'You're staying in Bethlehem for the next three nights,' the tour guide announced. 'From what I've heard, as I'm not allowed to go there because I'm Jewish, it's a boring city with very little to do, especially at night.'
I raised my eyebrows in surprise, skeptical. I hadn't been in Israel for long, but long enough to question the tour guide. He had quite a few opinions I didn't agree with at all. I wondered if he'd be right about Bethlehem. It's a weird thing to hear a tour guide be so negative about a place you're staying in. I was used to getting recommendations, but I'd never heard a guide flat-out say that there's nothing to do just before you enter a new city where you're going to spend three nights. Call it boring even. So I braced myself and prepared for the worst. I'd only spend three nights in the Palestinian Territories, and though three boring nights is nothing to look forward to, I told myself I'd be fine. I had my book and a notepad: enough to keep me entertained for three boring nights.

Right after our tour guide's uplifting announcement, we joined the little traffic jam at Checkpoint 300. Getting through the West Bank Barrier already proved a tedious task, But the minute we actually entered the Palestinian Territories, I started to seriously doubt the tour guide's words. Enormous murals covered the Palestinian side of the wall. A larger than life Donald Trump peered through a crack, the colors of Palestine were everywhere. My heart skipped a beat; I love me some political street art. Mere seconds later, I spotted an original Banksy and I just knew I was going to like this place.

That night, I tagged along with half of my tour group for a tour of Jerusalem by night. We spent the next morning at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. I was starting to wonder why the tour guide had made a point of labeling Bethlehem as boring when we'd spend very little time there anyway. It wasn't until the afternoon that we got to explore Bethlehem by ourselves. Most people in the tour group to go with some other tour guide to see some places of biblical significance. I decided to join them for a little while, as their first stop would be the Nativity Church, built in the exact location where Jesus was born. Despite having no connection to Christianity whatsoever, I had to visit this church.

The Nativity Church was being restored, with scaffolding hiding most of the interior. The parts that weren't covered were decorated with so many baubles and other stuff that it made me dizzy. I was glad when I entered the cavern to the place where Jesus entered this world. The cavern is bare and basic, not special at all if you had no idea what happened there once upon a time. Still I'd recommend a visit. What happened on that very spot according to the Bible is still influencing the lives of billions of people every single day. Maybe it's just me, but I think that's not boring at all.

Okay, I know there are a lot of people who would call the Nativity Church boring. But that's not all Bethlehem has to offer. When I left the church, I was almost literally bouncing with excitement for my next little adventure: I was going to look at the art on the West Bank Barrier with a Frysian couple from the tour group, with whom I became friends thanks to a shared interest in things that the tour guide didn't want us to see. We walked back to the West Bank Barrier and approached it from Manger Street, taking our time to enjoy the streets of the old city center.
The West Bank Barrier itself was an absolute highlight for me. Palestinians came up to us to tell their story and we saw the side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the tour guide tried to keep from us. Even if you don't care about politics, it's a great place to spend a few hours. The art is top notch and if you want to, you can hire spray cans and leave your own mark on the wall. And of course, there's the Walled Off Hotel for the dedicated Banksy fans among us.


We still had quite some time left when we returned to the streets of Old Town Bethlehem. Walking those streets is another thing some people may find boring, but I loved it. This part of town is so picturesque and full of character that I would've snapped shots of every piece of pavement if the sun and shadows hadn't ruined the lighting. For me personally, it was also fun to wander the streets of Bethlehem because a former co-worker of mine used to live there. 'I wonder if she's been here. Or here. Or here,' I found myself thinking.
My Frysian friends and I found ourselves on a rooftop terrace, where we had some drinks before we ended the day at the KFC with the best view a fast food chain could possibly have. I'd already enjoyed Bethlehem way more than I'd initially expected, and still had one night left in the town.


