What Do You Mean, No Bus?

Wadi Musa -> Ma'an -> Amman, Jordan

This morning we got up nice and early to see the highlight of the Petra National Park: the Monastery! In the interest of time, I convinced poor Philip to take a donkey up the mountain. He may never forgive me! But it really was beautiful up there, wrapped to the ears in our new kaffiya, taking pictures, chatting with a young Belgian photographer who was waiting for a second day for the perfect light.

Then we walked back down, passing Miriam on her way back up, and had just enough time to see the highlights of the Roman City before we hoofed it back up to the entrance so we'd make it on to the JETT bus by 4 o'clock. But when we got there, we discovered that there was no JETT bus today. The morning bus down from Amman couldn't make it, because the Shobak road was still closed, so there was no bus to take us back up to Amman. By this time, it was too late to find a public bus back to Amman, either. Instead, the bus parking lot manager offered to drive us to Ma'an, where we could catch a bus to Amman. We agreed.

Now, while I (and many other Peace Corps Volunteers and other expats who live more than 4km from the so-called "Fortress America") think that the American embassy tends to be overly-cautious about their warnings, I do lend some credence to their warning about Ma'an. Not only is it known for its "radical Islamist leanings," a term I'm always suspicious of, but also for its anti-governmental riots: bread riots, Tawjihi riots.... Even my archaeologist friend, who's well known and well respected in Wadi Musa and the south of Jordan, recommends that non-Arab women going to Ma'an cover their hair. And when we got to the bus station in Ma'an, the parking lot manager recommended that Philip let me do the talking, and that I stick to my Bedouin Arabic. And it seems to have been successful, because when we finally arrived in Amman, the young guys who'd been sitting next to us even stood around in the pouring rain to help us find a cab at a reasonable price. So I guess the embassy was wrong again.

Snowed In!

or, Someone Will Know (of) You Wherever You Go in Jordan!

Wadi Musa, Jordan

I've mentioned before how small a place Jordan is, and how closely people are connected to each other here. It was something we sometimes complained about in Peace Corps, how you could never go anywhere without being seen by someone who would know who you were and report back to your site village. On the other hand, sometimes it can be an advantage to be part of the network. This was a night for acknowledging those ties.

It started with a cup of tea last night with the owner of our hotel, Adel. Something slipped out about my being an honorary HaraHsheh, the name of the family in my Peace Corps village, which revealed that the hotelier and I were "cousins," as he was also from the Bani Hassan Tribe. He regaled us with some fabulous, likely exaggerated, tales of how being related to his uncle, alias Abu Mas'ab al-Zarqawi, had both helped and hindered him in recent years. I've heard similar stories before, and I understand what it must be like to know that the most infamous terrorist in Iraq is from your tribe. After all, it's become my tribe, too!

Then, this evening, Philip and I were walking down for another cup of tea with Adel, and I saw this Spanish guy I know coming down from upstairs. "Hey, I know you!" I exclaimed. It's Jose, who's friends with Abby and a number of other people I know in Amman. And he had quite a tale of woe, which he shared over a cup of tea with Adel, some other Spaniards and a Pollack travelling with Jose. They'd been in Petra for the day, and were on their way back to Amman when it started to snow. The higher they went, the more snowy and slippery it got. In Jordan, as is usually the case in south-central Pennsylvania where I grew up, they don't start plowing until the snow is almost finished falling. So when Jose saw an ambulance leading cars in the other direction, he decided to follow it back to Wadi Musa, and ended up at our hotel.

After they'd told their story, Jose and friends went down to the pub in the Petra Palace for a much-needed beer, but they left a note with the hotelier for a girl named Miriam who was also staying at the hotel. Philip and I stuck around to accept an offer of a cup of tea from our hotelier. When it came out, and I put in two spoons of sugar, Adel started to laugh: "You really are Bani Hassan!" But then he had to get up and take a look at the hotel's boiler, leaving Philip and I alone with our tea when the door opened and a girl walked in. The immediate words out of my mouth were, "You must be Miriam!" immediately followed by, "Wait! I know you!" We had met a week earlier while out with some mutual friends. She's an Aussie, volunteering at a Palestinian refugee camp, and staying with a friend who works for the UN. After she'd showered, the three of us followed the Spaniards down to the pub.

