Study Abroad

So far our time has been amazing. In my personal time with God journal, I have been spending time in areas we have either studied or are seen first hand. To walk through the biblical text and have it come alive is beyond belief. Being a seminary student and use to studying the biblical text, this course and Brian make it come alive and allow us to be a participant in the story. I consider myself very fortunate that have made this trip and now make the most out of it and to engage. Today we walked the old city, of course we know its not the true old city, but it is the modern day old city. We walk areas that support the biblical text and then watch it come alive as we moved into history to visit the pool of shilom and Hezekiah Tunnel. Tomorrow is already beckoning and we will visit the western wall first and then into other sites within the old city boy. Shalom: Gary Mejia

It’s day two of exploring the city of Jerusalem. I’m still in complete awe of the fact that I live here. I go to college in the Holy Land. It’s going to take some time for that thought to settle in. For now, still excited for all the wonder my eyes are about to see. I feel blessed beyond belief to have the opportunity to see first-hand the places I’ve read about in the Bible for years. What an unreal experience. We’ve begun to get settled in and are already finding our surroundings and learning how to navigate throughout the city. [caption id="attachment_69" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Haylie, Erin, and I ready to take on Hezekiah's Tunnel with our headlamps! ;)[/caption] Never in my life did I imagine I would be able to actually visit Israel, let alone live here for five weeks. Even though it seems like a long time to see the city, I can already tell there is more to see than I could ever go to or fully learn about in this amount of time. Regardless today was an amazing day. We walked to the city of David and were able to see the Mount of Olives from an amazing vantage point. While standing from a balcony we were able to see how people during the time of the Bible would have seen the land. Brian read Psalm 125:1-2 while we were standing there which says “Those who trust in the Lord are as Mount Zion which cannot be moved but abides forever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem so the LORD surrounds his people from this time forth forever.” Until that moment I was obviously never able to actually visualize this verse. [caption id="attachment_70" align="aligncenter" width="225"] Haylie in Hezekiah's Tunnel![/caption] There are certain words in the Bible that I feel many times get ignored due to the fact that we simply don’t have the knowledge and or visuals to fully grasp their meaning. This verse is a perfect example of this. Being able to see what the author thought everyone would be able to view while reading this verse made the verse come alive. When looking at the masses of mountains surrounding us, the verse of how the Lord surrounds us took on a whole new meaning. It helped me realize how vast and huge the Lord’s arms are that cover us in comparison to the surrounding mountains. A beautiful picture now ingrained in my memory. [caption id="attachment_71" align="aligncenter" width="225"] Caves leading us down to the Tunnel[/caption] After this we followed a staircase which led to an excavation of the City of David. An old house was visible showing how small the houses were during biblical times. There were no doors separating any of the rooms and there was an ancient toilet which made me extremely thankful for the sewage we have today! It was the bare minimum of a toilet in addition to the fact that having a toilet was apparently only an asset to the wealthy. Finally we arrived at Hezekiah’s tunnel. This was an underground tunnel that allowed the people in the city of Jerusalem to get water from the Gihon Spring. [caption id="attachment_75" align="aligncenter" width="225"] Ancient Toilet in The City of David[/caption] When we first stepped into the tunnel the water was about thigh high then for the rest of the time it was barely above our ankles. It was pitch black besides our flashlights and the tunnel was about the size of a coffin. Needless to say it was awesome! At least to those of us without claustrophobia... A new dear friend of mine whom I met this week, named Christy, had the privilege of celebrating her birthday today. Because of this, a spontaneous Happy Birthday song broke out midway through the tunnel. Amazing acoustics! When we got out of the tunnel about a half hour later all we wanted to do was turn around and venture back through. [caption id="attachment_77" align="aligncenter" width="225"] Excavation at The City of David[/caption] On the other side of the tunnel we sat on the steps of the pool of Siloam. This was the pool that Jesus sent a blind man to wash and get healed in after spitting in the mud and putting it on his eyes. Seeing the Bible come to life before your eyes is truly an awesome and humbling experience. I cannot wait to see what else this city has to teach and show me!

