There's a Popeyes, KFC, Pizza Hut on the street that runs by my house here. But there's also half-a-dozen open fields, golden with grass and limestone boulders, that seem misplaced among the bustling boulevard and monolithic apartments. Even more odd when a small herd of goat and sheep moved into the fields last week. In the mornings, through the window open, I hear their bells around their necks accenting the hum of traffic.

Yesterday the evening light was perfect for photography, so I went for a walk with my old film camera, intending to take a few pictures of the animals. The herd grazed in the field next to my house, and I sat and waited for them to move closer for a good shot. I guess the Bedouin shepherd saw me sitting there, watching his herd, so he came over to me holding a cup of tea. He approached wordlessly. His red-checkered keffiyah was faded from years under the sun, and his jacket and pants looked like second-hand fatigues. He regarded me through squinted eyes and leathery brow. When I spoke to him in Arabic, asking if I could come sit with him among his herd, he looked taken aback--me, the white guy with a ballcap and big camera, speaking to him in his language. But he answered my rough Arabic in his pure Bedouin dialect: "you are most welcome, come, come".

The tea was amazing. I think he brewed it with a special kind of herb or mint; he also put loads of sugar in it, so that didn't hurt.

The shepherd and I walked back towards his kettle in the field. I asked his name.
"Qassim".
"Qassim. I'm Matthew."
He nodded, "Matthew".
Some mischievous goats had moved in on Qassim's things, knocked over his tea kettle and some cups, and were licking them clean. They, too, liked the tea. Qassim made low grunting sounds towards the goats; they ignored him. Then he tossed a rock in their direction. They heeded the rock. He had an amazing arm, too, not hitting the animals but getting close enough to startle them.

So we sat among his herd, crouching at the low couch cushion that doubled as his table. The Holiday Inn towered over us, the grease from Pizza Hut wafting among the earthen smell of sheep.
"Where are you from", I asked.
"Balad as-shams" (country of the sun), traditional Arab for Greater Syria. He had taken his herd from southern Syria, through Jordan, and was making his way back up to Syria's fertile hills as the dry Jordanian summer came on.
"I like Amman, though, I want to stay. There are no problems here. No problems. Just peace."
He seemed fine with moving his herd through this city of three million, if only because Jordan is free of the political turmoil that shapes so much of life in all the neighboring countries.

I watched the largest goat, as tall and more regal than his mule, pick its way among the dry grass. A shined brass bell hung from its neck, and around its head a red ribbon. "Why does he have that?", I asked, pointing to the goat.
"He leads my herd."
I told him I thought he, the shepherd, was the leader.
"I do not lead them; I only show them where not to go. If that one does not walk, no animal walks. If that one walks, all follow."

He called the goat over, and it ambled up to us. It surprised me, the care he gave it, running his tanned hands through its fur, rubbing its neck and rump. The goat put its head in my crotch, like a dog asking for more love. I combed through its long hair, felt the coarseness like dried hay. Its square irises shined up at me.
"Does he have a name?"
Qassim didn't look up, rubbing dirt from the goat's curled horns.
"No name."

I wanted to ask Qassim about his life, what he did with the ancient rhythm of his days, why he chose to do sleep among animals. But then his cell phone rang. I listened to his crisp Syrian Arabic, the soft rounding of his words, and could only think his reality was made up of times and places that fit into no world. He brewed tea in the same way his father and his father before that had done, he carried a cell phone. He herded sheep through the highrises of Amman. He told me KFC was his favorite place to eat.

But before I could ask him about all this, he turned to me with a quizzical look.
"You...are Muslim?"
No one had ever put this question to me so sincerely. It was hard not to chuckle.
"No. I do not follow any religion", I half-lied. "You?"
"Yes". Silence. Qassim looked around at the quiet motion of his herd.

"I am Muslim, because I have all this." He swept his arms wide. "I love my life...and I think if you love all this too, you are with God." I nodded.

Several lambs wobbled through the herd. Qassim saw me looking at a black one.
"It was born yesterday, in that field." He pointed across the street, to the grass beside the Pizza Hut. I looked at the mother ripping grass from the ground, at its cowering lamb. Had the diners had watched its first gasping breath, its first pained step, as they chomped on pizza?