And what do you know, but the Swiss couple were also at the pub! Small world.

Neither Rain nor Wind nor....

Petra, Jordan

Our weather luck changed today. In fact, John and Ann called over breakfast to let us know that the park had been temporarily closed for fear of flash flooding. As we've been saying in Tareef for weeks, the weather's been great for biking and sightseeing this winter, but bad for Jordan, so I have to be grateful for the rain. Still, the timing could hardly have been worse for Philip, who was sure that winter would be over by the time he arrived in Jordan!

Nevertheless, as we lingered over breakfast, hoping the weather would change, another couple sat down at the breakfast table and starting talking to each other in a language I know and love ... Schwyyzerduutsch! A lovely middle-aged couple from Winterthur, Switzerland, they even gave us a ride down into the park when it had opened.

I'm running out of new things to see in a single day in Petra. Most of the things I'd most like to see now require advanced planning, more than one day, and a guide. Still, it's fun to go through the park with different people and see it through different eyes. Petra with Josh, Petra with Auntie Viv, Petra with my parents, Petra with Chris Tuttle, and Petra with Philip are very different experiences. Josh wants to pet every stray animal he comes across. Auntie Viv and I climbed every mountain in the place. I started out that way with my parents, and consequently, Mom couldn't walk uphill on the second day, and we rode donkeys, camels and horses all the way home. Going with Chris Tuttle was just fascinating because he knows every stone and every Bedouin in the camp by name and history. It was fun, then, to explore with Philip and recall all the things that I had learned on the expert tour this past summer.

Plus, Philip is a shopper. We hit almost every stand in the park, buying necklaces and such. I ended up with some very nice additions to my growing jewelry collection. As Philip said, "Maryah! You're finally turning into a girl!"

We also found ourselves with a little girl, Fawzia, leading us around the park and trying to play tour guide, which was cute for awhile, and then got annoying, and then she asked for money for a tour we neither asked for nor needed! In retrospect, I think perhaps Auntie Viv and I were also shadowed by Fawzia and a friend of hers, but three years ago they didn't ask us for money!

King's Highway Tour

Criss-Crossing the Backbone of Jordan

Amman -> Madaba -> the Dead Sea -> Kerak -> Wadi Musa & Petra, Jordan

Despite short notice, a full work schedule, and the threat of snow, I was determined that Philip get to see the highlights of Jordan in his brief stay here. As luck would have it, my co-worker John also had a friend, Ann, visiting from London, and had hired a driver to take us down the King's Highway to Madaba, the Dead Sea, Kerak and Wadi Musa, the town at the entrance of Petra National Park. Philip and I decided to tag along, despite my corporate client's warnings that it was supposed to snow and be miserable all weekend long. Philip agreed, it would be silly to come all this way and not even get a brief, rainy glimpse of Petra!

So we left early, in order to arrive in Madaba as St. George's Church opened in the morning. The Greek Orthodox church features a Sixth Century mosaic map of the Classical World, one of the oldest and most accurate maps of the Trans-Jordan region, though the part of the map depicting Egypt is quite skewed, so that the Nile River runs perpendicular and not parallel to the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. Archaeologists interpret this to mean that the mosaic makers were probably from the Trans-Jordan, and were only able to construct the Egyptian section of the map from texts and word of mouth.

As it turned out, the weather was simply beautiful today, warm and sunny and perfect for a trip down the Dead Sea, and along the backbone of Jordan, through the mountains that formed the edge of the Crusader kingdoms. Back in the period of the film "Kingdom of Heaven," the European Crusaders had built a series of castles along the mountain range beyond the Jordan River: Aqaba, Wu'ayra (in Petra National Park), Kerak (which features prominently in the film), Shobak, Ajlun, Krak de Chevaliers and others. They were built at such intervals that signal fires could be lit at one castle at night, and seen at the next one north and south. We visited one of the best preserved of those, Kerak Castle. One of the fun things about archaeological sites in Jordan is that they're poorly labeled (and likely poorly understood as well), so you mostly get to make things up as you go along. Sadly, I couldn't locate what Auntie Viv and I thought was probably the kitchens, but we had some fun wandering around and wondering.

