Going to Israel

I'm sitting here in the Newark airport, waiting for my flight to Israel. I'll be there for about 5 weeks, until July 21, when I fly to Riga, Latvia and then to Tartu, Estonia for the international SBL. It will be interesting to hear from my friends what their reactions are to the Gaza flotilla and the Israeli interception. It's always hard to get an impression of what's going in Israel simply by reading the press - even reading the Israeli press online one only gets a partial picture.

I bought a camcorder a few days ago so I could make some short movies about the Old City and the rest of Jerusalem - I'd like to give the students in my Jerusalem class an appreciation for the lived reality of Jerusalem, not just the books and articles about it that we'll be reading. Last year I put a lot of my photos up on Picasa, which I think helped in giving them a better impression of the reality of the city, but I hope that short videos will be more helpful. I'm also thinking of going on a tour of the Separation Wall in Jerusalem (there's a group called Ir Amim which does those tours) and it would be useful to have some video clips in addition to still photos.