The next morning we left Bethlehem once again, this time for a visit to the citadel of Masada, Ein Gedi and the Dead Sea. We returned late in the afternoon and for the first time, I felt a little bored. My friends and I went to the market, but all the stalls were cleared out already. We then went back to our rooftop terrace, which was closed for some mysterious reason. In search of a new terrace, I mistook a Jesus museum for a restaurant, but I like to pretend that never happened. In the end, we settled for a place on Manger Square, right next to the mosque, which almost blew my eardrums out with its call to prayer. Honestly though, I loved being there and watching life happen on the Square while my friends and I talked about just about everything. We ended our day, and our stay in Bethlehem, on another rooftop terrace with a view of the entire city.

Looking back on my time in Bethlehem, I can't say I was ever truly bored. I actually get a bit annoyed when I think about the tour guide saying there's nothing to do there. It is simply not true. Bethlehem is a place you need to explore on your own. You have to put some effort in. And the more effort you put in, the more Bethlehem will have to offer you. So don't let old men put you off. Go out and explore!

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With swift movements, my hairdresser started cutting off about 30 centimeters of my hair. It was a spontaneous idea, born the minute she picked up a few strands to examine my curls. I immediately agreed to her plan. Every time I looked in the mirror, my hair reminded me of the shitty chapters of my life that I wanted to leave behind for good.

Since late 2015, I've worn my hair long. Very long, usually till halfway down my back. I think I had a grand total of three haircuts between then and now, and I always stuck to the same hairstyle. My hair was long when I went through a serious break-up, my hair was long when I was more or less forced to quit college, my hair was long when I was in therapy for my inferiority complex. And it was long when I started hating blogging for becoming overly commercialized.
Somehow all these negative experiences and feelings became entangled in my long curly hair. My hair represented every trauma I wanted to leave behind. Instead, I was confronted with them every time I looked in the mirror. Eventually, I started avoiding reflective surfaces, especially when my parents were traveling in Canada and I was too busy keeping the house habitable. Those were some strange weeks. My body was busy, but my mind sat idly in the corner. I spent most of those days slowly making a plan for the future. I didn't blog so I wouldn't get distracted. Neither did I write or read much. Pretty soon I was focused on getting ready for university. And as the pieces of the puzzle of this new time in my life were presented to me, I decided I don't want to be a blogger. I want to be a storyteller, and this blog will be my medium. The minute I came to this conclusion was the minute I felt like I could finally chase my dreams and make them come true at university.
Yet on the rare occasions when I saw my own reflection again, I was reminded of the unhappy, failed blogger who'd dropped out of college. I'd fall back into a gloomy pit of destructive thoughts. The past swallowed me whole whenever I looked in a mirror. I knew I could not let that keep happening. I had to make a change. And that's why I decided to cut my hair off. So I could let my life begin again at university without constantly being reminded of the past.

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In a few seconds, my long hair was gone. A few minutes later, I had a short, wavy bob. I couldn't help but smile when I saw myself in the mirror.
My hairdresser showed me the ponytail she'd just cut off. 'It's really heavy,' she said as she handed me my hair. It weighed way more than I expected, as if it really was saturated with all the pain, all the hurt and all my demons from the past few years. I grinned as my hairdresser dumped it all in the bin. 'You're free.'
'I'm free,' I said too. Free to start over, free to begin again. Finally. I'm ready to turn the page and start the next chapter. Will you join me?

One of the main to go for group travel to join on my trip to Israel was that everything would be planned out and confirmed already. You get some time to explore by yourself here and there, but visits to museums and transportation to the next city are all taken care of. So every morning in the Middle East, I'd look at the travel program I'd gotten and know what's up - until we hit Jerusalem. As it turns out, the travel organization had given out two different programs, with some significant differences between them. One stated we'd get half a day to ourselves to explore Jerusalem, the other said this would happen in Bethlehem. A quick vote decided we'd spend that afternoon in Bethlehem. I quietly cheered: this meant that I could go look at the street art on the West Bank Barrier!