After lunch, we went out to the Desert Highway and hurried down to Wadi Musa so that we could make it to Petra By Night ... which was rather more fun when I came with my parents and there were about fifty people, instead of a couple hundred. Being one of the New Seven Wonders of the World has made Petra an awfully crowded place! On the other hand, I could tell my Arabic was better, because I understood what the rababah player was singing!

Philip, darling!!

Amman, Jordan

He'd been saying for weeks that he would come and visit me in Jordan if he could find an affordable ticket, and for weeks I'd been thinking, 'Yeah, right!' And then, on Sunday, I get a message on Facebook: "I'm coming on Wednesday!" I thought, 'Which Wednesday? This Wednesday? In February? He couldn't mean this week!' But he did. Still, I didn't believe it until I ran upstairs on my break for my last class of Block One, saw Philip step out of the cab, and had given him a great big hug.

As Philip's mother said, "I can never tell where in the world you and Maryah will end up next!" In fact, Philip's coming to Jordan from a rather interesting corner of the earth: South Korea! Clarian University, where he's studying at the moment, is piloting a new study abroad program to study Korean language in South Korea. Someone in the International Studies office must have known Philip, because they offered him a full scholarship to be their guinea pig, and of course he couldn't say no! Learn a new language? Of course! For free? Even better! And because he's enrolled in classes, he's also receiving a stipend from our friend Sec. Hilary Clinton under the G.I. Bill, which is how he can afford to come practice his Arabic in Jordan for ten days!

Those of us who flit about the globe in search of new languages and new adventures frequently have the problem of communicating those experiences to others. When we go back home, people tend to say, "How was it?" and all they expect in reply is, "Excellent!" When you start to extol the virtues of your host community, or tell the little anecdotes that so amuse you about the trip, their eyes glaze over and they become intensely interested in some spot on the opposite wall.... I'm lucky to have an extended family and a few friends, notably Phredd and my brother's late best friend Nathan, who truly are fascinated by every little story. So it's great when Philip comes to visit, because we can swap culture shock anecdotes and enjoy the telling as much as the hearing! Most of my expat friends here are like Phredd and Nate, though, so I knew they would love Philip, and he them. So I took Philip and my new roommate, Kitty, to one of my favorite expat hangouts, Books@Cafe, where we had a wonderful evening with Heba, Abby, some of Abby's friends, and eventually my third roommate Ryan and our mutual friend Lowen.

I only wish Meli had been able to come with the other Peace Corps Volunteers who are in town for a conference, or Emily, who's soaking up the high life in Geneva this weekend!

For His Mother

Amman, Jordan

It will come as no surprise to those of you who know me well to hear that I have stumbled into the GLBT community in Jordan. The longer I am here, the more I learn about what is actually a relatively flourishing Rainbow Coalition here in Jordan. Many of my favorite restaurants around town are under gay or lesbian management, and are therefore popular hangouts for Jordan's sexual minorities.

That's why I was very disappointed to hear today that the fabulous techno club I visited with my German friend and his boyfriend, RGB (reportedly short for "Real Gay Bar"), had to shut down recently. There was apparently an article published in a local newspaper about the gay community in Amman, which made RGB's owner's mother so nervous for his safety that she ended up in the hospital, and he decided to close the club.

So much for the idea of Philip and I going dancing there this weekend!

Thunder Thighs!

Dead Sea, Jordan

From Crossing the Dead Sea

I almost didn't go cycling with Tareef today, between last night's engagement party and that third glass of red wine, and the horrendous wind and ominous clouds in Amman. I knew, though, that if I could just make it down the street to meet the club at Safeway, I wouldn't regret it. I was right. The ride was beautiful, and not too hard, from the south end of the Dead Sea about two thirds of the way north (i.e. downwind, which is totally the way to go!).

