B!BLE COLLEGE or Jeff goes back to School

Whoa. The past two weeks have been an absolute blur. My eyes are almost able to focus again. I've never crammed so much information into my head in such a short time frame. Let me give you the tale in chronological order.

On October 28, 2 American professors arrived here in Tyumen to teach at our B!ble college. The topics were the Prophets and the History of Jerusalem. So on that Monday our lessons began. From 9am - 6pm each day we had lessons. No joke. We learned SO much information in the last two weeks. The intention is that each course is a college level semester long course. Seriously the history of Jerusalem course seemed more like graduate school to me.

Both classes were phenomenally interesting and packed with dates and so information that I could hardly contain it all in my head. Especially when you take into account the meanings of prophets names, their contemporaries, where did they prophesy, etc. Whoa. But I'm not afraid of reading in the prophets anymore (in fact, the opposite -- I'm thinking of doing a special study in them) and then there's Jerusalem.

I've been interested for a couple of years in maybe going to the Holy Land someday and walking about, but now I'm really excited about going there and seeing everything. Jerusalem has SO much history it's amazing. I had no idea that the 3 major monotheistic religions all had such intense claims on it. Whoa.

One of the professors, James, decided to not live at the hotel the whole time they were here, so he became my roommate for about 2 weeks. And he inaugurated the opening season of Chez Jeff (that's the name of my apartment as a hotel). So he was here for 2 weeks, next week a visiting Russian will be moving in for 2 months, and in January I'll have a roommate for 3 months from the States who's going to be here working with our ch^rch. Crazy, huh?

My only big worry about the January roommate is that I can't speak too much English or it messes up my Russian. After two weeks in the B!ble college, my Russian teacher reprimanded me for messing up my accent and speaking too much English! She could tell the difference in my Russian after only two weeks!

I did learn a TON of new words at the college though. I mean, I listened to parallel English and Russian lectures on the prophets and the history of Jerusalem. I know such words as: pride, arrogance, to occupy, viewpoint, beast, slavery, symbolism, 'as a matter of fact', 'just in case', cistern, and many others…. How funny, huh?

Okay - this entry is too long. Sorry about that. Oh, and I did get two 5's! Yippie