A crowd of German tourists were gathering in front of the Holiday Inn. They stood beside their monstrous tour bus, and held out digital cameras that gleamed in the sun. Qassim saw them and led his mule closer for a photo op. I snapped some pictures of him with the camera-armed crowd in the background. His tattered fatigues, faded keffiyah, sun-worn skin a quieter key than the crisply dressed Germans.

They eventually filed into their tour bus, and Qassim walked back to me, smiling.
"I have to go", I said. The sun was nearly down.
"I will be here if you come back."
"How long?" I asked.
"I don't know".
"Ok. Ma' as-salaam". I extended my hand to him. His palm was rough; his grip was gentle.
"Ma' as-salaam, my friend Matthew."
I turned and walked home.

The Saloon

Went to the barber shop today with my host brother Ziad. He just wanted a shave, didn't have a razor at home. It's cheaper just to get a 1JD trim than buy the do-it-yourself version.

We pull up. Looks like any old haircut place. Go inside, sit there and watch Ziad get a meticulous close-shave from an old Arab man with one of those old-fashioned straight razors. The guy the chair over was having his neck applied with what looked like tar. I think it was some sort of even more insidious Nair (cuz that stuff sucks to begin with).

Ziad finished, paid the man, and as we were walking out I figured what was odd about the gold English lettering on the window: "Saloon".

I started laughing. Ziad stared at me. "What?"

I asked "Do you know Clint Eastwood?"

"No".

"Well...nevermind".

Camels

An American girl was wearing a skirt at University today. I came out of class behind her, and watched, amused, as every single guy on campus watched her. Not those discreet side glances, but full on stares, like follow the skirt with the head and then turn completely around to watch the skirt sway off. And then the guys would turn to their group of friends and they'd all grin and sling out slang words in low voices. Jemel. Or Ghazel. I learned the other day that yes, they actually do refer to attractive women as camels and gazelles. It has something to do with the eyes.
Which if you think about it makes sense; camels and gazelles do have large, mesmerizing eyes--like most of the women, and men, here. And because of the hijab, ordinarily men only have a woman's eyes to fixate and salivate over. (I've been doing random counts of covered versus uncovered women on the streets during my daily taxi rides, and consistently find that 80 percent of women cover here--the actual figure is probably higher, because many women never leave the home). So I guess it's little wonder that when the pretty American blonde struts down University lane, baring her calves for all, men treat it as a spectacle. Because really it is.

To Westerners, I know, this scene comes off as bit misogynistic or objectifying of women. But my understanding of the thought here is that if a women shows her legs, or arms, or breasts, she intends them to be seen. Most women here, even the beautiful ones, don't get this kind of ogling.

I was talking with my Jordanian friend the other day, and we wandered on the topic of women in America. He told me, like every guy I meet here, the women in America must be very beautiful. I told him maybe, they certainly dress more provocatively, to which he replied "O, so they all must want boyfriends?" I wasn't sure if he was joking, but I guess it made me realize how rigid the gender binary of female modesty must be to a guy who sees most women covering their heads (because woman's hair is seen as sensual, a thing of beauty only revealed in private spaces).

Anyway, while men, and women, can stare and swoon all they want at one another (and guys do get long stares from lots of girls, though more discreetly), it's certainly frowned upon for unmarried men and women to show public physical affection. On campus, I've seen many a-touching couple accosted, either by fellow students or Administration. Because so much of social interaction here is about saving face, about honoring your tribe and your past, and producing an image that says "I am one of you, we can relate to one another on a basic, non-verbal level because we come from the same society." I tend to see the hijab as a manifestation of this traditional social desire to be a member of one community; the cover has little to do with being Muslim, though most tend to associate it with traditional Islam. For women in the Prophet's time wore their hair out, and it was not until three centuries after his death that reactionary Muslim scholars and leaders imposed the head covering. Most Muslims today claim that covering helps ensure people's duty to be modest to one another. Judging by the utter lack of promiscuity here (and I've been in some dingy bars here), I'd say the cover helps with this.

