Coming from Philadelphia, we find ourselves actually enjoying the weather here. Sounds trite, but humidity is really what it's all about. It's Ssso dry here, that we are not very bothered by the high temperatures, and enjoy being able to breathe easily.
The surprise for us is the wind. Most of the time there is some breeze. But at dusk it often becomes real wind, with lots of gusts that actually shake our stone home and make a ghostly noise. Now it's obvious to me how the disciples got in a boat in calm and then suddenly found themselves in a life threatening storm -- before I always thought it was strange that as fishermen they had not known better to anticipate this, now I know how sudden and unpredictable it is...
Payne has taken to joining in the logical local thing to do with this weather -- he flies kites with Jimi and Alla. Kite flying is definitely a major popular activity!
We are loving the food. Our hostess, Elham, is a great cook who makes most foods from scratch. She's trying to teach me to make Turkish coffee but I still don't quite have the hand. Her husband, Hamdi, has finally been able to come home from Jordan for a while, and he's a good cook too.
The major local hot-spot for locals to eat, drink and smoke nargilla is a place in the Shepherd's Fields called The Tent.
The Siraj program offers Arabic cooking classes. The other day, Payne & I were the only ones to show up for class so we had a super-private lesson from Abdullah at Ala Kaifak restaurant. We made 'Makluba' which means 'upside down.' Even at a professional restaurant it took 1 1/2 hours to fix but it was worth it (we got to eat it after cooking.)
Baird missed that cooking class because she was off with 'her little sister' Aseel. She goes to Aseel's volleyball practice and they are verifying that teen-age girl stuff is the same in Palestine as it is in America.... Whenever I walk in the room they ask me to leave... did you know a kuffiyeh could be a halter top?...
Our host family with extended cousins etc gets together all the time -- at least right now they do. One of Elham's sisters is here from Canada for the Summer -- it's their first time here in ten years so the family is trying to make up for Lots of lost together years.
At 10:15 every night the streets of Bet Sehour are empty because everyone is in the house in front of the tv for a Turkish soap opera -'Nur'. We can figure out what's going on without knowing the language...
The seatbelt thing is interesting. The Israelis are very strict about tickets for not wearing seatbelts. A little rebellion of the Palestinians is that as soon as they are out of sight of Israelis they take off their seatbelts. It is a sign of not wanting to be confined, as they are so strapped in and limited in so many other ways by the occupation. It's obviously a rather self-defeating rebellion because people drive like crazy around here, with their horns as their major weapons on the road. Payne is particularly annoyed by the horns and has various plots to silence them...
So these are a few of the everyday things in life in the OPT.
