Shalom.

I'm still jet-laggin' a bit. I guess it doesn't help when I go to bed at 8:00 and get up at 5:00. I think in order to overcome this evil foe, I'm gonna have to force myself to stay up later. But not tonight! On the upside, I was wide awake this morning to catch the sunrise over the Dead Sea from my balcony as I did some reading. It's a beautiful view.

I hope everyone is doing well back home. I've gotten a couple emails and have started replying but there are still a few I need to get to and right now I'm doing this instead. And I think after this...my eyelids are gonna win. If not before.

(My eyelids won. The rest of this post is continued the next morning.)

It is currently 3:42 am over here. I think I fell asleep around 6:30 last night while trying to write this blog. And now I'm wide awake. I guess I'll catch another sunrise. Remind me when I get home and I'll show you a picture of my view. It's unbelievable, really. You can see the Dead Sea and if it's clear enough, you can see Jordan just on the other side. Of course, that's not the only thing I'll show you pictures of. It's probably best if you set aside a couple hours for me to show and tell about all of them. We'll work it out.

I guess there's a lot to cover now since my other post was from London and now I've been here for three days. That doesn't seem like long but I was really thrown right into it right when I got here so there's been a lot of stuff already. Which is great because I'll only be here for a month.

I'm having a hard time collecting my thoughts right now and then my writing tends to be a bit sporadic because there's so much to cover and I don't know where to start. But I think between the two of us, you and I can work through this. I just gotta figure out how to go about this.

Okay. Heathrow.

I flew out of Heathrow that next day after spending about 30 hours wandering around and drinking coffee and sleeping on whatever bench looked comfortable (none of them were). And that was the last of my being able to understand and be understood by everyone. Next thing I knew, English was the SECOND language they used on the plane, and forget about finding an English newspaper (as far as I could tell, though, Obama won). I don't really remember much of the flight from London to Paris because I think I slept most of the time. Plus it was only an hour or something like that so we pretty much took off and landed. Not extremely exciting. Navigating the airport in Paris was fine. I had plenty of time so I slept on a couple more benches (I'm becoming a connoisseur of fine benches) and read some French magazines. Very informative. Paris to Tel Aviv was a bit longer but my iPod kept me company and even though I think the meal was made of play-dough, I was hungry and it hit the proverbial spot.

Even the Tel Aviv airport wasn't too much trouble and the immigrations lady with too much eyeliner only hassled me a littlt bit. Kyle, the other volunteer, was just outside waiting to pick me up and we made it back here to the house around 2:30 or 3:00 am where I slept like a baby. The bed was a welcome change of pace.

We woke up around 10 the next morning and went down and talked to Eldon for a while. He's the guy heading up the whole thing and it's his house we're staying at. He lives on the bottom floor and we're in one of the rooms upstairs. The rest of the upstairs he rents out as a retreat center but he's thinking that if he has any more volunteers, he'll just use the whole upstairs for them. You can kind of get a sense of things if you look at a map of Israel. The house I'm staying at is in Arad towards the southeast of the country. One of the centers is here and the other one is in Tel Aviv in the west on the coast of the Mediterranean. I haven't figured out exactly how long the drive is yet but it's somewhere between one and two hours depending on how you drive. And, of course, gas is $8.00 a gallon. Anyways, that day we went into Jerusalem to pick up a donation and Kyle showed me around the old city a bit. It was amazing seeing it in person. We just kind of walked around aimlessly through the markets and ate falafel and went and prayed at the Western Wall. I'll show you pictures. On the way home we stopped and had pizza and beer at a mall close to our house here. The pizza was interesting because the only option for meat was tuna fish. Something to do with being kosher, I guess.

Okay, so that brings me to yesterday. Right? I think so. It's all kind of a blur.

Yesterday I got up WAY too early (as we've already talked about) and the plan was to get groceries before going to the center to teach (rather, I watched Kyle teach this time to get a feel for it). On our way out to go shopping, we stopped downstairs to say hi to Eldon and he kind of just ended up sitting us down and launching into Bible study. So we spent the next couple hours in intensive study of the book of Jonah and then we had to go because we were late for class. We hung out at the center for a while and then went and bought groceries. Toilet paper costs a small fortune. After that we came home and ate for the first time that day and went back down to talk with Eldon. We spend the next few hours after that back in Jonah because today Eldon wants us to teach on Jonah to some Sudanese.

Then I fell asleep.

This morning I need to prepare my teaching. That's at 10 and then I don't know what's going on for the rest of the day. Kyle is heading into Tel Aviv today for the weekend and Eldon's having me stay here to do some work. I'll probably end up teaching on Tuesday and I'll probably be at the center for most of the weekend. I don't really know. We just make it up as we go along.

So what about you guys? What's new?

.Tim

P.S. Love ya!