Hello family and friends!
This will be quick, but I just wanted to let y'all know that we have arrived safely at Jerusalem University College! I met two friends in Amsterdam without much difficulty (they wandered around the airport for a while, but I was just waiting blissfully), got to walk around the city a bit, and flew into Tel Aviv at 2:30 in the morning. We were very glad that all our luggage came through--there are probably ten students or so whose bags got "lost"--mostly those who went through Heathrow. Sarah and I know how that goes. We were planning to meet another NWC student whose flight was scheduled to land an hour after ours. The wait got a little longer when we found out that his flight from Germany had been delayed two hours (one of the engines wasn't working!). Since the campus wasn't open until 7 am, we decided it made perfect sense just to wait for him. About an hour after his flight landed, we were about to leave, figuring it took us about 30 minutes to get through immigration and get our bags, so we thought we might have missed him or something else happened. I happened to overhear some people who had just come through speaking German, so on the hunch that they were coming from Germany we decided to wait another half hour. Ten minutes later he came through the door, very glad to see us; he hadn't brought any of the info about how to get to JUC. We took a sherut (group taxi) to Jerusalem, and actually ended up with two girls who were on their way to JUC as well. We got our bags moved in, went to get some breakfast, then spent the rest of the day showering, unpacking, and sleeping. We had our first group dinner, then some of us went down to the Western Wall (you might know it as the "Wailing Wall," but they don't call it that here). We weren't allowed to go right up to the wall, but we were there--because it's the beginning of Shabbat (Sabbath) it was teeming with Jews. Very interesting experience.
I'm living with the two other girls from NWC--we weren't expecting to get all three of us together in one room, so that was a nice surprise. There are about 60 people living on campus, about 90 students total I think, but on campus there are less than 20 girls, probably closer to 10. Definitely not like Northwestern!
I will try to get some pictures up here when I can--I'm putting them on Facebook for now, because I don't know how to get them on this blog. I'll try to figure that out real soon!
Shalom!