Καλημέρα, Sunbirds. This is your fellow carbon-based organism, Fabio Avetisyan, blogging live from Greece. I have never in my memory set foot outside California, and I have never really been big on travel, so this particular adventure is special as it is my first trip in which I can potentially get three different types of motion sickness within a couple of days. The first location we visited that really stands out to me was the Greece National Archeological Museum, one of the most famous museums in the world, located in the heart of Athens. Upon entering the wondrous museum, the first exhibit we encountered was that of the illustrious Mask of Agamemnon. You know, the one with the epic nineteenth-century European mustache on it. As it is the death mask of the king who plundered Troy, this artifact is considered to be Greece's very own national treasure. A fitting label for a mask depicting the man who sacrificed his own daughter and led countless Greek soldiers to their deaths to protect his own family name. What a hero. The next item that caught my attention was a crumbling statuette of the Minotaur. It was in the same room as the giant bronze statue of Zeus/Poseidon throwing his weapon (lightning bolt or trident, respectively), which was itself quite the buff spectacle. The Minotaur was a monster created from the unholy union between a bull and a woman. King Aegeas was forced into giving it seven boys and seven girls to feed on. Upon seeing this creature, I proceeded to give it a piece of my mind by challenging it to a staring contest. Unfortunately, my efforts to shame the beast proved futile, though I'm sure Dr. Pam would have been victorious at such a competition. I will be quite sad to leave Greece, as I will probably never set foot in this museum ever again. But not to worry. I've seen enough naked men to last a lifetime. Fabio Avetisyan

Greetings, FPU blog sphere! My name is Will DePledge, and I am one of the travelers from whom you will regularly hear. I am a business major with accounting and finance emphases at FPU, and this is the third study-abroad trip of my undergraduate career. As previously mentioned by Anthony Fredette, we have just joined our FPU cohort after an informative and life-changing week in Rome. If you are at all interested in reading about our experiences in Rome, please feel free to visit our personal blogs: http://anthonyjfredette.com http://adventureswithwill.weebly.com For some brief context, our group has been traveling in Greece for approximately three and a half days now, and we are currently visiting archaeologically and historically significant sites around the island of Crete. We will return to the mainland on Monday. On Wednesday, May 28th, following an expedient taxi experience in Italy, we quickly made it through security and landed in Greece. Immediately apparent to me are the similarities between the Greek and Californian climates. It is very dry and warm here, which is almost comforting since these types of summers are what I'm used to back home. Our taxi driver from the airport to our lodging was a very nice Greek man who was "night-and-day"" different from our Italian taxi experience. He cruised down the highway, grandly motioning and pointing out his favorite sights to us while weaving in and out of the traffic lines. After arriving at the hotel, we quickly reunited with our jet-lagged contingent and had lunch. Following lunch, I and a few other brave souls went on a quick walking tour of the part of Athens in which we are staying. We are very centrally located and are only a thirty-minute walk from the Greek parliament. Greece is a fascinating city to explore after living in Rome for a week. Though the two are not truly comparable, there are certain things that I am immediately starting to appreciate about Athens. First and foremost is the fact that I am no longer walking on cobblestones twenty-four-seven as I was in Rome. This means that my feet are now very happy and far less sore than they were in Rome. After our quick walk around, we went on to our orientation at College Year in Athens, our hosts for the entirety of our tour. They are a study abroad college that works with college groups in the summer to organize trips like ours and provide much-needed in-country support for our venerable group leaders. Following our orientation we had a wonderful family-style dinner that featured feta cheese (my reason for coming to Greece; just kidding!) among other meat and salad dishes. The next day, Thursday, we had a "late" start at 9 a.m. (late for me, since I had been rising at 7 a.m. or earlier all last week in Rome). I am extremely satisfied with the breakfasts here. Here, my breakfast is pretty much confined to a vat of the best Greek yogurt I have ever had, Greek coffee, and fresh orange juice. Energized and ready for the day, we proceeded to the New Acropolis Museum, which is constructed at the base of the acropolis. It is a fascinating and modern museum. The building is built with see-through floors that allow visitors to look on the excavations of ancient Athenian dwellings below. The theme of this museum is the construction of the Parthenon and the carvings that adorned it, but it also holds some very famous and early Greek statues. This museum seemed much less cluttered, without so many statues seen in almost every Roman museum we visited, and more focused on the progression through the years of both the Parthenon and the styles of the statues. This museum was really great because they have life-size reconstructions of what the friezes and carvings around the Parthenon would have looked like, including some of the original carvings that were not taken to the British Museum. In some ways, this museum felt more personal to me than some of the Roman museums. I still love all the museums in Rome, but there was something that was really appealing to me about this museum. Sadly, no photos were allowed in the museum. Following our stint in the museum, we started a hunt for a place to exchange currency here in Athens. I call it a "hunt" because for some strange reason none of the banks do currency exchange here, as is the case in the States, Southeast Asia, the UK, and Ireland. Once we found a specific exchange, I had the pleasure of attempting to bargain for a better exchange rate, which the manager agreed to give us after my finagling. My Vietnam bargaining skills definitely came in handy! Though the manager explained everything to us, and it looked like we received a better rate, I am still not convinced that we received a better rate than was posted. At any rate, it makes for a fun story! We cooked dinner in our apartment in order to conserve money for later in the trip. We had a fun night of chatting and getting to know each other a little better. On Friday, we visited the National Archaeological Museum, and it was truly spectacular! Like the museum yesterday, this museum holds some of the best preserved artifacts in the world. Not only did we see statues, pottery, and jewelry from the archaic period, but we also got to see what is thought to be the world's first calculating device, the Antikythera Mechanism. I am still processing the full enormity of this great musuem, and will go into more detail in my next post. I spent the afternoon roaming Athens with one of our student groups and am really getting a feel for the city. Until next time! The next blog post will be written by another student in our group. And so we go, Will DePledge

