Entries this day: Cinderella evening niveen

Cinderella

1:48pm CEST Saturday 25 June 2005

Today was our Cinderella play in rude Japanese. I was glad to have memorized all my lines, so I didn't need a piece of paper or to read off my hand. But, I forgot a line in Scene 3, so I broke character for one second until I recalled it. I'm not able to ad lib in rude Japanese.

Shawn got it on video; I wonder if I'll get it on here.

Now it's work work work on curriculum time.

evening

7:29pm CEST Saturday 25 June 2005

Just hit the internet for 23 expensive minutes (500 yen for each portion of 15 minutes) and was happy to see some emails from my mates. I didn't see an email from Caesar, who I'm supposed to meet tomorrow in Barcelona. He sent me a copy of his passport so he can get on the ship, but I don't have any contact info for him. I didn't think to email him and ask for his digits or something. I had expected him to give some ideas on when/where to meet, but .. ah well.

I wasn't really impressed with the slowness of the internet, nor the price, so I scribbled FUCK in the area where I was supposed to write my initials.

We had our GET meeting outside today! The meeting was fast (only 45 minutes) and sunny (no clouds in sight).

Chillin' in GET Room 4 now; Nicole (from Brisbane) is talking to Takako (from Kagoshima, Japan, whose English is decent. Good vocabulary).

niveen

1:24am CEST Sunday 26 June 2005

Woah. It's late. About 20 minutes ago I walked Niveen to her room after she spent at least an hour telling me some of the history of the nightmare situation that she lives in every day. Stable checkpoints and flying checkpoints require her to stop and answer questions. Her version of the story is basically the Israelis (Jews displaced in the German Holocaust) have (with American support) invaded her country and taken her rights with the intent of ultimately erasing the Palestinian identity. Palestinians are forced to live in camps separated from each other around Jerusalem.

She is nearly forced to disown her Palestinian identity because, for example, she can hardly travel in Egypt if she says she's from Palestine. (( The more detailed story: she was born in Jordan so she has a Jordanian passport, but isn't allowed to get a Palestinian passport and doesn't want an Israeli passport. When she presented her Jordanian passport in Egypt but said she was Palestinian, they nearly took her passport from her.

She wants to be Palestinian. I imagine they want consistency in passports' written and passport holders' spoken identities.

She said I really should come to see for myself what it's like.