The West Bank Barrier, under construction since 2000 by Israel, is a hideous concrete structure that spans 708 kilometers, separating the Palestinian West Bank from Israel. It's also known as the Separation Wall, Security Fence or Wall of Apartheid. The wall legendary in the street art world, partially because of how much space it offers, mainly because Banksy left some clear political statements on it. After seeing his work framed at exhibitions in Antwerp and Amsterdam I was dying to see Banksy's art in the wild. My tour guide, a very anti-Palestine man, completely lost his temper when he heard me say I was excited to go to the Barrier for the art.
'Do you even know why that wall was built?!' he basically yelled at me. I admitted that I didn't. As it turns out, the Israelis say that they built a concrete barrier to protect themselves from Muslim suicide bombers. The Palestinians, however, see it as racial segregation. They're vocal about it, and one way to show how they feel about the situation is through art on the very thing that symbolizes the problems in the region. It's this combination of art and politics that drew me to the West Bank Barrier while the rest of the tour group went to visit churches and biblical places as usual.


After a very brief, more or less obligatory visit to the Church of the Nativity with the entire group, I set out for the wall with the friends I'd made in the group, a young Frisian couple. We walked through the old city and soon saw the first signs of Banksy's visit in the shape of some relatively small stencils depicting children playing with bombs and toys made of barbed wire. One of these stencils happened to be on the corner of the street our hotel was on. It was a nice warm-up for what was to come, though we decided to take a little detour to one of Banksy's works on the wall of the Palestinian Heritage Center on Manger Street. Here, a huge white dove in a bulletproof vest offers an olive branch while trapped in a sniper's crosshairs. My Frisian friends hadn't seen it yet, so I showed them the mural and explained how it was made. In terms of artistry and message, it was one of my favorite pieces of the day.

Once we'd taken enough pictures to last us a lifetime, we left for the wall for real now. We approached it from Manger Street, then Hebron Road, where we were greeted by concrete blocks with slogans in crude spray painted letters on them. For a second I was scared. Up until that moment, I hadn't really thought about safety much, as Bethlehem was so calm and the people so friendly. But the concrete blocks and enormous watch towers sent shivers down my spine. What if walking too close to the barrier would be viewed as a threat by the Israeli army? At the same time, my mind registered the details and size of the enormous murals and I realized those were a sign of safety: if anyone approaching the wall would be seen as a threat, there would be no art there.


We walked straight up to the barrier, down an alley were not many tourists seemed to come. I was in street art heaven. I snapped picture after picture and eventually even climbed up on the base to slap one of my own stickers on the West Bank Barrier. It was so different from all the biblical places I'd visited with the group. It was beautiful in a painful way. It made me want to change the world in ways I can't, because I simply don't have that kind of political power. All I can do is talk and write about Palestine, just like most Palestinians can only paint on this awful wall to let their voices be heard.


"Make hummus, not walls" seems to be the slogan of the Palestinians, though they also don't shy away from calling the West Bank an 'outdoor prison' on the endless concrete. There are official plaques with information, but you'll learn far more about the situation in Palestine and the way Palestinians experience it by looking at the graffiti. The 'ugly' tags are voices shouting the opinions of those who experienced oppression, the beautiful murals are well-written pleas for peace and justice. There was a huge piece depicting Messi shooting a football through barbed wire, as Argentine canceling a match with Israel prior to the World Cup was seen as a positive thing on this side of the wall. There's a mirror, showing us we're all people, no matter our background, culture and religion.


The paint fills every inch of the concrete here with countless Palestinian flags, the words "Free Palestine" and the ever-present "Make hummus, not walls". Of course there are original Banksy pieces too, but though they were what drew me to the wall in the first place, the piece that hit me hardest was a huge portrait of Razan, a Palestinian girl who volunteered as a nurse/paramedic but won't ever treat another patient again: She was shot by the Israeli army while she was treating a patient close to the border in Gaza last June. The Dutch media has remained eerily silent on this story...


