Entries this day: Early_wakeup Old_city_tour Picking_olives Silent_Football zzz

Early wakeup

7:21am IST Sunday 30 October 2005

Near our apartment, a relatively tall tower towers over the surrounding buildings. Standing happily on a mosque, this tower features a ring of (eight ?) loudspeakers looking out over the city.

This morning, and probably every morning, at approximately the deepest part of my sleep, the loudspeakers blast into life with the singsong voice of a man perhaps praising Allah, and/or telling everyone to wake up and/or stop eating (being that it's Ramadan and Muslims may not eat during the day for yet a few more days).

He finished, and I eased back into sleep.

Then he started again, a new song with a new message, and a newly awoken public to listen. I eased back into sleep during the song, which finished after a bit.

Then started again, waking me up briefly. I think I can get used to this and he won't wake me up at all after one or two nights here. If I stay that long.

Old city tour

11:29pm IST Sunday 30 October 2005

I'm still two or three stories behind..

We got a tour of the old city of Nablus by Ayesh, and he showed us all these sections of rubble and rebuilt buildings that had been destroyed by the Israeli army in the not so recent past. There are tons of memorials for martyrs and prisoners and innocent victims, like a family whose house was destroyed and collapsed upon them. And a dude who used the outdoor payphone which was rigged to explode and killed him, so they made a memorial for him shaped like a phonebooth.

We also saw a turkish bath, from the inside, which looked a lot lot lot like the place in which I had photographed Francois, but at the time, thought it was a mosque of some sort.

And a place that made chairs.

Picking olives

4:58pm IST Sunday 30 October 2005

Yes!

I have now picked olives, finally accomplishing that which I originally planned to do when coming over here. A pretty quick taxi ride from Nablus/Balata area, we arrived in Salem, a small blip of a village with garbage in the street and rough rock buildings with few accoutrements.

Through the village and turned right and avoided an earthen road block by driving across a rough cracked dry red clay field with a smoldering pile of rubbish in one corner.

We piled out and immediately came across two cow carcasses, that seemed fairly intact except for the faces and tails. I chose not to get a picture of Francois with them; not so much because it didn't seem right, but because I didn't want to infect him with carrion cooties.

Shortly, we were met by a man with a yellow hat and headed across a settler road (*) and met some people picking olives. ((Hmmm.. I realize now that I didn't get a photo of the overview;; olive tree with tarps below them to catch the goodies))

(*) highway that only military and Jewish settlers can use.

Just as we arrived, a military jeep raced up and stopped on the settler road near us, where two soldiers jumped out and ran over to the field where our taxi had been, though he had driven away.

But then we heard what sounded a lot like a gunshot from that direction, and resounding echo from the surrounding hills. Woah.

We watched a bit longer, but that seemed to be the end of the action, so we decided to get to work on the olives.

The training was pretty straightforward as given by Chris: "pick everything and let it drop." No concern over size nor ripeness, but everything seemed approximately the same color, so... I kicked off my sandals (purchased in Viet Nam and well worn with love since then), climbed a tree and started picking.

At first I would pick about 8 or 10 olives, and then toss them so they would land neatly on the tarp. Then I experimented with just pluck-and-drop and those also landed on the tarp. So from then on I just plucked and dropped. plucked and dropped.

Francois wasn't a big help, but I did pose him for a couple of pictures.

Pick pick pick pick and lots of climbing. I wanted everyone to see and be amazed with my climbing skillz: barefoot and balancing in the wind with both hands focused on plucking and dropping.

I was in the tree with Jonas at first, and since it was a relatively big tree, we were there for a while. At one point, he said he couldn't get any more in a particular section, and I was like, yes cause that's exactly what I wanted to hear. Just so I could climb somewhere he couldn't.

Tragically childish, I know, but that's what was in my brain.

I climbed past where he had been, and balanced precariously on two thin branches, upon either of which I would not be very comfortable with my full weight, but distributed across the two was okay.