And I got some nice compliments from people who would know.
First there was Sawsan, who I consider one of the best of the amateur cyclists. She came up behind me pedaling away furiously on a relatively flat stretch (it's all about momentum for the next hill!). "Shift up," she says. "I can't," I say. "I'm already on 8th gear." I have to repeat myself, but then she says, "Wow! Your legs are really strong!" And suddenly I had an image of my best friend Phredd, with a backpack out on the Appalachian Trail, shouting, "Thunder thighs!" (I don't think this ever happened, but it was a vivid image, just the kind of thing we would've done on the trail!)

Sometime later, Ammar came up beside me. He's one of the true professionals, and the one who most frequently passes out advice to riders. He wanted to point out that I had made noticeable progress in the months I've been riding with Tareef. This was really nice to hear because, while that was part of the point of joining, it's sometimes hard to tell oneself. As I've told Aktham more than once, sometimes I feel like I'm in worse shape from week to week.

I'd also like to thank my two heros of the day.
The first was Anas, another of the professionals in the club. On the two occasions, last week and this week, that the Tareef buses drove past the hot springs along the Dead Sea Highway, both sides of the road were mobbed with young men in their tighty-whiteys, and I was really not looking forward to riding past it. Then, when I saw the sign for the hot springs, I realized that I was riding alone, and couldn't see anyone else back to the next curve behind me. But much to my relief, as I came up to the edge of the mobs of people, I saw Anis coming back the other way, and then watched him turn around and wait for me. He escorted me past the hot springs, reaffirming what I love about Tareef: they not only arrange the trips, but they are really great about making sure everything goes well for everyone.
Ahmed came to my rescue not once, but twice! First, when I ran over a nail and popped the inner tube in my rear tire, he was the one who stopped and called Nader for me to get a new bike, and Ahmed and Hatem kept me company until Nader arrived. That was in the first 7km. Then, though he probably doesn't realize it, he came to my rescue again in the last kilometer. There I was, a little ways ahead of Ahmed, minding my own business, when a powder blue sedan full of shabaab (young men) pulled up alongside me, shouting something I didn't understand in Arabic. I ignored them, so they stopped on the shoulder ahead of me, clearly hoping I'd take the narrow little bit of pavement left to their right side. Instead, I swerved out into the street to pass them (uphill, no less!). So, of course, they pull off the shoulder and, as they drive past, several hands reach out the window and thwack me. Fortunately, they didn't stop again, but I knew I was never going to make it the rest of the way up the hill. So I stopped, and waited for Ahmed to catch up and walk up the rest of the hill with me, to the outlook that's becoming our regular stopping-point for our Dead Sea excursions.

As luck would have it, we also encountered Sam and Ester and her parents at the Dead Sea.

Sam and Ester's Engagement Party

Amman, Jordan

From Sam and Ester's Engagement Party

A few days ago, Sam calls me up and says, "Ester really, really wants you to come to our engagement party Thursday." I've trained myself never to refuse a reasonable invitation, so I said I'd come. Plus, I really like Sam and Ester.

Sam is the initially creepy guy that Megan and friends met at the gym. It's this act he likes to put on, playing on the worst stereotypes of Arab youth that he learned in his years in Canada, for anyone he encounters who speaks English. In the end, though, he's one of the most fun people we've met in Amman.

Ester was renting a room at Sam's parents house when I first met her at a salsa party at the British Embassy. That was a memorable night, ending in Ester pushing Sam into the pool, and the three of us and my roommate being summarily ejected from the embassy with Sam wearing my roommate's shirt (which still hasn't been returned!). Only one of many adventures we've shared. And now, five months later, Sam and Ester are engaged.

The engagement party was great, a casual family affair with an amazing lamb dinner and much laughter, including the usual shocked guffaws over my village Arabic. I had a great time. But as soon as I arrived, I realized at least part of the reason why Ester "really, really" wanted me to come: Her parents had flown in from Switzerland. Ester is Czeckoslovakian (literally! Czech father, Slovak mother), but her widowed mother now lives in Switzerland with a very nice Swiss widow. He speaks a little English, and like all Swiss, is much better at English than he lets on, but Ester's mother speaks no English. I, however, speak English, German, and Arabic.

