Jumping Jordanian

I’ve just come back from Jordan – what a beautiful country! It is something like the 10th poorest country in terms of its water resources, but that sure makes for some beautiful desert.

One of my fellow “villa”-mates, Emil from Denmark, and I started off on an early Tuesday morning last week, taking a “ser-VICE” (pronounced like in French, with the accent on the last syllable and the “I” like “ee”) to the bus station. We haggled for a good price and then waited an hour for more passengers to come. Such is life. We got to Amman and then got on a bus to Aqaba, which is the farthest point south in Jordan. We didn’t want to go there though, so we got off at a random checkpoint before Aqaba in order to hitchhike to Wadi Rum where Lawrence of Arabia based his rebellion. It was amazingly beautiful, peaceful, tranquil, isolated, and serene. It was a desert, just like how one would imagine a desert, but rather than large dunes, it had huge mountainous outcroppings that abruptly jutted out from the surrounding sands. We camped out under the stars for two nights – I haven’t seen so many stars in my entire life. There wasn’t a city around us for at least 50 miles – not a real city anyways, only small Bedouin villages without many lights to ruin the sky. It was also a new moon and so the sky was darker than usual. There was almost total silence except for the wind rustling through the nearby tent flaps. During the day, we toured around the desert in a modified Toyota Land Cruiser from the 1970s. It was rickety and felt like it would fall apart at any minute, but it held together long enough to get us into the deep desert and back. We saw wild camels, went rock climbing, and I did some front flips down the sand dunes. Fun stuff, but I got sand in my camera – currently at the repair shoppe.

After Wadi Rum, the history of which is told in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which I didn’t finish due to its excessively flowery, early 20th century British style, we continued on to Petra and Wadi Moussa, the closest city to the ruins. Petra was a big disappointment after the magnificence of Wadi Rum, yet it was still an amazing mountainous and desertified region. I also really enjoyed seeing the façade from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (one of my favorite movies). We hiked all day long throughout the ravines, which had cubes carved out of its sides in order to house the ancient Nabataean civilization. We attended (sort of) a Bedouin wedding with one of Emil’s mom’s associates that night, but it was really only sitting and eating with a bunch of men – no ceremony or music unfortunately. I guess that was one of the other nights.

The next morning (Friday by now), we took a bus back to Amman and then another to the Dead Sea and a place called Wadi Mujib. Wadi, by the way, means Valley in Arabic. So all these are “valleys”, but valley is certainly a non-standard term here. It could be anything from a shallow and desolate crack between two plateaus or a green oasis with a bustling brook or stream running through it. So Wadi Mujib was the latter and we hiked up the difficult trail along the stream that led to a big waterfall. There were some serious rock obstacles along the way and not all voyagers could complete the entire trek.

So we floated back down the river after the trek and then hopped over the freeway to bathe in the Dead Sea. All of our little cuts from the river trek stung so badly when we got into the 30% salinity water. Crazy salty! More than I remembered from my previous experience in Israel. We frolicked a bit, then covered ourselves with dead sea mud, dried in the sun, and then washed off in the nearby hot springs. Lovely time, but it was sooo hot. We didn’t have a place to stay that night, so we camped in a valley along the highway somewhere. Aka we put a couple towels on some sand in an inclining ravine between two mountains. We ate various canned foods: tuna, sardines, sweet corn (delish!), and olives. We finished the evening with a ½ of a pound cake each. We made a fire out of the little bit of kindling we could find and relaxed. Falling asleep was more difficult because the heat at 400m below sea level is quite suffocating. Somehow we did though, and woke up the next morning, re-hydrated with our lukewarm water, and hitched a ride back to Amman with a passing truck driver. We took 7 different vehicles on Saturday to get back to Damascus. In order: Truck to Amman, van to the bus station, car to a city near the border, taxi to the border station, another taxi to the Syrian bus station after we waited for my visa to come through (only 3 hours this time!), bus to Damascus bus terminal, and van to the Old City, where we walked the 5 blocks to our villa. Whew! We could’ve pushed it to 8 for the 5 blocks, but decided against it.

Heading to Lebanon on Thursday for 6 days, so expect another update in a little over a week.

Kitchen Kaboodle

I’ve been here over a week now and I will certainly fill-in many details about my life here over the coming weeks, I’ll share a small anecdote about cooking here, having just made my first attempt at cooking eggs, potatoes, and onions – generally a good gauge of how difficult things will be.

No: peeler or paring knife, scrambling bowl, frying pan, cutting board or surface.

Yes: dirty dishes (like years of dust and grime caked on), sauce pot (handmade out of aluminum by a 4 year old?), plastic stir-thingy, fork, plate/bowl, steel wool, 8-inch cutting knife.

