The plane to Amman may have been easyjet, but it gets you there, with one suitcase and a violin for the princely sum of 112J. Follow that by a 3JD journey into town and a 3JD sleep in a bizarre hostel inhabited by japanese and many planks masquerading as beds and you have my total experience of Amman.

Of course the crossing into Palestine was never going to be easy, however in the five and a half hours I was waiting I never stopped worrying that in fact this time they would not let me in. Whilst in the narrow corridor, sitting rather frustrated on a chair having been searched and questioned as to my purpose and even my religious beliefs and those of my parents, I found myself sitting next to one of my friends from Dheisheh. Marcel had obtained a visa to France and was now trying to get out. Three days later when I went to Dheisheh to visit friends it turned out that he never left the crossing. Like the friends that he was telling me about, he was arrested and sent straight to prison. He has just turned 18.

Anyways outside of the doom and gloom I also bumped into my good friend Yazan at the border who was returning from a theatre festival in Jordan. Apparently a success, he was returning to Beit Jala to masrah al-harah, which brought back memories as it was the first theatre I went to and wanted to work at when I first came to Palestine last year. I spent many happy afternoons with him in Damascus so it was really good to see a friendly, curly-haired personage having been seated brooding over the iniquities of the border crossing.

So, the Israelis took my phone and copied down any palestinian numbers on it. Fortunately they failed to find my palestinian sim card, otherwise they would have obtained many more. However, they threatened, I don' know how truthfully, to give me only two weeks, at which point I'd have to return to the border with details of the people I was staying with in the West Bank, and then they would reassess my application. As it is, I now have a mystery stamp in my passport which says 'Palestinian Authority Only'. What makes the Israelis think they can grant permission to go into the only area of this country that they supposedly have no control over, thereby potentially restricting my movements to only the West Bank is truly bizarre. Such a bizarre contradiction is typical of this place. Still, I am glad to be in, eating Keneffe and drinking lots of minty tea in Balata camp in fine and wonderous Nablus, where the mountains around it remind me of the Jebel Qasioun of Damascus, and the old city is reminiscent of Aleppo. Three months and counting...