Border crossing

So I am on this bus going from Amman to Israel, and as I hit the first Israeli checkpoint an Israeli soldier gets on the bus, and stares at the 9 Arabs for a moment, then points to me and calls me off the bus. That began a long ordeal where I was asked the standard questions about packing my bags myself, and if anyone gave me presents to take, and if I had been watching the bags the whole time . . . Keep in mind this is after I left the bus and was on my way in to a taxi to Jerusalem. It is not like I was getting on a bus, or a plane or anything. I had just gotten off.

My bags (only MY bags) were picked apart. Mostly they found my dirty laundry from Lebanon, my laptop which they all but disassembled and ran through the X-ray machine no less than 8 times, and my books, which they sorted, and from the amount of time they spent staring at them, I thought they planned on reading them. One guard asked me to explain to him what the philosophy of mathematics was. I cannot imagine what he was thinking.

Then there was this conversation really loud about 5 feet away from me between a security guard and what looked like his boss, that established that I knew Hebrew, I learned it here in Israel, and I had been to Lebanon.

Then this cute female guard came over to me and asked if I can think of any sentence or quote about love. Next week is the Jewish version of Valentine's day, and she was collecting sentences about it. Sadly I had little to contribute.

Then I was in a cab driven by a really friendly guy named "J" who explained to me that he was an Aramaic Turk whose father was expelled from Turkey after the Armenian massacres. I am not sure I fully understood everything he said.