A day in Nablus

On tuesday, I decided to make a daytrip from Ramallah to Nablus. In general, I am not a big fan of daytrips, because my favourite time of the day is the early evening, and that is mostly the time at which you start returning to your homebase. Still it seemed a reasonable thing to do this time, because I knew there wouldn't be too much to see in Nablus, and I have an amazing place to stay here in Ramallah. (I stay with Lucia from Austria, who has been working here in the Palestinian Trade Center for about 10 months now.)

Spontaneously one would say that if you're doing a daytrip, you should leave early in the morning at least, so you have the whole day to explore the city. Sadly, it doesn't work like that in hot countries like Palestine. Basically, you can't enjoy your time outside between 11am and 3pm, and 4 hours are a long time to drink tea somewhere inside.

Luckily, it only takes about one hour to get from Ramallah to Nablus, so I simply arrived there at 3pm.
On the way I saw parts of the Israeli "Defence Wall" again (just like from Jerusalem to Ramallah), but wasn't really able to capture it. Let me tell you that they use the exact same stones that were used for the Berlin Wall - with barbed wire on top.

somewhere around Jerusalem

the future "East Side Gallery"?

Checkpoint - crossing between the zones A, B, and C (read more here)

as I heard, mostly private cars are searched through - our bus wasn't even stopped

Cruising through hilly and curvy Palestine, I once again wondered why my Israeli friends had left their country and flew to Nepal and India for hiking in the first place, when they have all this beauty in front of their houses. (That doesn't apply on the Westbank of course, but if you remember the pictures I took in the Negev, you will know what I mean.)

When I had arrived in Nablus and walked around in the city center for some time, I soon realized that Nablus was pretty much the same like Ramallah: A lot of clothing and shoe stores, snacks being sold on the streets, women doing some shopping, and men sitting together in shady places, watching the scene.
Definately an atmosphere I feel comfortable with, but I had hoped for some nice mosques to see and couldn't find a single (nice) one, so, slightly frustrated, I sat down in the shadow myself, thinking of how to spend the rest of the day and watching the people walking by.

I guess that's my favourite thing to do: Watch people.
And there is one thing I witnessed during the last days, which I will tell everyone who wants to tell me that "in Arabic countries, all women look the same" - that's simply not true! I can honestly report you that I have seen women here in the Westbank, dressed so chic and sophisticated that you can't even imagine.

There is two ways to put it.
You can say: All women wear headscarves and clothes that cover every part of their body. Which is true.
But I say: How they wear it is what matters! They don't have the same boring ponytail every day, but they choose from an - as it seems - endless variety of shawls. I've seen women matching their scarves with their dresses (of course), with their purses, even with their shoes! You find small details of the shawl in the seam of the dress, small bows are added on the back of a dress, and so on..

(These may not be the best examples, but as you can imagine, I didn't want to point my camera into people's faces.)


Anyway, I could not sit around there alone forever, so in the end I walked up to a group of younger men sitting together. The excitement was obviously big, but everyone kept being friendly and tried his best to ask some questions in English. I ended up eating Knafeh with two cousins Ali and Ala in a shop nearby.

Knafeh - melted white cheese with lots and lots of sugar around it

Ala & Ali

After some communication problems I understood that they wanted to show me a place from where I could see the whole Nablus from above - something I had thought about myself, as the city is located in a valley between two very steep hills, but hadn't known where to go of course.

So we took a taxi for 12 shekels that brought us up to the hill in the south, from where we had this amazing view:

Ali went a little crazy with the camera..

<3

At one point of the still chitty-chatty conversation we had, one of them asked me if I remembered Hitler.  "We like Hitler", they both said, "because he was against the Jews". 
I tried to explain them that they were in their current shitty, rightless situation pretty much thanks to Hitler, but obviously, their historic and linguistic knowledge was far too low to understand a word of what I was trying to say. At least they know now, that Hitler was Austrian, not German. I have the slight fear, though, that they confuse Austria with Australia.

Anyway!

As you can imagine, I would have looooved to see the sunset from that place, but that would've meant another hour of waiting and also coming back home in absolute darkness. So we began our descent and walked until a taxi picked us up.

And that was the end of my short but nice trip to Nablus!