Some Holocaust museums focus on the brutality of it, some on the graphic stories of individuals, but this one I felt like really memorializes the people, as both group and as individuals. They do outline the brutality and do focus on individuals to illustrate what happened, but the focus felt like it was all in memorial so that people as individuals will never be forgotten. After a sack lunch we toured Mt. Herzl which has a lot of things around it that basically commemorate the Zionist movement. Once again, it was cold. Like every other field trip all semester. (Note: it was 60+ degrees on Sunday) But the field trip was good one regardless, like every other field trip.