Cooking Cookies in the Holy Land? Yes!

Hello! So we're being super terrible at these updates, but there's so much to tell you! We'll get the Turkey update on soon, but for now I just had to let you know my highlight of the week! We have had a strong desire to make chocolate chip cookies (surprise!) ever since coming here. Well, I didn't see any way to make it happen, but apparently some others had a little more faith than I did. :) They checked with one of the senior couples who DOES have an oven and they gave us permission to use it! We put it on our Eventually-We'll-Do-This-List, but I wasn't thinking it would come anytime soon. Well, the other day on our travels around the city we took a spontaneous stop at a little market store. They just happened to have chocolate chips...and then magic happened! We bought everything we needed there and took everything home (after a little stop at the Garden Tomb :)). After dinner that night we escaped to the Bench's apartment and made chocolate chip cookies! It was one of the most magical things ever. Definitely didn't taste quite the same as in Utah, but they were still quite excellent! The best part of it though was spreading the joy throughout the center. We took our big huge plate and just started walking upstairs, handing cookies out to everyone we ran into until they were all gone. I felt like Santa Claus! Freshly-baked homemade chocolate chip cookies are a pretty rare commodity here in the Jerusalem Center and you could feel the joy in the air over such a small thing. It was so much fun! Moral of the story? Cookies + love = happiness :)