Sunday in Ramallah

Back when Chelsea, Caroline and I had gone to Cairo, we met students from Europe and the US who were studying at Birzeit University near Ramallah. I have kept some contact with particularly one of the girls we had met since November, and finally, I decided I would take her up on her offer, and come and visit. Since Jess had taken me along to Bet Lechem, I invited her to join me in this excursion, and so at 10 am, we met at the Damascus Gate of the Old City, in East Jerusalem, and boarded the number 18 bus for Ramallah.
Marica, Salsa and their friend Banan met Jess and I at the bus depot, to which we arrived at with no issues at all, as the bus wasn’t even stopped by a checkpoint. Together, the five of us walked a bit around the center of the city and made our way over to a service, like a sherut, to travel outside the city to Birzeit. There, in addition to the memorials for Arafat and Hussein, the girls brought us to their university to show us the campus and to see the viewpoints, from which we could see the beautiful mountainsides in the region. Getting hungry, we jumped into a cab and traveled back to Ramallah to get lunch, a delicious traditional restaurant where we had soup, sameesh, hummus, baba ganoj, garlic salad, labaneh, and rock-baked bread. Finishing up, we continued to walk around the city for a while, ending our day at Stars and Bucks Café, where, unfortunately, they did not have standard mugs that Jess and I could buy (although they gave us Stars and Bucks stickers.) Coming onto 4pm and not wanting to be going through a checkpoint after sunset (especially since, even though Jess and I both have Israeli student visas, we had not idea of what a checkpoint from the capital city of the Palestinian Authority would actually mean) we said our goodbyes to our hosts and went back to the bus depot. In the end, the checkpoint was hardly anything, only taking as long as it did (about 10 minutes) because the guard in charge of checking passports was training another about what to look for, rather anticlimactic.