Extremely short trip to the Israel Museum

The ONE time I don't bring my camera on an archaeology field trip, and there's really cool things to photograph. Our class met at the Israel Museum at 7 tonight, to see the archaeology department, and I thought it'd be all artifacts and stuff which are interesting but make boring pictures when absent from their surroundings. Plus, they usually don't let you take pictures in museums around here. I was mostly right, they didn't let us take pictures, but after we were done seeing the archaeological stuff, she released us to run around as we pleased until closing time. Since we weren't taking a bus back she wasn't responsible for us, so she was out of there. Naturally, many of us migrated towards the kids section, which does let you take pictures and of course had fun things to play with, including a large projection on one wall of a beach with beach chairs to sit in and enjoy the crashing waves, a soccer ball taller than me (with a whole accompanying soccer exhibit) and ping pong tables of various weird shapes. The tables were in their own room so kids could whack the balls around, and there was a round table, an extremely thin table that was probably regular length but no more than a foot wide, and one that was like a light wave, with the crest on one side of the net and the dip on the other. Serious students that we are, we spent most of the half-hour we had left playing with them. The guards got annoyed while trying to kick us out at closing time.

The Israel Museum is in the same district as the Knesset building, and outside the main building of the museum, which is on a hill, you can see the lit-up building at night, complete with a little electric menorah on the top. The Shrine of the Book, which contains the Dead Sea Scrolls, is also in the Israel Museum, and we walked by it but didn't have time to go in. Too bad.

Last night of Chanukkah tonight! Beth and I lit our full chanukkiahs just now.