Though the situation is grave, the colorful murals lifted my spirits while I walked along the West Bank Barrier. Yet the art wasn't the only interesting thing on this walk. Soon Palestinians came up to us to tell us about life on the West Bank. The man attending to the small shop full of Banksy merchandise went out of his way to explain the Messi and Razan paintings. He pointed details out and handed us a ladder so we could take better pictures. Another man came up to us and, in an attempt to get us to buy a drink from his stall out of pity, told us he had fairly recently gotten out of prison. He'd killed a man: after his innocent father had died in a tear gas attack from the Israeli army, he went berserk and left the Israelis with one soldier less in their ranks. Though I can't vouch for this particular story, it was still shocking to hear, because this is the harsh reality for Palestinians on the West Bank as well as in Gaza. It's an insight like this, meeting locals and talking to them, that made the whole experience even more special.


After our conversations with the locals, we continued walking along the wall until we reached Banksy's Walled Off Hotel. I didn't go inside, because the wall intrigued me more. Sadly, the street art was quite low-quality here. Right next to the Walled Off Hotel, shops have popped up where you can hire spray cans and stencils. This has resulted into layer upon layer of rip-off miniature Banksies and generic images like superhero logos and even Taylor Swift's album cover for Reputation. The latter appalled me. To me, the West Bank Barrier shows we didn't learn from Berlin: It's a place to think about the way we as humans treat one another, not a place to stan your favorite artist. I also wonder how Banksy, who is known for his anti-capitalistic views, feels about his stencils being rented out as a fun activity for tourists, helping them leave their mark on this wall with no thought behind it whatsoever.


At that moment, just as I was getting fed-up with the commercialization of art and political statements on the West Bank Barrier, we decided to turn back and go for a drink in the old city. We could have walked on for much longer, all the way up to Checkpoint 300, but I think that would have become overwhelming. There's so much to see that you don't really take it in anymore after the first couple of hundred meters. I could've spent days looking at all the art, but we had a trip to the Dead Sea planned the next day. I fully enjoyed my time at the wall though, weird as that may sound considering the political situation it symbolizes. The thing is, this afternoon in the shadows of the West Bank Barrier gave me a better insight into politics and life on the West Bank. Without this visit, I only would've seen the Israeli side of this conflict's story. If you're looking for the Palestinian side, this is the place to go: you'll see it told in the beautiful and raw language of street art.

I never planned on writing this post. I'd be too political, too much religion thrown into it, too many controversial opinions shared. Israel is a conversation anyway and I never wanted to make anyone feel Lost in Translation doesn't welcome them for having certain opinions. It's the internet, so I rather stayed away from complicated matters. But looking back on my time in Israel, I realized I absolutely had to write about Jerusalem and the way our visit was organized there. This will be no fun storytime, no post full of recommendations, but my honest opinion on the way a Jewish tour guide steered us away from opinions that weren't the same as his.

I'd like to tell you that my arrival in Jerusalem made quite the impression on me, but I can't. In fact, I don't even remember first entering the city. I was dozing off in the bus, only half-awake at best. My first view of the city was the famous on from postcards and travel brochures: we got off the bus at the viewpoint on the Mount of Olives. The city looked beautiful in all its vastness, but the first detail I noticed in this massive urban sprawl was a huge golden dome.
I expected our tour guide to tell us all about the impressive sight in front of us, but being most interested in the golden dome, I first took some pictures of it while he told about all the other building we saw. Then I took some pictures of other people. Then they took some pictures of me. And when all that was done, I still hadn't heard anything about the golden dome. Later that day, in my hotel room, I learned that I'd been looking at the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest place in Islam. A mosque our Jewish tour guide told us very little about. Even if he did tell us, his story was so short that I completely missed it while taking pictures, at most 10 meters away from the group...