It made me think of my cousin Gwen. One day, in my dorm room at Goucher College, I get this phone call from Germany. It's my cousin, who's living with her fiance in Berlin. "I want to ask you to be a witness in my wedding. It has to be someone who speaks English and German, and the only person I could think of was you!" I understood what she meant, of course. After all, I'd just had a fabulous summer staying with her and her then-boyfriend, now-husband in their apartment in Berlin, and already got along extremely well with her soon-to-be in-laws. I will also never forget the first time I met Gwen's mother-in-law, who had been in the US for 4 weeks with only her husband and sons to talk to. As soon as we were introduced, she got this huge smile on her face: "You're the girl that speaks German!"

This is becoming a trend for me, actually, translating weddings. If I'm not careful, I'll start to develop a complex: Always a translator, never a bride!

Arabs on IM

Amman, Jordan

Stereotypes about Arabs are pervasive and often over-blown, as we well know, but an example of one such stereotype today really bothered me.

There's a very nice Egyptian man who serves us our food in the cafeteria at Al-Quds Community College, where Bell Amman is located. In a testament to how bad unemployment is here and/or how little worth an Arab university degree is accorded, he has a BA in American Literature, speaks fantastic English (not perfect, but better than many of the foreign PhD students I tutored at Indiana University), and is working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, making sandwiches and fries and serving the meal of the day. He's a very nice young man, and has been especially helpful for my co-workers and the many instructors from the SAE Institute for film studies here, all of them imported to Jordan for their expertise, but without any Arabic language skills (yet! I'm working on that!).

Today, I came to lunch while he was on his lunch break, but he got up from his table to come and speak to me. "I got Yahoo Messenger," he said, "to be able to talk to interesting people. But every time I tell an American girl that I'm an Arab, they immediately sign off! Why is that?" And I felt awful, because I knew exactly what he meant, and worse, I knew that I would probably do the same thing. All I could say was that Arab men have a reputation on the Internet as being creepy. "Not all Arabs!" protested my Egyptian friend. Which, of course, I recognize, and I said so.

Still, it makes me reconsider how I want to respond to Arab men on the Internet in the future.

On Biking

Mount Nebo, Madaba, Jordan

From Mount Nebo to Wadi Mujib

Much to my surprise, though perhaps not surprisingly given both my nature and nurture, I've got a competitive streak and a need for speed!

I mean, with the exception of that first trip in Wadi Musa, I've been very pleased to find that I'm usually ahead of the middle of the pack. And I have a practical reason for passing people along the way: I know that my reaction time is not very fast, and I'm afraid that if I get stuck behind someone else, I'll wipe us both out. Even moreso on a precipitous downhill like the road down from Mount Nebo. At least four people did have wipe-outs, and while that may have been because there were more people with less experience than usual, it still made me want to get ahead of anyone I got too close to. And yet, every time I pass someone, I hear Dad's Goose and Maverick impression in the back of my head....

"I've got a neeeeeed ... a neeeeeed ... for speeeeeed!"

Maybe it has something to do with Dad's mantra I grew up with on the sailboat: Any two vessels on a similar tack is a race. Ergo, any two bikes going to the same destination is a race.

In fact, I learned a lot more than just sailing from Dad. I learned a surprising amount about bikes! On this trip and the last one, I found myself handing out all kinds of instruction and advice on bikes. Your seat should be high enough that your knee is straight when the pedal's at its lowest point; you get more power that way. When you start to go uphill, downshift so that you're never pedaling either too hard or too fast; use your mechanical advantage. Your helmet's on backwards; it's more aerodynamic the other way around. It was maybe the sixth time I'd said, "It's all physics!" in just four hours that I realized how much I sounded like my father. So, you see, Dad, I really was listening to you all these years, even when I was rolling my eyes!