Side note: The concept of human rights is an entirely Western concept; in Islam, each person, regardless of creed or composition, has a duty to "enjoin mercy on one another [Sura 90]". What Americans refer to as human rights of freedom of worship, of speech, of employment and movement etc, people here frame as duties between Muslims and their non-Muslim brethren under Allah. Thus when one denies another of the right to worship, for example, he not abridging a human right but rather committing an un-Islamic action and must face Islamic, and not civil, inquiry. Likewise, people here follow their perceived Islamic duty of modesty toward one another. I don't intend to make any judgments on the merits of human rights and Islamic duties, and realize the hijab/niqab certainly offends many feminists/human rights activists.

That said, the whole modesty issue seems to be a one way street. Men here dress very provocatively, and wear shirts that look about two sizes too small for them. They rarely cover their arms, or heads, they never wear gloves, and in general talk louder, laugh louder, and generally carry on like third graders in a playground. The whole silly ordeal of the huge brawl between male students of opposing tribes last week evidences this.

On the cab ride home today, the driver and I both found ourselves staring at an extremely attractive, dark-haired woman walking down the street. I caught his eye and said "Jemel". He laughed at my slang Arabic, and then asked me what word we use in America. I told him the most popular is "hot" or "hottie", and he looked at bit let down. "hmm", he said, "I think Jemel is more beautiful".

The beach all sunny in Olympos. It wasn't sand, instead little sharp pebbles right up to the water, so it didn't exactly lend itself to frisbee. But the water was cool, clear, so swimming was in order.

A stream cut the beach into two sections. There was no bridge, and if you wanted to cross you had to ford across the stony bottom. The current was so strong it snapped the plastic connector on my flip-flops. Normally I wouldn't care but the pebbly beach kinda hurt to walk on, so at first I just hopped around on one foot until I sat/got in the water. That got old so I began looking for a way to fix the flip-flop, but I didn't see any duct tape. I did find an ancient leather sandal, half eaten by something or someone, and so I used that for the rest of the day. It was for the wrong foot.

Also, Colin and I were coming back from a little village, had just crossed the stream, and saw what we thought was a shirtless man sitting with his child. Walked closer and realized it was a woman, just sitting there completely naked with her kid. I'm all for nudity, it doesn't embarrass or fascinate me, but the local Turkish boys seemed to feel differently. They unabashedly orbited around the woman, just walking up and down the beach giggling. But the point of the nude woman: she later came up to my friend Colin and began speaking in German. Colin made confused hand gestures, mumbled something like "huh? wait, what?" while trying to look this woman in the eyes. She just kept pointing to herself, and then to Colin, and saying "child, child" ; I took it as a marriage proposal...and more. But eventually we figured out she wanted Colin, a strapping lad, to carry her kid across the strong stream. He did, and when he came back he told me "I can check that one off the to-do list".

Islands of Kekova. A guy working at our Pension in Olympus offered us a trip to his hometown in Kekova. He drove us there, hired a local fisherman to ferry us around the waterways, took us to an Old seaside castle--all for free. The place was paradise.

The azure water of the Mediterranean. Under the water is a sunken city from Hellenistic times.

A 13th Century Genovese castle above the Olympos Beach. A 21st Century Matthew atop the castle.

We felt an uncontrollable urge to climb a rock and then test how deep the water was....it was deep enough.

Below are a few pics from Cappadocia, a mountainous region in Central Turkey. My friend Collin and I spent a day riding around on the this little 125cc Honda scooter, exploring the crannies of the awesome rock formations ("fairy chimneys"). These pics were taken outside the town of Goreme.

The mushroom caps, the wizards hats, the wild rocks towers of Cappadocia, Turkey. The landscape felt like something out of Lord of the Rings, maybe a benevolent Mordor. It too was ringed by mountains on all sides, the strange rock formations created by pre-historic lava flows.

The windowed rocks of Cappadocia. Not sure when they were carved out, but they're ancient and abandoned now.

So the pics below are from Istanbul, the one above my favorite from the Hagia Sophia...more pics from the rest of Turkey in a bit

Park next to Topkapi Palace...tulips were in bloom

At Topkapi Palace, the "Circumcision Room" where all royal Ottoman men were...well you get the picture. Awesome mosaics




Vaulted main chamber of the Hagia Sophia; all below from Hagia Sophia






The Hagia Sophia in the background, rising like a spaceship


Twelve Days in Turkey

From the plane's window, the first thing that strikes you are Istanbul's pastel highrises. Sky blues and creamy yellows, off whites and cinammon browns. Then the precision of minarets resolve themselves against the maze of streets. Beyond them the Bosphorus shining with hundreds of ships. It's hard to fathom the scale of this city that spans two sides of two continents.

