ليبتون. Leeptune. Or Lipton. However you prefer.

I won’t try to hide the fact that upon my arrival to Beit Sahour I purchased a box of the yellow label straight away. Call it a cushion; landing gear to settle me into Palestine. Spot of milk, and my first night in the Middle East felt like any other.

That said, you can’t drown a feeling of foreignness in tea while walking across the dusty roads of an unfamiliar city at 7am (unless you’ve got a thermos, which I don’t). Almost every citizen of Palestine whom I’ve met so far has been extremely friendly and approachable, but I can feel the eyes on me as I shamble through the neighborhoods near my apartment.

So I don’t yet “fit in.” But someone else I deeply respect didn't, either.

All the same, these protracted glances from my neighbors are far easier to take than the unending gaze of security and passport control back at Ben-Gurion. I don’t think my experience was all that abnormal, but with my lack of food and sleep I might’ve looked less than sincere while addressing the guards’ questions as to what I planned to do in Israel once we all parted company. And a story is harder to spin when you know your interlocutor is expecting the spin.

So of course I had a much easier time chatting to Jamil, the taxi driver who got me from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Early in the morning, passing through the checkpoint from Israeli to Palestinian territory, you can see the workers living in the latter shuffle across the border to work in the former. I saw them with Jamil.

Once we reached Bethlehem I stepped out of his flatcar, had a tour around the PNN office and went home to sleep for a number of hours that would be embarrassing to write down.

Tomorrow I go to work.