So I have a little less than a month left before heading back stateside -- thus I've been trying to at least blog a little every day. But I didn't blog yesterday, so this is an extra-special make-up blog.
Yesterday evening I didn't manage to blog because I was at a graduation party in Beit Jala, the western neighbor of Bethlehem in the West Bank. Distance-wise, Beit Jala is fairly close. (Google says it's about 13km as the crow flies.) But it can take an awfully long time to get there, mostly because of having to find the specific checkpoints to go through the 30-foot tall security wall.
I managed to cross back from Beit Jala to Jerusalem at the end of the evening (because my program coordinators happened to be at the party, and they have a car with the right color license plate -- meaning they can drive back and forth through the wall.), but Palestinian buses in southern East Jerusalem are unreliable and poorly scheduled, and the Israeli buses weren't running because the Jewish shabat/sabbath starts Friday at sun-down. THEREFORE I spent the night at coordinator's house in the Palestinian Jerusalemite neighborhood of Beit Safafa.
Transportation here is challenging and confusing sometimes.
But yeah! Barbecue! Fun and games and dancing! Parties are fun.
Here's a taste of Arab pop -- the kind of stuff you often hear at parties here.
Fares Karam -- IlHamdilla
Khaled -- C'est La Vie (this one might sound familiar)
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