Israel Photo Diary Pt. 1

Hello everyone! I always really enjoy seeing other people's pictures from exciting trips and I'm happy to share some more of my own today! I've got a little backstory, during my very first semester of college, I took a class that focused on the Old Testament. Being the studious person that I am, I always put my best effort into the class and studied hard, and the professor noticed. One day, he named off a list of students he needed to stay after class, and he called my name. It was a long list, and I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, so I didn't think anyone was in trouble. I just wanted to know why he wanted to speak to us.

I got through that class and stuck around to hear what he had to say. The gist of what he told us was, "I know from all of your guys' work that you care about this class and put a lot of effort into it. Thank you for that, and because of that, I want to open an opportunity to you." He told us that he was organizing a trip to Israel for that December. It was normally a trip opened to upperclassmen in the theology or Christian studies majors, but since he knew that people who had already signed up could drop out, he wanted to let us know that we could take those empty spots if they opened up.

He spoke a little more about the trip, about the company that puts it on and the cost. The company is called Passages and they take groups of college students to Israel multiple times a year. It's not a birthright trip or anything like that, their goal is to educate Christian college students about the origins of the Biblical faith and also the modern state of Israel, the Middle East, and it's relations with the United States. We would spend 10 days in Israel seeing all the sights we had read about in the Bible and modern sights like the Knesset and Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust museum, with flights, accommodation, and most meals taken care of for $800 dollars. My eyes just about popped out of my head when I heard the price, and I had decided. I was going.

I left the class and immediately called my parents to tell them the news. It was fairly short notice, the professor met with us in October and the trip was in December, and at the time there was no promise that a spot would open up for me. I had put my name on the list, and I just had to wait. Luckily, people dropped just like the professor had said and I was in, I was going to Israel. I was the youngest person on the trip, being 18 years old at the time, and probably the only one who wasn't a theology or Christian studies major. I didn't care, I knew that I was not going to pass up this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

So at the end of December, I flew back to California to meet the rest of the group at the school the day before leaving. Everyone got up at three in the morning to drive to LAX, and we were off! I had my camera with me the whole time, and these are some of my favorite images from the trip. If I explained all of them, this post would be a novel, so I'll split this post into two parts. If you all would like to hear more about my trip, please let me know, and be on the lookout for part 2 next week!

Thanks for reading, enjoy the photos!

xx, Hannah

We started in Jaffa, an ancient port city that is now a bustling suburb of Tel Aviv!

We were there in January and the weather in Jerusalem was pretty bad, but this is a view of the Dome of the Rock and the city from the Mount of Olives.

This was taken from the ruins of where King David's palace supposedly was, this was one of the few days of nice weather we had in Jerusalem!

The streets of Jerusalem were quieter at night.

Jerusalem is split into four quarters, this is a underground shopping street in the Muslim Quarter.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, it felt like at any moment I could turn around and see the disciples asleep under a tree with Jesus praying a ways off. Absolutely surreal.

The Western Wall. The huge limestone blocks at the very bottom are the oldest, from 19 BC!

Graffiti in the lower chambers of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

We weren't able to go inside, but we looked at the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament building in Tel Aviv.

This is the Garden Tomb, one of the speculated sites of Jesus' resurrection. This site is in the approximate location of where Golgotha was, the hill where Jesus was crucified.

A sunset from a mountaintop overlooking the Valley of Elah and Sokoh, where David killed Goliath.