Today I am mad at Palestine

Let's just keep this between you and me though ok?

I forget who but someone told me once that when you stay in a country for long enough, you will go through fluctuations in how you feel about it. Sometimes you will absolutely love it there and never, ever want to go home. Other days you will just not GET what is going on around you and why people behave the way they do and you will just want to go home where things are more familiar.

I think I hit that second one today.

Americans are particularly fond of order. In America, you wait in line, you are quiet in a movie theater, you cross the street at an appropriate interval and cars who see you in the street will keep a respectful distance. We even know which side of the escalator is for standing (the right) and which for passing (the left). I've been to a few countries where these rules either don't exist or are generally not followed.

In Palestine it's a bit different I've found. Some of what happened to me today is cultural and will involve me letting go of my American need for control and order, and some of it was just something you'd find wherever you went in the world. I guess this blog is my personal forum, though, so I'm going to vent to you, my dear reader.

It began this morning with my moms' exercise class. For no particular reason at all I am partial to having my students quiet and attentive while I huff and puff and call out the beat and spattered phrases of encouragement in English and Arabic. My ladies, however, are more content to use the time for chatting and dropping in and out of the workout as they see fit. Sometimes "guests" just enter and stand in the doorway and talk with the ladies and hold up the class. For me, as an American, this is disrespectful. For them, I could see how if someone enters a room and you know that person, it would be rude not to talk to them and engage them. This is an example where I should amend what I'm beginning to see as Type A habits to better fit with my surroundings.

In a university classroom, however, this is not the case. With just a few classes left before their second exam, I am stressing myself out trying to make sure that my students are prepared. I try to explain this to them, even drawing out the remaining days on the whiteboard vs. the amount of material we have left to cover. Still, students talk out of turn, talk to each other, complain that I give them homework, and say "khallas! khallas!" when there are five minutes left in their 50-minute class. When they stroll in 15 minutes late to the classroom and I am the middle of teaching, they knock on the door and shake hands with their friends. Someone's cell phone went off at least three times in the class. One student, who I swear I have never seen before, came up and complained about being marked absent so many times. I said, in English I know he could not understand "I don't know who you are. I don't even recognize you. You are *never* in my class." Ugh.

Then, at the end of the day, around 730pm when I'm about to set up my classroom, hang up the costumes I've purchased in the new closet I've had installed, I find a wet, sticky, rather lovely puddle of paint that some unwatched kids have swirled onto my floor. There are paint bottles in the pile of costumes, there is paint in a hat, there are crayons on the floor, there is general disarray. And I realize that unattended children in any country will wreak havoc but this was the icing on the cake today.

So I vented to my blog. Is that healthy or not? Please let's not post cultural relativist arguments on this forum saying that I am being elitist or some such. Today, today, I am mad at Palestine.