do not fear

So it may seem that all I do is read and fume about the occupation here. I do that a lot, but I am also making friends and having fun.

Last weekend I did quite a bit of moving around, and really enjoyed it. Thursday night into Friday evening I was in Ramallah. 4 ladies from my program are based in Ramallah so I met up with them and some other people in the program who are based in Nazareth came down to Ramallah as well.

Before we met up with the Nazareth group the Ramallah ladies and I met up with my very good friend Kathy's cousin, Ghneim, who lives in Ramallah. We met him at the family restaurant for dinner and then went out to meet the Nazareth bunch.
Everyone felt like going out to dance, but I was not a fan of the place we were at so I went off with Ghneim and got to meet some of his friends. If was especially funny because some of his friends thought I was Kathy's sister so Ghneim started introducing me to some people as his cousin.
I went back to Bethlehem on Friday evening and met up with some friends to watch the world cup match that evening. On Saturday after I got out from work Nour, Derek, Jenna, a friend of Nour's and myself went to the Dead Sea to rub mud on ourselves and have a barbecue. It was a wonderfully pleasant evening with no instances of Sea water in anyone's eyes. Great success.


The following day Nour, Derek, Jenna, Mahmoud( a new friend! He happens to be an Egyptian who was raised in Jersey, what are the chances!) and myself went to Nablus. We headed up to Nablus to see the town and according to Nour the best Turkish Bathe house is there. Lucky for Jenna and myself Sunday was ladies only.
The Bathe was wild. Both Jenna and I had never been in one so we didn't really know what the deal was. The woman that worked there were super helpful though and walked us through the whole thing. We first went into a room where we laid on a hot stone floor. Then cold shower, then a sauna and steam room. After that we got scrubbed down with this crazy course mitt that scrubbed all of our dead skin off. We were going to get messages, but realized that we had been in there for an hour and a half and the boys would be waiting outside.
We then walked around Nablus and had some kunafa, a delicious filo based sweet that allegedly was created in Nablus. Then we went off to Ramallah to meet a friend of Nour's and to have dinner. It was a wonderful weekend.