We stop off before going to the university in Birzeit village to visit Mustafa, an English major like Kifah. Kifah - by the way - is supposed to live with Mustafa but was turned back at the checkpoint and consequently is staying with me until he can get home.
The view (left) from their house of the surrounding hills is beautiful. As the house is on the side of a hill, you can see the valley down below, dotted with groves of olive trees. From this point you can also see Jalazon Refugee Camp and part of Beit El settlement. We spent many an evening here staring out at the hills, eating barbequed food, and playing music on the guitar and Palestinian 'Aoud (a kind of lute).
It's 10:00am but Mustafa is still asleep. There's not a whole lot to do when you are one of only a few hundred who can make it to university.
We wake Mustafa and plug a cigarette into him (as demonstrated right). "How's Kifah?" he asks, grinning. We borrow a CD player for a get-together tonight in Ramallah that he was invited to go to but isn't going to be able to come to.
Everyone is cursing the situation. A couple of people attack a settler car and a whole community of several tens of thousands of people is held hostage in an attempt to convince them it was their fault. For the fifth time this year.
On to the university to try to get some work done. The phone lines are crap, and putting the first few pages and images from these diary entries takes ages.
The get-together still goes ahead as it had already been planned before the closure and it's too late to cancel it. It's subdued and the fifteen people that do turn up, as opposed to the forty or fifty that would have turned up, pass the time quietly.
Topics of discussion range from the obvious situation outside, to the songs of Ziad Rahbani. The music varies from this to Tracey Chapman, to Fairuz's Lil Beirut to Survivor's Eye of the Tiger.
Ahmed turns up, just out of a brief Palestinian Authority detention. A "mistake". He's okay (pictured wiping eye on left), smiling and sitting next to Kifah. A cultural studies lecturer jokes about how no one understands the language used by Palestinian academic Edward Said. Some of the shebab from the student communist party start practicing a sketch in the living room which gets our attention.
We also have Fatah supporters, independents, disinteresteds and Jerusalem Kit Kats with us. No factionalism here. One international describes the stomach bug he caught during a work trip to Bangkok. Marwan Tarazi, director of the Computer Center, and I talk about the Web, a different kind of disease.
Kim mentions how the international students have exams and that she is facing an organisational nightmare. It's impossible not to think of the closure and we return to discussing it time and time again. In other words, it is impossible to relax. We're living in a prison.