Onward to places new and hard to understand.

In my last post I wrote about waking up and w atching a sunrise from a foreign country. One of the things I did not note was that on clear days I can see the Jordanian Hills and Bethlehem. I can also see a wall. It's ten or twelve feet tall, grey, and topped with razor-wire.
This wall separates my new home from Bethlehem, which to my great surprise is only a twenty minute walk away. Twenty minutes away but a million miles from the norms that I have experienced so far in the Middle East.
Before I talk about Bethlehem I want to talk about the Old City of Jerusalem. I have been through it twice now, once to get acquainted with the city and yesterday we did a walking tour of the Christian Jerusalem, stopping at some of the stations of the cross on the Via Delarosa and reaching our goal of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. (Which was beautiful in a very odd way, considering it is broken up between many churches.)This norm with people from all over passed by us without a second glance most of the time, tourists are a given on a Saturday afternoon.

Back to today and the things I saw. They made me sad. Not in the sense that the people were sad, they were living their lives, enjoying the sun (which has been absent for the last three days) and being so very helpful when my group and I got lost as we were working on a photo scavenger hunt. (Let's just say that the three words I know in Arabic were used a lot.) But I noticed that unlike the people in Jerusalem where the movement between places was easy and fluid, the actions of the Palestinians were less so. As my group walked past the wall on our way back to the check point we walked past miles of graffiti. We finally got back to the checkpoint only to find it way more crowded than it normally is. Scott (a good friend from Jessup that is here as well) spoken to a Palestinian man and found out, that in January, Christian Palestinians who live in the West Bank are allowed to pass the check point to visit Jerusalem as sort of a gift. Only in January, he said to Scott that it was the first time his children had been on the other side of the wall. It was a treat for anyone who does not cross the checkpoint daily with work papers.

This is an example below of some of the graffiti I saw, It breaks my heart. Yet as I have beginning to find out, taking sides does not solve the problem here it makes it more stratified. All I can hope is that in the next three months I can learn and speak to the people here and find a spot on the fence to see both sides. I do hope one day though that this wall will be torn down too.

Peace and Love,

Kylie

Would you like some sugar with your stick water?

A lot gets done at 3:00 AM, I found that out pretty fast. I guess you could say that jet lag hit me hard this morning. I calculated the time difference (ten hours if you care to know from NV) and so my three a.m wake up time was equivalent to eight pm at home. Anything past this I cannot promise to be coherent due to the fact that I need to keep myself awake until at least ten or eleven tonight to have any hopes in waking up at a time that it not before the morning call to prayer (which was at five this morning). I got to watch my first foreign sunrise, which is a plus I guess in the grand scheme of things.

Today as a group we toured around East Jerusalem and the Old City, stopping at places like the Damascus Gate and the Wailing Wall. We learned where the cheapest place to get good food is and I learned where there is a bunch of museums to go too.
We are slowly getting the handle of things, I walked around the compound today with some of my new found friends looking at the amazing views from where we are located.
(I promise, I will update pictures tomorrow, I didn't think about uploading as I was searching for a good internet connection.)

All right, I have more bonding time with my apartment-mates to get too. Keep on the lookout for updates and crazy tales, as for the title of this post, well you will have to ask me about that later. It probably won't be as funny to you as it was to the six or so of us that was involved with that conversation.

Love love love
Kylie