I got to scrubbing and managed to clean a steep-rimmed, but still shallow glass cup to use for scrambling the eggs. The fork was being difficult and didn’t want to wisk the eggs into a fluff. Ok, no biggie, the eggs will be less fluffy than is ideal. Horror of horrors. Moving right along. I used the big knife to peel (slowly) and chop the potatoes and onions, using the plate/bowl as my perfectly ideal slippery surface – safety first. Cooked the onions and potatoes (45 minutes? Seriously? Yes.) and added the eggs, which each stuck to the bottom of my sauce pot like white on rice. 15 minutes later I had golden-y goodness in just over an hour. I worked harder for those two eggs than any other eggs I’ve ever eaten. Too long you say? Nay, I reply. It oriented me with the kitchen. I now know many of the quirks and hindrances of the facility, which I promptly reorganized and will be cleaning in the immediate future. I’m looking forward to my diet of eggs, pita, lentils, eggplant, and cucumber, possibly spiced w/pepper and cumin. I hope to come back looking like a Kenyan marathoner, complete with exposed ribs and a dark tan complexion. Unnecessary? Probably.

Perhaps a Turkey update next time. Perhaps.

Badlands Border Crossing

After almost two and a half months without posting anything on my blog (for a variety of reasons, two of the most significant being Spring Break 2009 and the end of the semester), I have decided to rekindle my relationship with the blogosphere and my loyal readers, however few you may be at this point. I will try to catch everyone up to this point over the next weeks, but unfortunately will not be uploading pictures. Blogger is blocked in Syria – oh yeah, I’m in Syria, but we’ll get to that in a bit – so I will be typing my blog postings in MS Word, then copying and pasting through the proxy server, which happens to move at 56k x 10-1,000,000,000,000,000,000 power. I am also adding “Syri-ack!” to the title page somewhere in commemoration of my new place of residence. Now that the format has been reestablished, we can reinitiate the updates and anecdotes. Pictures may come via Picassa links during blog posts or simply in August after I return to the States.

Let it begin:

I had decided in late 2008 to study Arabic in the Middle East after my semester abroad in Turkey. Which country though remained in question up until March or April of this year when my choices came down to Morocco, Syria, and Yemen. We all know (I hope) that Yemen is not currently the most hospitable destination for foreigners, even if it is one of the best places to study Arabic. OK, Yemen gone. Morocco and Syria both have good programs, but one was simply more expensive than the other. Can’t guess? Well, since you already know I’m in Syria, you’ve probably figured it out. Just to give you an idea of how cheap things are here: my rent for my room, utilities included, is $156; I can eat out for three meals a day (street food) for about $2, including chicken, ground beef, and/or cheese for two of those meals if I want. The third is falafel, which costs all of $0.50, so I could do $1.40/day if I wanted. Private Arabic lessons with a certified tutor with years of experience teaching Arabic will be the most expensive part of my 6 ½ weeks here at $10/hour.

I crossed the border between Turkey and Syria on June 11th, without receiving a visa from the Syrian Embassy in the US before I left the country spanning two continents. Syria requires that Americans (and ANY other nationalities?) obtain visas before coming to the country. I’m pretty sure that most other countries can just come and buy a visa at the border, but Americans are special because our last President named Syria as a member of “the Axis of Evil.” Anyways, I arrived without a visa and, as per many thoroughly researched forum websites, was told that I would have to wait – how long? Nobody knew. It all depended on how much of a threat I was in the eyes of the Damascene bureaucracy. After 4 ½ hours waiting in the long (football field?), hot (40 degrees Celsius? – I couldn’t spell fareinheight) marble-laden hallway, I was finally told that my visa had been ok’d and that I could now go to pay the whopping $16 price-tag. When compared with sending my passport back to the United States with a pre-paid envelope and money order (impossible to get in Turkey) so that the Syrian Embassy could send my passport back to Istanbul, all combined with paying $130 visa fee, 4+ hours at the border was well worth it.

I changed some Turkish Liras to Syrian Pounds (which are called Liras in Arabic…) and hitched a ride with an empty tour bus to Damascus. A/C on the tour bus, plus the lack of passengers was fantastic. I originally thought they were smuggling cigarettes or children or something, but then I realized that they weren’t when they had to go buy some (cigarettes!) at a local market. We arrived in Damascus at about 9pm and they dropped me off on the side of the freeway. A taxi rolled up about 2 seconds later and I was on my way to the Christian Quarter (hereon Bab Touma) of the Old City in Damascus. I met my teacher Basel at my now-favourite falafel shoppe and we went back to the “villa,” which certainly implies a certain elegance or wealth that has definitely lost its way here.

Arabic studying here I come!