Spending Free time in Hebron, Palestine :Do you like shisha, eating and hanging out with family and friends? If you do then Hebron is the right place for you.
Hebron is a concervative city, which means that people are very family-oriented. This means that if you´re staying in a host family you´re probably lucky. The families often live near each other in the same building; cousins, siblings and grandparents next to each other. This means a lot of shared family meals and events. Prepare to eat loads of macluba, a huge rice-and-chicken dish cooked to share with a large group of people.
Sometimes you however want to go outside of the house and explore the city. This is pretty obvious, but the Hebron night-life doesn´t include bars. Instead, the beloved nigh-time hobby for the locals is smoking shisha – a lot of it. People gather in nice coffeeshops meant for this specific activity for hours. While smoking you also enjoy beveriges such as Arabic coffee or fresh juice.
What comes to food, Hebron is definetely not a culinaristic capital in the Middle East. However, you can find I couple of nice restaurants that offer menus with far more variety from the everyday falafel and hummus. These restaurants can often be found in the rooftops so you can enjoy the view while eating. And smoking shisha of course.
If you´re into sports, the city offers many gyms of different price ranges. The gyms have separated schedules for women and men – women usually go from the morning to afternoon and men go in the evening. Many of them have saunas, aerobic classes and some of them even swimming pools. For thse who love shopping the city has a surprisingly big variety of shops for finding new clothing from abayas and hijabs to the Western-style fashion.
As a student of the Excellence Center I have had great opportunities in spending time with the locals and experience and see amazing things while not on class. I´ve attended field trips to different cities and places such as the Fawwal refugee camp, an olive farm in the countryside and gotten to know different organizations working for human rights. But mostly I have spent my free-time over dinners, barbeques and parties with the locals. Once you settle in the city you can be sure that you will be invited to all kinds of events – even weddings of people you hardly know – the locals make sure you won´t get bored.
