there's just no way to write about arabs without coming off as a rascist snobby bitch.

Yesterday we drove up north and passed places called Baqa Al-Gharbiyye, pronounced "back-a al- jab-ee-yeah" and Umm Al- Fahm, pronounced "Um, let's fuckem".

We visited our dear arab friends who have just moved to Nazareth Elite. Yes, that's not the low down commoner's Nazareth, its the posh elite part. It's 80% Jewish up there but they think highly of themselves and rightly so. They are the best kind of people.

My friend took me off to Al-Tabune to buy some delicious rotisserie chicken on onions on bread for the rest of the people who had gathered at her house. Insider knowledge is everything. On the way she took me through the area where she grew up, which is worlds and worlds apart from the place I grew up even though we were born only 3 months apart. Her hood is an arab area and it shows. If you've ever been anywhere arab you will know what I'm talking about. Its a different level of affluence and a different mentality and different things are beautiful to their eyes. I saw large sparse shops which sell pastries (good pastries). I saw small packed shops full of chinese toys. I saw beggars and women beggars and child beggars. I saw cars packed with teenagers windows rolled down, arab pop music blaring out. Which I know about because I listen to sama-fm and it hasn't even launched yet. That's how cosmopolitan I am.

Their idea of xmas decorations just wouldn't fly back home. Plastic, plastic, and flashing plastic. And yet you feel the pulse of the place, very much alive and happening. The people in the areas we drove through are poorer than we are. Their priorities are different. But if an inflatable chinese-looking santa makes their xmas, who am I to judge?

We came to my friend's road and she told me "when I was growing up, we all lived down there: cousins, uncles, the works. I come from a very small family. Only 150."

I might even get one of those chinese santas. Ho ho ho.