I picked and dropped from there for a while until I couldn't reach anymore, and I thought about humane ways of training monkeys to pick the olives, for they would be able to reach *every* olive on the tree. I would want them to be happy while working, and not forced into labor. But what would motivate a monkey to pick olives? I didn't want to starve them unless they worked, but just have them choose to work, with all their other comforts provided.

- - - -

I left the tree and joined a few people on a much smaller tree. I climbed a bit and immediately broke a branch at its base, and kinda lowered myself down out of the tree to the ground. I felt bad at first, but no one else seemed phased, and there was a guy pruning the shit out of the tree anyway. I just sat and plucked all the olives off the branch until we moved on to another tree.

- - - -

Met Rad (sp), who said his name means thunder in Arabic, speaks really good English and is actually trained as a network engineer. Rad, Sarah, David and I worked on a tree while David told a ten minute version of the Kicks are for Trids joke. Sarah quite enjoyed it which quite surprised me given that she seems to have never enjoyed any of *my* jokes, but I've never actually told her a long joke.

I told David the story of Moe and Joe, which he and Rad enjoyed and Sarah quit paying attention to, although she had complained near the beginning of the joke that I was telling a joke at the same tree where the Trid joke had been told, though Sarah had moved on to the next tree.

"There's still work to be done here," explained David simply.

Rain sprinkled on us a few times, but Sarah got a picture of me and Francois and I took one of her, and everything was great.

Time to go and the Rad was like, "hey I wanna show you guys something," and brought us to where he said he uncovered a hand grenade that had no pin but wasn't detonated.

Holy shit. Some people hypothesized it may have been planted there as a ghetto landmine. We called B'tselem, an organization with some clout and experience who will apparently come out tomorrow and check it out.

Headed back, and the driver said the gunshot we had heard had hit the case of his passenger side mirror. Woah.

Silent Football

11:36pm IST Sunday 30 October 2005

Whoohooo!! We played a lovely game of Silent Football tonight! Super thanks to Chris for being such a great proponent for us to play!

The game started with me, Chris, Sarah, David, and Ayesh, with Jonas and Leena (sp) sitting between Sarah and David, but not playing. Ayesh didn't listen carefully to the rules (as far as I could tell) and made several errors at first, but he soon got the hang of the game and did well. He was funny because he kept making clicking noises each time he did a motion, which the rest of the players picked up during game play. We all found it quite humorous, actually, though someone called him/us on it and I declared that Ayesh need not make that noise anymore (and Sarah suggested that he be required to do it all the time), but then mentioned how I had made Kris Scott sing a new song with every tattle and then gave Ayesh the choice of clicking with every move or no clicking at all.

He chose to click.

David and Sarah tattle on each other quite often, though Sarah seemed quite adept at speaking before addressing the dictator, and using pronouns in her elaborate speeches, which we all found quite amusing. David did really well at tattling accurately and succinctly; I believe he always properly addressed the dictator.

(( interesting that I just realized I didn't include the Mister Dick Tater rule. ))

Early in the game, Chris stole the football several times, which Sarah claimed was due to his inability to count, so I renamed him Mr Countless.

David made a guess-tattle on Sarah, which turned out to be inaccurate, so I renamed him Mr Field a Guess; he had said something like, "if Mr David could field a guess, I would say Ms Sarah said quote itself unquote."

Paul joined the game at some point and did well, for his first time and possibly for not having heard the rules; I think he was in the kitchen at that time.

I'm tired; time for bed.

zzz

11:59pm IST Sunday 30 October 2005

But first, I'll say David spent a lot of time scoping a world map to see what countries were actually opposite what other countries, and basically found that there are very few such alignments.

"if you dig a hole through the earth, you'll come out in China," is *also* taught to kids in Sweden, even though it's even a bigger falsity for them.

Basically, only kids in Argentina and most of Chile could dig straight through to China.x

Afterward, David asked me a bunch of the theory behind binary and hexadecimal and computer storage and cool geeky stuff like that.

And Chris and Sarah told us about cane toads in Australia, and how they are an ecological disaster.