What’s the big deal, you know? And it’s true. Clearly, in their eyes, of course we can. One of the women is asking if we can pay it, not if we want to. We either pay the 150 or we call the police. This goes on for another 10 minutes, and we’ve gotten basically no where. They did, and the translation mediation began. A handful of women stopped to listen in on the argument. Even on this side street where we were parked, people were walking this way and that. What is this, these two bills? Do you see the meter?! In between our failed attempts to explain why we’d given him that much, he’s asking us if we want him to call the police so they can sort it out. Immediately, after all the good-natured chit chat and feeling of universal brotherhood with this man, we had hit a wall, and we had only to pull ourselves out of the wreckage to see that it was bad, real bad. So Micah handed him two of those plastic 20-Shek notes.
That became clear when Micah asked our brewmistress friend back in Taybeh how much to pay the man for the ride. We realized we weren’t in a fabled service taxi. In the brokenest of Englishes, he told us, after Micah asked, that we could pay whatever we wanted, if we wanted. Then we were back in Ramallah and after he parallel parked, the meter had ticked all the way over 150. He hadn’t had one since the drive up the mountain and given that he smoked three in that 30-minute span, I wondered how he had made it this whole time without.
#Lyrics waiting for moshiach shalom hanoch driver
Then there was another stop so the driver could get another pack of cigs for himself. And back on the road we joked about youth and being old, about Obama, about Bush, or we were just laughing because we really didn’t understand who was saying what, and what about. Thirty feet away a dry and wavy hill of beige grass crackled and suddenly erupted into flame. There was a pit stop on the edge of village. We finally got back in the cab and started heading back toward Ramallah, and this return trip would prove to take even longer than the first. “Drink the Revolution,” it reads, though its unclear against whom or what or which people this revolution is directed. Word of mouth is the way of business here. An old Jordanian law, which for some reason still holds influence in the territories, says that one cannot openly advertise for alcoholic beverages. And in Ramallah and the surrounding towns, there’s a different set of issues. Even so, she was able to rattle off a long list of bars and pubs in the Holy City that serve this Palestinian brew. And to go the couple dozen kilometers into Israel proper is day-long endeavor for these people. It’s basically an impossibility, she said, to get a box of anything with “MADE IN PALESTINE” stamped on its side into America. Despite the fact that the family who started the brewery is just a bunch of ex-pats, the U.S. Taybeh is sold in the territories, in Israel, in France and Germany and they’re working on Asia. After the video, the woman walked us around to the various tanks and machines and we sampled some of the goods. Amid the colorful stacked boxes of lagers and ales, the young woman who’d opened the door, sat us down to watch a quick video about how Taybeh was founded. The face became a body, and a body with keys no less, and soon enough we were inside the Taybeh Brewery for a private tour. “Are you looking for the brewery?” the face said in perfect English.
Suddenly, a voice from a face on a balcony. I walked around looking for a soul or an entrance or something. Or, we found a building with a big painting of a beer bottle on it. We would agree on a price later, the driver seemed to agree to then. Who would have guessed? Anyway, the meter in that thing was steadily churning and bubbling up, but we thought somehow that it didn’t matter. We didn’t know this yet, but a service taxi is something different than a taxi taxi. Take the taxi to the brewery for about 8 NIS. Find a service taxi near the center of the city. Back in Jerusalem, I called the brewery to ask the best way to get from there to Taybeh. We were heading uphill and away from Ramallah in a taxi. “But she knew we were coming, right?” we thought with a big dose of dread. The Lonely Planet-listed 15 kilometers had already turned to 20 and the time from 3:30 to just beyond 4. Every 50 meters the road had a speed hump or was torn up.
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