When all the pictures were taken, we walked down the Mount of Olives, slipping and sliding on a sloped street. I was wondering when we'd hear something about the role of Islam in the history of Jerusalem. I'd always heard how important Israel was to three major religions. Now that I was finally there, I saw only two represented: we visited a Jewish cemetery, two churches, the garden of Gethsemane... and not a single place where Islam was the most important religion. Sure, our tour guide mentioned when and where Muslims had lived in Jerusalem, but I felt like we focused a bit too much on Judaism and Christianity.


Don't get me wrong though. I enjoyed my brief visit to all the major sights. The garden of Gethsemane was beautiful and I'd bombard you with pictures if they weren't full of Italian tourists. The church in the garden, where Jesus apparently sweated blood, had a pretty cool facade, the Lion's Gate made me feel like a 16-year-old Latin student again and hearing about the Biblical significance of all these places was very interesting. I don't want to build my life on what that book tells me, but it's awesome to walk down the Via Dolorosa understanding why it's such an important street to so many people around the world (in case you're not Christian: Jesus dragged his cross down that street).


We walked through endless streets and a souk. Then, when I was daydreaming for a bit, we found ourselves at a gate to the Western Wall, where we had to open our bags and show everything inside to the security guards. This is usually done by X-ray, but the X-ray machine was on 'Sabbath mode', fancy for 'it is turned off because it's Saturday.' After a very aggressive French lady told me not to take any pictures, I walked up to the Western Wall and prayed. I'm more of a messed-up Buddhist than a Jew, but I believe every sacred place is a good place to pray (told you this post would have more serious opinions than my average ramblings).


After lunch, I once again found myself wondering about the Muslims who'd left their mark on Jerusalem. I saw countless pretty streets and had a lot of fun, but my curiosity kept nagging. At the end of the day, I felt like everything Islamic was being neglected and ignored by the people who'd organized this trip.

That night at Jaffa Gate, I heard my tour guide rant and complain about Muslims. It shouldn't have surprised me after his radical stance on the situation on the Golan Heights. It did explain why he didn't tell us much about Islam in Israel.
When we got on the bus to Bethlehem, where our Jewish tour guide wasn't allowed to stay the night, he told us as little about Palestine as possible. The way he described it, Bethlehem was the most boring place in the world. The West Bank Barrier, separating Palestine from Israel like a Berlin Wall on steroids, was barely acknowledged.


The more time passed, the angrier this situation made me. In my humble opinion, you can't ignore an entire religion in a place like Jerusalem, but we did. You can't just go to the Jewish and Christian landmarks, but we did. You can't remain silent on the problems in Palestine, but we did. You can't refuse to look at all the sides of the story, but we did. I didn't want to gloss over the situation in Palestine, but with a tour guide who kept us away from things he didn't agree with, it wasn't easy to learn more about the other side of Jerusalem and the West Bank Barrier.


That night, our bus driver took us on a tour of Jerusalem. Suliman, a practicing Muslim, showed us the side of the city I'd been longing for. We saw the Arab quarter and the Damascus Gate. We were told about mosques and other important places. Sadly, no everyone in our group decided to tag along. I feel like those who didn't come, never saw the full picture of Jerusalem. The same happened the next day, when I visited the Palestinian side of the West Bank Barrier with two others. My parents always taught me to stay true to my own opinion, an opinion based on stories from both sides. It was simply impossible to do so by staying with the tour guide and group all the time.

Where am I going with all this? To the point where I ask you to do the same thing I did if you ever go to Israel: don't allow a tour guide to spoonfeed you propaganda. Go and see all parts of Jerusalem. Talk to a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim. Go see the West Bank Barrier. But don't be that person who refuses to see that Islam has made Jerusalem to what it is too.

The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs has nice little maps of every country in the world on its website. They're color-coded to show you how dangerous it is to travel to a country. I never looked at the map of Israel before I went there. Had I done so, I would have seen a bright red strip of land near the Syrian border. "Don't go to Golan Heights,' our caring ministry tells us. Now can you guess where I went when I was in Israel in June? Yup, that's right. I went to the Golan Heights.

