The Grand Tour

After scouting the entirety of the Ataturk Airport in Istanbul and almost concluding that it just didn’t have electricity, I finally found an outlet where I can recharge my computer so I can wander around trying to pick up a wireless signal looking like a fool. Granted, I already look like a fool, as we decided to forego sleep yesterday to celebrate Purim as it was meant to be celebrated. My skim café au lait is the only thing keeping me alive, even if it is definitely not non-fat and kind of tastes like it was made with cream. I’m at the point of hangover and/or layover where I don’t really care.

For the first eight days, the fourteen of us on the trip were on a schedule that was grueling, but worth it. The program had us meet with diplomats, soldiers, activists, academics, NGOs, government officials, students, kibbutzniks, settlers, new immigrants, and religious leaders - but we also toured a huge swatch of the country, and in addition to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, we went to Capernaum, the Sea of Galilee, the Mount of Beatitudes, the Golan Heights, down along the Jordan River, to Massada and the Dead Sea, out to Gush Etzion, to Yad Vashem, to Rehovot, to the border with Gaza, and to Sterot. We spent some quality time together on that bus. But afterwards, a couple of us wanted to check out the West Bank and get a better grasp on the humanitarian side of the conflict, so Genevieve (who’s a rockstar) set up Days 9 and 10 for those of us who wanted to stay behind. On Day 9, four of the fourteen students flew back to London, leaving us with ten students and a sister who joined up at the end of the trip. A couple of us took a cab out to Bethlehem, where we saw the Church of the Nativity and I had the falafel that I had put off for the entire trip because they fed us ridiculously well and I couldn’t justify skipping multicourse Yemeni and Moroccan dinners for a dollar’s worth of roadside falafel. (After trying the falafel, this is no longer the case.) And then we had a giant sleepover! One left for an a capella tour in the middle of the night, and another person and her sister left in the morning to spend another day in Bethlehem. And then there were seven.

The one of us who didn’t live in squalor met up with us that morning, and the eight of us spent Day 10 meeting with an Israeli NGO that works on human rights in the region, and then piling into a bus and touring Hebron and other areas of the West Bank that are being occupied by settlers or blocked off by the IDF. Afterwards, we picked up our stuff in Jerusalem and went to Ramallah, where we met with a negotiating team from the PLO. (We passed the compound where Arafat was under house arrest and it turns out that we all remember it vividly from watching CNN as children because some of us are dorks that way.) And afterwards, three people peeled off to go to Egypt for a week, and then there were five. So those five went out to a bar in Ramallah for dinner and drinks, and then went back to our barely affordable hotel where we narrowly avoided a crisis when they told us we couldn’t have a co-ed triple. (Luckily, the three of us are cousins, and the fact that a fourth person slept in our makeshift giant bed was wholly incidental. We figured that was safer than telling the desk that Genevieve was safely in the hands of two gay men.) Anyway, the highlight of my night was going to our friend’s friend’s birthday party, where I danced to a vaguely Arabic cover of “I Will Survive” and drank a $7 Corona and had an awesome time. I didn’t sleep a lot afterwards, because I kept waking up between two people to find that I was slipping into the crack between the two beds and halfway to the floor, and all I could think about every time was how it was an apt metaphor for borderlands and the Israel-Palestine conflict and then that made it worse.

The weirdest part of all was when I woke up to a text message from a friend in Brussels, saying that our mutual friend told him that I was in Ramallah, and that he was actually in Ramallah. And I was like, whoa, that’s crazy, but I’m leaving in two hours and will probably stay at our hotel for breakfast. And he was like, awesome, I’m downstairs, and so I padded down to the restaurant in my gym pants and socks and had breakfast with a professor I knew from Brussels who happened to be in my hotel. I think that qualifies as the craziest part of the trip, actually.

So then Genevieve and Zak left for Jordan, leaving three of us as Team Day 11 to fend for ourselves. We took a cab from Ramallah to Bethlehem, picked up luggage and falafel, took a cab to the Bethlehem checkpoint and went through very intense, kind of scary border control for Purim (not scary in the frightening sense, but in the disturbing, 1984 sense where you’re taking orders from a disembodied voice), then took a shuttle from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, a cab from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, and I spent the next eight hours having screwdrivers on the beach, wine on the beachfront, tequila and margaritas at a surprisingly awesome Mexican place, and vodka and Red Bull at a pub downtown. (The latter was purely to stay awake, and I only drank it because I got really sleepy and woke up to a girl poking me and asking to take a picture with me because she thought it was cute that I kept nodding off. I was like, um, sure, and now I need a pick-me-up because this is mortifying.) Over the course of eight hours, though, it wasn’t too bad, and we still rolled out at 3:30am, picked up the luggage, and two of us left for New York while our last guy stayed behind in Tel Aviv. And that leaves one person from Team Day 12 in Israel. The bonding was kind of intense, and I'm going through withdrawals. The fact that I’m about to board a twelve hour flight to JFK doesn’t help, probably.