It was a few minutes past 7 when I rolled tiredly out of my sheets and got ready for a long day. 7:45 and I was sitting in a taxi flying down the curvy main road out of Dheisheh and to the bustling Mecca of Babiskak where hordes of bright yellow taxi's and bleached white with royal blue trim buses shuttled traveling customers around the country. I stepped onto bus #21 and sat with the collection of Palestinians headed towards Jerusalem. I hopped off the bus at the Damascus Gate and caught a taxi to the main bus station.

I tried to use a couple of Hebrew phrases that I had memorized out of the back of my Go Israel guidebook but I failed miserably and my taxi driver was Arab anyway. Finally after navigating the lines at the central bus station I found myself on bus #404 to Ramla (note: not RAMALLAH.) Israeli soldiers, some with guns just sitting casually on their laps, surrounded me.

The front of the bus was like this creepy little shrine to who knows what. The drivers seat was wrapped in an American flag towel and above his seat to the left was a Tennessee license plate that read "1 Elvis", then directly in the center at the front of the bus was a set of deer antlers with a Native American doll placed in between them complete with feathered headdress. And last, but not least, a tiny flag of Israel was stuck into the side of the driver's rear view mirror. What to do with this surreal imagery at the front of the bus while I watched the whizzing country side fly by, away from the WALL?

We pulled into what I thought was Ramla and I confirmed it with the woman sitting across the aisle from me. Ramla is the only Arab established town in Israel but now mostly Jewish immigrants inhabit it with a small Christian Arab population. I de-boarded and called the Israeli Arab School I was meeting with this morning to pick up digital cameras for Ibdaa's cultural exchange program with youth. After getting lost several times and trying to ask for directions and not knowing what language to speak. I finally found my way to the school where I picked up the cameras and stayed for about five minutes chatting with a few of the teachers in English and Arabic. They pointed me in the direction of some of the sites to see in the city and I ran off with three camera bags in tow.

The first three places I found, I couldn't figure out how to get into. I went to an Arab baths place but all I could find was a weed covered dome. I went to the great mosque but the door was locked, went to the church of St. Nicodemus and St. Joseph Arimathea but couldn't find a way in. I wandered through the central market, a familiar montage of vegetable stands and plastic goods in all sizes shapes, colors and varieties. Reminded me of my days wandering the crowded markets in Guatemala. Then I finally made it to the Tower of the Forty Martyrs. Seriously it was like something out of a strange horror flick, the solitary tower rising up in the center of a concrete mass. Jacobus the guard who was sitting in a small trailer off to the side finished his piece of fruit and after collecting five shekels from me walked me over to the big rusty padlocked door with Arabic script above it. To my left was the unkempt old Muslim cemetery. Jacobus tried to squeak out some phrases to me in English but I really didn't know what he was talking about.

When he opened the door a smell of stale pigeon feces bellowed out at us and right there at the foot of the stairs was a pigeon carcass. This could not be a good sign. I took one stair at a time while the echoes of wings beating rapidly and strangled pigeon calls followed me around every corner of the tight spiral of stairs. My feet crunched down on the fetid covering of the stairs, this place was obviously not kept up. Past oval, triangle, arched and square window openings, pigeons nests with 2 eggs in them and up to the top of the tower I climbed repeating, "please scary pigeons, don't attack me, coo coo " over and over again. I finally made it up to the top and gazed out through the chipped sea green bars of the cage surrounding the upper level and over the town of Ramla, off to Tel Aviv in the distance and the airport.

I wandered back to the bus stop and after going through the metal detector with seven cameras and figuring out which platform I had to stand at to catch the bus back I wandered around the bus station for bit, taking in all the crazy shoes stores and eating places including McDonalds in Hebrew. Not thinking of it in any other way, I pulled out my camera and snapped a shot of the McDonalds sign in Hebrew as I was going back down the escalator. When I was at the bottom and walking over to the platform to wait for my bus a man ran up to me from behind and started moving his hands all frantic like and jabbering in Hebrew. I shrugged my shoulders and he finally said, "Why pictures? Why camera?" I said, oh I just took a picture of McDonalds in Hebrew, I thought it was interesting. He shook his head and scolded me in his broken English, "No pictures. No pictures." I sat down next to the platform and noticed that they guy had gone back up the escalator with his walkie talkie strapped to his belt and was standing at the railing looking down on me. People kept coming up to me around the platform and asking me questions in Hebrew. I think all the questions had to do with where the buses were going.

I didn't take the first bus back to Jerusalem because it was packed. I finally got on the second bus and was feeling a bit woozy by now from the lack of food and water all day under the hot sun. I just wanted to be back at Ibdaa. The taxi ride from the bus station back to Damascus gate was a crazy swirl of Jewish children getting out off rabbinical school and men in black suits with circular brimmed hats with long side burn curls poking out from under them. I hadn't seen this part of Jerusalem yet and I was overwhelmed by it. As I sat on the Arab bus back to Babiskak I tried to piece together something of what I had felt riding on the bus surrounded by Israeli soldiers or riding through this new piece of Jerusalem.

And that is where I must end for tonight...It's 2:30 in the morning and my eyes are drooping. Maybe a good nights sleep will help me process some of the emotions bubbling around in my head...