From Mount Nebo to Wadi Mujib

New Roommate

Amman, Jordan

I got a new roommate today. Her name's Kitty, she's from Manhattan, and she's studying Arabic at Qasid Institute, the same place I studied this past summer. I'm only just getting to know her, but it's happening fast. She's quite a talker, though I suspect that's probably because she's nervous. It's not her first trip to the Middle East by far. She lived a significant amount of time in Bahrain, and interned in Saudi Arabia for awhile. But it is her first time in Jordan. So I'm just thinking, What would Ken and Connie do? and trying to be a good host mother/host sister.

Reminiscences of Lynn

or, They Actually Built That Ridiculous Bus Station!

Municipality Jebel Bani Hamida, Madaba, Jordan

From Return to Jebel Bani Hamida

This week's trip with Tareef was a special one for me, for the beauty of the route, and the nostalgia. This was a route I'd taken by bus almost half a dozen times to visit a Peace Corps friend, Lynn. In fact, the whole route was reminiscent of Peace Corps, as we started in the village of Mshaggar, which was one of our training villages, drove through the center of Madaba past the bus stop for my training village of Ma'in, and ended up in Jebel Bani Hamida where Lynn and Cassie lived as Peace Corps Volunteers.

We actually started in the village of Mshaggar, north of Madaba, where 5 of our J7 Peace Corps Trainees lived in Spring 2004. We Ma'een Trainees went to visit them once, which was interesting to me because the terrain is so different. Ma'een is built on a hilltop, whereas Mshaggar is almost completely flat. It made a good place to start biking, a nice little warm-up to get us going.

Then we regrouped and rode right through the middle of Madaba, which was not as bad as I had anticipated. My memories of Madaba usually involve lots of little boys throwing stones at tourists and other foreigners, and my friend Chris who lives there now says not much has changed. A few boys did run at us as if they were going to push us over, but for the most part it was quite tame, thanks to the Tareef guys announcing in native-speaker Arabic to all and sundry that we were not tourists.

After that, the ride was pretty sedate, a few gentle ups and downs, until we got to this giant hill in Lib. Now, I'd come this way a number of times, at least a dozen, to visit my friend Lynn, to take my Auntie Viv to visit Lynn and climb Maccharaeus, and to take my parents to climb Maccharaeus. I knew that the big hill in Lib was coming, and I wasn't looking forward to it. It wasn't until after I'd walked half way up the hill at Lib, and then ridden a good distance more, that I remembered that the rest of the trip went up, up, up. Nader wasn't kidding when he said that the second 25km were much harder than the first 25km. And a couple km after Lib, it wasn't as fun. It seemed important to stop before it wasn't fun at all anymore. So I rode the bus the rest of the way.

But there was one thing I still wanted to see more than anything on this trip. I wanted to know what had happened with the Jebel Bani Hamida bus station project. I like to tell this story as an example of one of the strengths of the Peace Corps. When Lynn first came to Jdaideh, one of 5 villages in the municipality of Jebel Bani Hamida, she went around asking village elders, "If I could find some money to do a big project, what do you need?" and they immediately said, "A bus station!"
"Nonsense," said Lynn. "I ride the bus out to the village. You have a perfectly good bus, it runs frequently from Madaba, and it goes to every house in the village. What else do you need?" And she bargained them down, as they had probably expected, to a women's center. A few months later, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) came to Jebel Bani Hamida and asked the village elders what the US could build for them. "A bus station!" they said. And USAID agreed. They arranged for the five villages to share one bus out to the site of the proposed bus station, and then the local buses would have new routes out to the homes in the surrounding villages. It seemed like a good idea, a bus station around which a local economy might develop, with local farmers and shepherds selling their goods to each other, saving them the 45 minute bus ride into Madaba proper. In reality, however, I was witness to several fistfights over this new bus route, which didn't run frequently enough, and put young people from rival families on the same bus. Noses were bloodied, windows were broken.... It could get quite scary. By the time Lynn left Jordan, she told me that the five villages had gone back to the old bus routes. And yet, when we arrived on the mountaintop this afternoon, there was the bus station! Whether it will lead to the kind of economic development that USAID intended remains to be seen.