Ramallah

I’m in Ramallah, Palestine right now where I’ll be teaching for about a week.

03/02/2008

I arrived in the Tel-Aviv airport yesterday night. Of course the flights were delayed and my luggage was lost. In the airport after I said I’d like the stamp on a seperate paper because I travel in the middle-east, I was told to go to a seperate waiting area until someone would pick me up for questioning. The actual questioning went pretty quick though, it was 3 in the morning and everyone was a bit tired.

A taxi driver picked me up and after driving through a couple of checkpoints we arrived in Ramallah, where I will stay for the next 8 days. It took us a while to find the hotel, and after we found it we couldn’t find the entrance. The hotel was on the 5th floor of some kind of shopping complex, but there were no lights and the whole front was closed. After walking around the building a couple of times trying to find some kind of entrance, we finally found a tiny bell. It took another 5 minutes until someone came and opened.
Today I went to the conservatory where I’ll teach, the national conservatory of music which has departments in Ramallah, Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

The atmosphere was tensed, because yesterday many people where killed during airstrikes in the Ghaza Strip. Everyone is a bit down and concerned about the development of the situation.
Tonight there is a memorial concert for one of the students here who died during a car-crash and right now I’m sitting in the concert hall during the soundcheck. I met one of the percussionists here that I’m going to work with over the next week.

03/03/2008

Finally I got my luggage. I couldn’t have it delivered here because I’m in Palestinian territory. The airport sent it to Jerusalem to a friend of one of the people here. It arrived last evening, but it took another day to get it over here. Nice to have my toothbrush back.

Some of the students didn’t show up today because it’s not so relaxed to pass the checkpoints now, there are shootings and lots of controls.

I gave a masterclass to the percussion teachers, both very nice and great players. We also started discussing the new curriculum for percussion students of the conservatory, which is one of main reasons I’m here.
I talked to a friend in Jordan today, he had a funny story. He’s a percussionist but has a dayjob in a bank. He had moved to Dubai to work there, but after a while they asked him to stop playing music because of the damage to his reputation as a banker. That’s when he went straight back to Amman. What a weird world.

03/06/2008

Yesterday and today I went to Bethlehem and Jerusalem to teach. After 8 students of a religious jewish school were killed during an attack 2 days before, I thought the checkpoints and roads would be closed, but they weren’t. The overall atmosphere is tensed, the situation really messed up.

It was interesting to meet the teachers and students of the different branches and I had heard many good things about Jerusalem which indeed is very beautiful.