I was pretty nervous when we drove towards the Syrian border. I'd never heard of Golan before, but our tour guide filled us in. The Golan Heights is a Syrian region, occupied by Israel. It's been that way for decades now and recently Iran felt the need to make some threats to get Israel to give up the place. Heavy ammunition is in place at all times. According to our tour guide, it's safe because of the dispute: no one would dare to fire first, out of fear of escalating the conflict. So Golan is a safe and fun place, where you can hear the bombs explode when the war gods play their games in Syria. Great, awesome, why were we going there again?


Half of me was quite scared, but the other half of me saw this as an adventure. World's most well-known warzone was just around the corner! My excitement disappeared the second I spotted an army helicopter. Around the same time, we passed an army base that looked abandoned.
'They're all out in the field, on patrol,' our tour guide, a former army guy himself, told us. I did not see that as a good sign. There were no tanks and army vehicles in sight, but knowing they were out and about was unsettling.

Our bus stopped near the summit of Mt. Bental, a dormant volcano close to the current Israeli-Syrian border. It was a quiet day on the other side of the high fences separating one country from the other, with no bombs falling from the sky and no smoke billowing over the Syrian plains. That calmed me down, though I did get very confused when I reached the actual summit by foot. In my mind, we were visiting a calm mountain in the middle of nowhere. In reality, Mt. Bental was a full-fledged tourist trap with a coffee house, fancy sculptures and a souvenir shop. Not exactly what I'd expected. It felt a bit surreal, even more so when I took a step back and watched my tour group stare at the yellow war-torn fields of Syria the same way you'd look at a mentally challenged monkey at the zoom; it feels wrong to stare, but you can't look away because it's strangely interesting.
'Weird how we use war and someone else's misery as a tourist attraction,' I remarked.
'But don't you think war is big business?' one of the older men from the group asked me.
I considered that for a moment. I tried to think of all the weaponry, ammunition, vehicles and people involved in this one war, then added the tourism money from Mt. Bental to that. Our bus had been of a dozen buses to visit Golan at that moment. It was insane. I had to agree with the man.
'Not just any big business, the biggest business,' he said. In the meantime, the next group of tourists had arrived to have a look at Syria's misery.


After that short conversation, I felt a little uncomfortable exploring the rest of Mt. Bental's summit. If you were able to forget about its location and the bright red color of the area on the Ministry's map, you could have some real fun there. Mt. Bental was a stronghold in the Yom Kippur War and its bunkers are still intact. You can explore them on your own if you have a flashlight and the guts to walk into a dark tunnel on the edge of an actual war zone. It's also cool to see the UN officers on duty there at work, but it's also a grim reminder of the whole situation. These guys were okay with me taking pictures of them, I guess because it offered them a little distraction from endlessly staring at a similar place on the Syrian side of the border and the rare care that drove past a quarry.


Well within the hour, I'd seen pretty much everything there was to see. Even though the trip to the Golan Heights had seemed safe enough all that time, I felt a wave of relief wash over me as we left the area. I'd like to recommend the place to you, but I won't. I visited Mt. Bental on June 15th, when it was relatively calm in the wider region. Our guide happened to live in Golan, so he knew what he was doing. If he hadn't been there, I never even would have thought about getting so close to the Syrian border. And if I'd get the chance to visit today, I'd turn the offer down. Back in June, only Iran was ready to shake things up. Over the past weekend, however, both Israel and Syria have been preparing to do damage, with missiles reportedly landing in Syria already.
Apart from the safety risks, people visiting Mt. Bental seem to forget they're visiting land that Israel violently took from Syria, visiting that place to look at the pain and misery of innocent civilians living in the hell of war. So I'm going to end this post by saying something I usually never say in my travel posts: Please, don't go to Golan.