Students at City Academy are no strangers to big learning in the classroom. Experiencing big learning beyond the classroom is 
something that 10th grader Jordan Davis recently had the opportunity to do with her family during her spring break trip to Israel.
Why Israel?
“Our family wanted to take a trip together before the children started going their separate ways,” said Jordan. “My mom spent some time in Israel as a college student and really liked it.” So Jordan, her parents and older brother decided to do it BIG by visiting the country.
“I expected it [the country]to be a lot less developed. I liked all the sight-seeing. We went to a lot of religious places like Christ’s tomb, the caves that the dead sea scrolls were in, and Masada which was my favorie site.”. “We went to one of the beaches in the Dead Sea. It was kind of cool to hear the connection between the Jordan here that flows into the Salt Lake and the Jordan River that flows into the Dead sea there.”
“This was a paradise vacation as well. Besides the learning it was also really cool to go snorkeling with Dolphins in The Red Sea There were palms trees, nice sand, blue water. We did a lot of walking which was fun because there was always a place to be.”
Jordan says her big learning experiences were “seeing the differences between how Arabs and Jews live, and understanding how different their cultures are. We all had assignments for this vacation. We all had to study up on certain things, investigate them, and then show them to each other during the visit. My dad had the Dead Sea Scrolls, which was the first time I had heard about them. It was amazing to go up the hill and see the Dead Sea. My assignment was the Jordan River and Jerusalem.”
The Jordan River was a bit of a disappointment because it used to be a lot bigger. We think they were saving it for irrigation. It was more like a creek than a river. It was polluted and smelled really bad. In Jerusalem there is the Dome of the Rock which is a Muslim Mosque up on the temple mount.”
Jordan says her academics prepared her for the trip. “The culture changes that I have learned and about the Jews and the Holocaust that I learned in school – it was cool to see that they were able to live a normal life. In Salt Lake if you see an Orthodox Jew it would seem kind of out of place, but there that was the norm and people were looking at us. “
Jordan describes her experiences traveling in the country. 
“It was interesting to see how the the Israeli’s and Palestinians treat each other and how the Israeli’s control the Palestinians. Most of our vacation was in Jerusalem. Bethlehem is right next to it. Jerusalem is a well developed city. We were told not to be in a Palestinian section after dark at all especially if we were a tourist and a woman. If you went from Jerusalem to Bethlehem you could see it was a lot poorer, not kept up, very crowded. There were no Jews in Bethlehem at all.”
“We went through checkpoints. We were coming back from the Sea of Galilee and were just driving around to different sites. Usually we were just waved through because you could see we were American tourists. But there were two that we got checked on – we were near Jordan where the checkpoints were tighter. They looked through our passports until they got to mine. They made us pull over, unload everything and run through a scanner. They brought a dog. We think it was because my name is Jordan. The other one is when we were coming back from Bethlehem. Since it was an all Palestinian area and we were on our way back to Jerusalem. We didn’t have our passports. This cute little lady with a machine gun said “How stupid could you be not to have your passports!” We were able to convince her to let us go back and get them. Otherwise they would have had to call other people in to investigate. It was interesting and scary at the same time.”
“This experience had just the right mixture of BIG learning and fun. There was religion. There was the differences between the 
Jews and the Arabs. Even seeing the food and the cultural experience. Seeing the ruins and caves, the Red Sea, the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee.”