Kaeli Hanson "They're ruby slippers, Adrian. Put these on and say 'there's no place like home', 'there's no place like home' and you can be there." - Adrian Cronauer "Good Morning Vietnam" The short term study abroad trip to Vietnam was an experience of a lifetime, but it is good to finally be home. Vietnam was the first time I had ever been across seas to another country and the farthest I have been away from my family. I have made great friendships and was able to build relationships with my professors that I could never get from the classroom. Vietnam was a culture shock! Saying the weather was hard to get use to is an understatement. There were times when it was 110 degrees outside with 80 percent humidity.  I now appreciate air conditioning more than ever and I will never complain about the heat again. At one point on the trip our air conditioner on the bus broke, but Tony (our tour guide) pulled through and got us a new air conditioned bus. It is the little things that make a difference. Getting use to the weather was hard, but learning how to interact with the local people and your surroundings was a challenge too. Every time I walked down the street I had women offering me stuff to buy, they are very persistent. They don't really know the word "no" or they just choose not to listen to you.  Being in the big city of Ha Noi was crazy. We were just thrown into this new way of life and it was very overwhelming. The night life in Hanoi was great. One night a group of us went and joined in a Zumba group by the lake. Ha Long Bay was my favorite part of the trip. The scenery was incredible. There were many islands; 1969 to be exact, all unique. Some of these islands even have little brown monkeys inhabiting them.  After Ha Long Bay we took a night train to Hue. I have never been on a train, let alone a night train. Me and another student even made friends with some Vietnamese business men who made the train ride more fun. When we arrived in Hue, we got our first little taste of Vietnam's thunder storms. It rained hard but I think many of us were happy because the rain made it cooler outside. We were able to visit the Imperial City and the tomb of Khai Dinh. From Hue we went to Hoi An; which is a calm little tourist town not far from Da Nang. Hoi An was my favorite town, mainly because it was quiet. There were less people trying to come up and sell you things and you could walk down the street and not worry about getting hit by a motor bike. When we were there we road bikes to a beautiful beach. The water was amazing and clear and you could walk out fifty yards and still have water up to your waist. The only thing you had to watch out for were the occasional jelly fish. We also hiked a huge mountain called Marble Mountain. It was a struggle to reach the top (so many stairs!!), but the view was worth it. In Hoi An we also learned how to cook some great Vietnamese food; spring rolls (which is harder to make then it seems) and fish. Staying in Hoi An was the best place to end our trip in Vietnam. When we left Vietnam we had a 12 hour layover in South Korea. South Korea was cooler in temperature; no complaints there, and we were able to visit a couple religious sites. We were all very tired from the plane ride and most of us were running on only a couple ours of sleep. I wish we had more time in South Korea,but I am still thankful to say I have been there.  I am so thankful to have had this experience. This was the best way to start out summer and I would recommend this trip to anyone. Vietnam is an amazing country with rich culture and history and my life had been enriched as a result of the opportunity to have seen and experienced it.