Holy Cow! Holy Land!!: ‘S Goin On!

It’s been a while since we chronicled our happenings here in Palestine…

There’s another volunteer apartment below ours and it was in pretty bad shape. Seeing as we had a new volunteer coming in, it needed some love. So Char and our “boss” spent the afternoon cleaning it and patching it up a bit. A few hours into it, we (myself and coworker Saleem) get a phone call asking for rescue. Apparently Char had been cleaning out the shower and as she dumped some water down the drain, she noticed some movement… and out popped a claw! Followed by another claw! A scorpion coming out of the drain! Scary business. After a minute to recover, she saw more movement… another scorpion crawling out of the drain!! So we arrive on the scene with the two very sizeable scorpions in the bottom of the shower and poke around at them… they’re pretty cool. After rescuing them into a plastic container, we decide to drop a little more water down the drain to make sure… and third scorpion came out! And he was BIG. After poking him a little bit, we scooped him up too and now they live with Saleem. That’s right, lots of scorpions here. The picture below is the big guy that came out of the drain. His sting is deadly to an infant or elderly person. To a rather healthy adult, his sting only merits a trip to the hospital.

However, this particular variety is the not the only kind of scorpion around here. There is smaller scorpion, with stronger venom, who actually is deadly to just about anyone. What do you call such an animal? That’s right, the Deathstalker! How sick is that? Coincidentally, that was also my nickname in high school. Check him out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathstalker I know the good folks at wiki says he won’t kill, but who you gonna believe?

Because of the Israeli occupation here, Palestine is very limited to the resources they have. So most of what they do have, is imported, and very heavily controlled by Israel. In light of that, there is only one true Palestinian beer. Others are imported and are somewhat equivalent to budweiser or coors. But the one truly Palestinian beer is called Taybeh, named after the small town in which it is brewed. As Palestine’s only brewery, it is their civic duty to host what would be Palestine’s answer to Oktoberfest. Aptly named Taybeh-fest, we decided to check it out. We got on a bus with 18 other Palestinians and foreigners and headed north to the sleepy little town of Taybeh where for this one weekend, the population of the town increases seven-fold as people (half locals, half foreigners) flood the tiny courtyards of the youth center. This place was PACKED. We were sufficiently burned out on people by the first hour. But among the big hits were: the donut stand (they don’t have much donuts around here), of course any booth selling beer, the local apiarist who had a sample of his product, and of course “G-Town! The Palestinian Hip-Hop Makers!”. We unfortunately did not get too many pics, bad on us, but we did manage a sampling of one of the acts. Presumably some sort of comedy troupe, that was actually quite horrible… and in arabic… maybe it was funny but we just didn’t understand. At any rate, we got some laughs at their expense: