I've been in Jerusalem for two and half days now. Met up with my 80 person group at the Tel Aviv airport then we went to Jerusalem and checked in to our hotel. Monday morning we met with some Israeli venture capitalists. They talked about start-up companies in Israel and how successful israeli high tech companies have been...it was pretty interesting, but not so fun for 8 in the morning while still jet lagged. Then we took a bus tour around Jerusalem and a walking tour around the old city. I took a bunch of pictures which I'll try to upload later. We had an hour of free time for lunch so I grabbed my first falafel of the trip and walked through the arab market to check things out. It was almost completely empty. Every other time I've been there the market was packed with shoppers. The old city overall was much less crowded than the other times I've been there, but there were a lot of french tour groups, probably because of all the anti-semitism there they want to get the hell out of france. Overall, it is pretty noticable how much less tourism there is here.

Aside from the trip to the old city, this program is all meetings, lectures, and discussions from 7 in the morning until 8 at night every day. There is very little free time, and they don't let us leave the hotels at night. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow our trip, along with 1200 other students from around the world are in this student leadership summit where we have all these boring lectures (which i'm skipping right now because I can't take it anymore). It's all pro-israel speakers and people asking us to move to israel after college. It's funny though, with all these jews and everyone being involved with jewish stuff for years literally every person I meet I know at least 1 or two people they know. Except for the non-US people, I'm within 1 or 2 degrees of every person on this trip. It's a fun game for the first few people, but it gets old fast when you're doing it 50 times a day. There should be a new year's party for us tomorrow night, and on the 1st we're going to a kibbutz up north. Hopefully the rest of the trip will be better than this summit.