Day one and two

The first day of the trip was pretty uneventful.  We boarded the buses, each picked up an Ohev shalom Israel shirt, and found or way to the plane.  We flew An ELAl, Boing 777 for about 10.5 hours into Ben Gurion airport.  It felt like we had been awake for 12 hours, and because of the time difference, it was morning  when we got there.  As we pulled away from the airport in our new coaches, we were introduced to our tour guides.  The first stop we made was to a small terrace overlooking the old city of Jerusalem, where we did some Israeli history activities and ate lunch.  After that, we went to the southern wall of the ancient temple, and worked our way to the southwest corner, then north toward the Kotel.  After we spent some time with the most crowded section of the wall, we explored the chambers beneath the Arab quarters, finishing the rest of the western wall.  We then had dinner at a place called IMA's (Mother's in Hebrew), and after being awake for almost 20 hours, we trudged to our rooms in the Olive Tree Hotel.