Unless.: "A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in."

Eid break is wrapping up here, and it's hard to believe that I only have four weeks left before I'll be back in Portland. Life here feels so normal that it seems like I could stay so much longer. Monday starts my final rotation of kids, the oldest group (11-12 year olds), and then the last week is final evaluations and wrapping up administrative work.

This last week I spent traveling Israel proper, so I spent a day in Jerusalem, one in Tel Aviv and Jaffa and three in Haifa. The trip north was an adventure of public transit. We walked to the bus station in Nablus, caught a bus from Nablus to Ramallah, from there caught a bus from Ramallah to Callendia (the big checkpoint between the West Bank and Israel proper by way of Jerusalem), then we caught an Arab bus so that we could do the slightly easier drive through checkpoint, which was stopped and boarded by an Israeli soldier who checked everyone's ID's. Military service is mandatory for Israelis, so men serve three years just out of high school and women serve two years. What this essentially translates to on the ground is that a kid younger than me with a gun the size of his torso boarded our bus, had clearly never seen Americans on the Arab bus before, and had, by all evidence, never seen an American passport. We got through fine, but not without the kid flipping the passport open and closed, open again, back to the front page, back to our visa stamps, and then back to the front the passport again before essentially shrugging us through.

From the Arab bus station inside of Jerusalem, we walked to our hostel to drop off our bags, and went out to explore the city. We got to Jerusalem on Shabbat, so West Jerusalem was pretty much shut down for the Jewish holiday, but the Arab side still had plenty going on, and a few streets in West Jerusalem had some restaurants and bars open as well. We met up with a couple of girls we had met our previous trip to Jerusalem and went out to get dinner and chocolate fondue, all of which was delicious. Time and time again while there I was struck with the disconnect of the people sipping coffee in the sunshine in Jerusalem while not even an hour away, people in Nablus lived in camps and poverty with F-16's flying overhead. The next day we headed into the old city, where I got immediate looks of shock and surprise when I spoke to the vendors in Arabic, and even more so when I said I was living in Nablus. A lot of tourists come through Jerusalem, most of whom don't speak a word of Arabic, and many of whom don't speak any Hebrew either, so I could tell it was an interesting break from the usual. From there, we caught a bus up to Tel Aviv.

Our only night in Tel Aviv, our basic goal was to experience American life. We went to an American bar right near the embassy, where we watched football, ate nachos, drank beer and experienced a little taste of home. The next day we went to the beach, choosing one closer to Jaffa (an Arab community outside of Tel Aviv), and once again was struck by the differences. Here I saw girls in hijabs giddily playing in the water, enjoying the day with their families, playing with the dogs on the beach, and I couldn't help but think of Balata refugee camp. Most of the refugees in Balata originate from Jaffa, so as I looked at the families and the coast and the parks, I thought of the kids I teach and how this could have been their lives in a different world. It made me mourn for the lives they would never know they were missing, and also made me wonder how these particular Arab families got to stay in Jaffa, while so many were forced out of their homes. From there we wandered into the downtown area of Jaffa, where once again I was met with surprise when I asked the three men standing near the cash register if they were in line in Arabic. Tourist communities are always so interesting to me that way. From Jaffa, we headed back to Tel Aviv to the central train station, and caught a train up to Haifa.

The train to Haifa was cramped and uncomfortable and we spent the duration of the hour and a half long ride sitting on the train floor, but when we got there it was well worth the wait. Think of Haifa as Florida-- lots of retirees and young people and not much in between. We spent the bulk of our time in Haifa at the beach, where I (sort of) learned to paddle board, read a good book, and met some interesting people. One of the things particularly apparent to me on this trip is that sometimes a good geopolitical debate is worth it, while other times, you just don't want to get into it with the random beach bum why exactly you are living in Nablus, why being in Israel makes you feel more insecure than you ever feel in the West Bank, and why Israeli policies are shockingly racist and uneven despite their cries of democracy-- which means that a lot of conversations go like this:

Beach Bum: So what are you doing here?
Me: Vacation
Beach Bum: Where are you from?
Me: America
Beach Bum: How long have you been here?
Me: (choosing my words carefully) I've been in Israel for almost a week.
Beach Bum: And how long are you here for?
Me: Two more days
Beach Bum: And then you go back to America?
Me: (stalling a little, looking around for a change of subject) Not quite, I'm going a few more places before I leave. I have to go. (abruptly leaving)

Better yet, three American girls together, all from different places in the US but saying that they work together, as well as that they met here, left many people with confused looks on their faces. It wasn't our plan to lie ever, simply to divulge the least amount of truth necessary for conversation if it wasn't someone we felt the need to talk with longer than a few minutes.

In Haifa, we also went to the Bahai Gardens (the second holiest site for people of Bahai faith) and a beautiful sculpture garden on our last day in town, before taking a taxi back down into the West Bank and returning to reality in Nablus. It's good to be home though and have a couple of lazy days before work starts-- vacation can't last forever.