Travels in Israel and Palestine!

Hey whats up everyone! So I've been out here a few days, and, as promised, am trying to write to everyone / start a blog, and figured this was the easiest way to do it. If you guys want to keep getting these just subscribe to my notes I guess, or just look at them now and then, otherwise just ignore the spam;) Anyway, so its late and I'm feeling way too lazy, so I'm pretty much copy and pasting an email I wrote to Carole when I first got here for this first post, here it goes:

Hey! So i just made it to the school, and just got into my apartment! I like my other roomates / other volunteers, they are all pretty cool, especially this quirky 60 year old Japanese man who keeps yelling out "Your mother's pussy!" in Arabic, and is really proud of himself for knowing how to say it;) It was definitely an adventure getting here though, the information in the guidebook was completely wrong, I got questioned for 5 hours at the border, and got into Jerusalem at 1am, and just walked around the old city checking it out in the middle of the night (with$500 in my pocket which probably wasn't very smart;) It was mostly all arabs in the old city, everybody just assumes I'm palestinian until I open my mouth, then they are just confused;) they go "are you.... Egyptian???" because I speak with the Egyptian accent, but I do it badly so they are even more confused. But they are cool and helpful and all want to talk and all that. The tension in the old city is pretty intense. I went to the wailing wall and saw a bunch of orthodox jews praying, and then I went out into the street and hung out with this group of Palestinian teenagers, they said they had all been to prison and told me some crazy stories about being harrassed by cops and soldiers all the time. And they were sitting outside the door to the big mosque there, and any time a jew would try to look at the door they would taunt him and tell him to go away and that it was theirs and he couldnt go in. Its not all like that though, some of the Israeli security gaurds were cool, and even the guy who interogated me, even though he accused me of being a liar and thought I was a homeless bum and didnt believe me that I worked at Google and had cash, or that I lived in a bus, and thought I was a complete weirdo (I was talking to him for hours so I pretty much ended up telling him my life story), and thought that Elie Sherman and Oren Ofer didnt exist and accused me of making them up, after this guy told me he had just found out that I was lying and should tell him the whole story (which I did because when I thought about it there were so many simple ways he could have known), after I told this guy that I was going to the West Bank and that I was going to teach children, he just gave this sigh and gave me this look and said "why would you want to lie about that? Volunteering with kids isnt a crime, thats not something you need to hide." Look at that run-on sentence, and I'm supposed to be here teaching English;) And this one gaurd in the old city taught me how to say "Boka Tov" and "Layla Tov" (good morning / good night in Hebrew), and was super friendly, even though he did have his hand on his gun the whole time;)

Anyway I start my first class at Al-Ayn refugee camp at 7am tomorrow morning! So I need to pass ouuuuut I am exhausted, I will talk to you all later!