nearing the end

Ok, so I think my last post was way too boring and I'm sorry for making this thing too journal-y. I took a while with this one because I wanted to think of a way to make it more interesting, but I haven't been able to so here's a list of what we've been doing, instead long paragraphs:

-Micah and I went to Be'er Sheva to visit a friend who goes to the university there. It seemed like a small, suburban place and we didn't really see much of it.

-We got in our first fight while we were there... in retrospect this is hilarious because neither of us can remember why we started fighting. But we'd been together 24/7 for a long time so it was overdue. We're good now though, don't worry.

-We sat at the Be'er Sheva bus station for four hours and became experts on the place. We talked to an IDF soldier for about an hour which was super interesting. Halfway through our convo he said that he hoped we weren't spies :P

-We traveled to Ramallah to stay with Brian Phelps, a UNC alum working at the Friends School there. Another UNC grad named Vivek was also visiting the same weekend, so we had a bit of a Carolina takeover.

-Brian took us to this fancy restaurant and I got the Mexican food I'd been craving for a while, and it wasn't too bad considering I was in Palestine and very far away from Mexico.

-We went to Hebron and Bethlehem. In Hebron, one man approached us and offered to show us a view of the whole city from his roof. Luckily Brian is really good at Arabic so when we went up he could translate for us all the things the guy was saying about what it's like to live in the West Bank and so near to Jewish settlers.

-In Bethlehem we saw the church were Jesus was born, and then we ate some falafel.

-That night we went to a debka (traditional Palestinian dancing) musical with Meera, who we met earlier in the week. It was easier to understand than the last play, even though it was still all in Arabic. Also, the play was really professionally down and they had free posters and an awesome set, which was interesting because my perception of the West Bank didn't really consider the fact that there is a culture there, and in some ways it's very similar to what I'm used to.

-Also in Ramallah, I ate what Brian thinks is the best shawerma in the middle east, got a tour of the Friends School and when to a graduation party BBQ for one of Brian's students.

-I had trouble leaving Ramallah because the Indian Embassy has my passport for my visa app and all I had was a photocopy. At first they told me I couldn't go through to Jerusalem but after I asked to speak to someone in charge, they waved me through. The soldiers running the checkpoints are all either younger than me or my age.

-When we were trying to find the bus station from East Jerusalem to the central one, a cab driver tried to convince us that there was no station and that our only option was to take his cab for 35 shekels. Once we told him we knew for a fact there was a station, his friends started laughing at him and he gave us directions to it.

-We took a bus to the main station (it was soo full and we had our huge backpacks, which was hilarious to see and very inconvenient). When we got to Tel Aviv, we were supposed to meet a friend at the station but apparantly there are two bus stations and we were at the wrong one. We fought with the taxi drivers until we got a ride for 30 shekels to his apartment.

-We spent that day taking pictures of/with graffitti and going to the beach. That night we came back to Dani's music studio and crashed for free :)

-Yesterday was Micah's last day, and we took it easy. One of Dani's bands only plays covers of like Justin Timberlake and Backstreet Boys so we rocked out to them/took a billion pictures for a while. Then we walked around and found a cute cafe, and some really cheap tank tops.

-Also yesterday, we tried all day unsuccessful to find a shower but couldn't. So, we did all of Dani's dishes and washed our hair in his sink. It was really funny at the time because if you think about it, Micah was washing my hair, in a music studio, while listening to Elliot Smith, in Israel, because we couldn't find a free real shower.

-Now, Micah just left for the airport and I'm on my own until my flight leaves Wednesday night (or actually, really early Thursday morning). I'm not really looking forward to flying 12 hours and having a 15 hour layover, but I'm going to leave the airport and hang out with Ben so that's something to look forward to at least. In the meantime I get to pick up my passport today and I think I'll go back to Jerusalem tonight, so hopefully I"ll keep busy without my other half...