marhaba (hi!) from falastin

Marhaba!

After a long flight, a layover in Amsterdam, and another, but shorter flight, here I am in East Jerusalem.

M & I are staying at the Faisal hostel tonight, where lots of activists, especially ISM-ers stay. Tomorrow we have a birthday party to go to- the owner of the hostel has a birthday on Christmas! We spent today wandering around, doing errands, and getting pulled into stores filled with interesting things and people persistant to sell them.

The computer keyboard that I'm using is really interesting, it has Arabic letters on it as well as "English letters" (what are they actually called?). Everything written in Arabic looks beautiful. It brings a whole new perspective to the idea of literature as a form of art, and literature as form-based in general, because in Arabic, it's not just that the sounds that the letters make can be beautiful, the letters themselves can look like art on a page. The letters English uses are so hard and boxy in comparison. And I can already tell that a cultural comparison might yield similar results. People have been so welcoming and kind here...when I was in a store buying some gifts for folks, and I glanced over at the food two of the owners were eating, they offered me some! It is amazing the way such simple things can feel like a huge embrace, or maybe it is the combination of a lot of simple things. I want to learn how to act so that I too will be giving that feeling of embrace to the people I interact with, not just here, but in my life in general. I think that is another level of solidarity.

Then there is the contrast with the fact that there are Israeli soldiers walking around on the street, who look like a bunch of young high school kids who got given guns for some reason. And the way this is totally normalized.

And I haven't even been to the West Bank yet, I'm just in East Jersalem, by way of Tel Aviv...

There's not much more to this update, except to let folks know that I got here okay, and I feel a lot more grounded than I did in the past few weeks. I am here, on the ground, literally, so maybe that is why.