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Hi, folks

Here we are on our second full day in the Holy Land. We visited a bunch of places. One that was especially meaningful was St. Peter in Gallicantu. What does “Gallicantu” mean? It means “the rooster sang” – it’s the place where Peter denied Jesus three times, and after the third time, the rooster crowed. It’s located on the place where the high priest Caiaphas lived at the time of Jesus, and where Jesus was taken right after he was arrested. He spent the night in the dungeon in the lowest level. After they lifted Jesus out of the dungeon by ropes, he walked up the stairs on the way to Pontius Pilate’s place. Those stairs are still there, and we got to walk up the steps. It’s interesting that the steps have survived, and somewhat surprising, too (since a lot of the original stuff has disappeared). It was moving to walk up the steps.

Earlier we visited the Garden of Gethsemane, with its 2500-year-old olive trees. This was Jesus went to pray the night before he was crucified. The trees were from the same trees that were there when Jesus was there. Seeing things from the time of Jesus is quite impressive.

We had about an hour and a half to wander around the Old City of Jerusalem this afternoon. It was hot, it was smelly, it was crowded. A lot of the stores had almost exactly the same stuff for sale as others – not a lot of specialty stores. Some of the items we saw that we wouldn’t see in a mall were spices, water pipes, swords, cups and tableware, maps, and “knock-off” stuff. We did buy by a soccer ball for our group, but “certain mishaps” led us to make the day for someone at the bottom of the hill.

We did more, but we’ve run out of time to write about it.

Breakfast is boring – bologna and cheese. Lunch was lamb or falafel swarma. Some of us liked it fairly well, though others didn’t eat a lot of lunch today. Dinner tonight was hot dogs, pasta, and red sauce. We enjoyed dinner a lot.

Thanks for your prayers and support.

The Guys – Christian, Jake, Matt, Chris, and Ian