This week we visited the dead and went to heaven…twice!. We got the opportunity to go to the Tomb of the Kings and the next day we went to Ice City. The best part of the week was getting a personal Jon Schmidt concert just for us Jeru students!

The owners of the Tomb of the Kings open it whenever it works for them so it’s very hard to visit it. Plus when you knock on the random green door on the street, you have to pretty much beg them and bribe them with money to get in. So thankfully we got to go, flashlights in hand (well I guess on head), and crawl down to where the dead would be laid. I’m not sure if it really was for the Kings but that’d be cool if it was.

With Paige and Brooke!

Rachel and I sitting in deep tombs that the dead were laid in. It probably wasn’t very sanitary…

We decided to get our shekel’s worth and spent 2.5 hours and made a horror short film, it was so much fun!

In West Jerusalem there was an big event for Ice City. It’s this huge shack that is filled with ice sculptures. They gave us coats at the front because obviously the room has to stay at a very cold temperature. It was a perfect time to do it because the weather is starting to get super hot. We had a lot of fun looking and sliding down and climbing on and taking pictures with ice.



Analise and I about to go in!!

Robin, me, Jerica, and Sarah at the Jerusalem lion symbol sculpture!

The ice felt so good, and of course we had to take a picture with a pillar ruin, we can’t stay away from those pillars!

This is just a glimpse of the whole thing, it was so cool!

Even a princess ice sculpture.

And a ice hallway!

Hailey, Whitney, me, Rachel, and Analise

I have the most beautiful friends and these are only 6 of them!

It was a lot of fun, that day a group of us also went ice skating too! Even though the skates were as crappy as you can get, it was still awesome and a nice break from the intense heat in Jerusalem that’s building.

Another part of our fantastic week was meeting Jon Schmidt. On Sabbath, it was announced in Relief Society, oh Jon Schmidt is here, has been for a week, and he is having a piano concert inside the August Victoria at 7:30 and performing for whoever wants to come. Wait what!? Jon Schmidt! Like the Mormon piano idol!? I was very excited. I have never learned a Jon Schmidt song because everyone and their dog knows Waterfall or All of Me or something he made and I just would rather not be like everyone else, but after this concert I am definitely going to learn one. He is AMAZING! And so nice, and lots of fun. He is definitely a performer, he kept us engaged and laughing and his songs were echoing beautifully inside the wonderous chapel. We’d been here before and so it was even cooler to go there again and have this wonderful experience.

He played his own songs, made up a song by using the numbers in the time 7:57, and different arrangements with his Ipad accompaniment of his cello guy.

He was so funny too! Sometimes dancing all over the place while playing, I want to be just like him!

It was funny, while taking pictures he was just saying, man if only the guys in high school could see me now! Haha.. I also got his signature and I am now reenergized to become a better pianist and not give up on this talent of mine. 

I had a great week and I made lots of memories with all of my friends, who I’m becoming closer and closer to every day!