Our subway into the Old City sped past rows and rows of apartments and storefronts, all busy with the quiet industry of afternoon. It was Friday, yom al-jum'a, day of prayer, rest and cleaning. Laundry waved from balconies, each piece an inimitable sqaure of color. Towards the Old City, or Sultanahment, the skyline opened up and we saw the strait below. On our side, the European sector of Istanbul sprawled out, further separated by the Golden Horn waterway into the older southern half and the newer, chic northern half.
Our train stopped at the tip of the southern half. Collin and I walked out, backpacks on and necks crooning up. We were thirty yards from the walls of the Blue, or Sultan Ahmed, Mosque. I turned to Collin and said "I feel like a cheap little toy", which I guess is what its builders had in mind. Six marble minarets towered over us. Each had three ornate balconies, which I later read were build in succession for the sultans' wives. The walls were inlaid with Quranic verses and set off every forty feet by two-story arched entrance ways. We climbed up the steps of one, and into the Mosque's courtyard. The entire wall, probably one hundred yards by eighty, was tiled with polished, but faded, blue tiles (hence the Mosque's English name). At the tops of the inner walls were ornate golden scripts, from the Quran or naming the caliphs. Men in abayas were filing past us, removing their shoes at the main doors, and entering with bowed heads. We couldn't go inside because of their Friday prayers. From the way they ignored all the tourists snapping pictures of them, and their mosque, they seemed used to visitors. For me, it's hard to imagine going into a church service with hundreds of tourists taking your picture or crooning for a peek inside. But then again I've never been to service at the Blue Mosque.

So the interior of Sultan Ahmed was closed to us for now. But we weren't too stressed because the Haiga Sophia was the next block up. The Haiga Sophia, seen from its exterior, is less visually engaging and more worn than the Blue Mosque. I mean it is one thousand years older. It rises from the city like an eerie Byzantine spaceship. It had just closed for the day, but I got a chance a few days later to go inside, and my God...literally.

Can't say too much about the Haiga Sophia. The last time I felt that exhilarated was climbing Long's Peak. The place is mountainous, monumental, but the best parts were the intricacies. Like the pre-Islamic mosaics on the vaulted ceilings, sparkling next to Quranic calligraphy. Or ancient Greek characters carved into even older marble building slabs.

I spent five hours wandering through the Haiga Sophia. I didn't even see one balcony and the inner courtyards and residencies.

We stayed at old City Hostel, about a two minute walk from the Haiga Sophia and Blue mosque. It was simple, clean, complete with a rooftop bar that looked out on the Strait and the city's landmarks.

The Spice Bazaar, for me, captures Istanbul. It's a covered market; the outside is lined with hundreds of stalls selling everything from rye grass to tulip bulbs to garden tools. Inside, rows and rows of little shops, mostly specializing in every imaginable spice--cumin, paprika, this orange curry powder, giant chunks of sea salt...most shops have a sweets section too, and because I really wasn't looking to buy spices in bulk, I headed straight for the candy. Turkish delight (chewy, semi-sweet starchy blocks), candied peanuts, pistachio-filled truffles, dried apricots, brown sugar coated almonds...really paradise realized for the senses. The smell of spices, the color of the candy, the free samples from the shop vendors--it was like an authentic Turkish costco. My Arabic came in handy too, many of the shop owners knew a bit of Arabic, and the word for 'apricot' and 'chocolate' are the same in Turkish and Arabic; I was on a quest for apricot-filled truffles. Didn't find any in the end, but after hours of wandering through the Bazaar I came out with 5 pounds of food (mostly sweets); got most of them for really cheap (like $25 total) because I used my Arabic to whittle down the prices.

In America...

In America, there’s this man law that if you’re in a public bathroom stall, but you only have to pee, it’s ok to leave the door ajar/unlocked. I mean you’re only peeing, and your cash and prizes are safely pointed away from the general public [bathroom]. I think of it as a urinal with three walls. No need to lock a urinal.
I thought this man law to be global. Nope. The other day I stopped by the University bathroom with my Jordanian friend Mohammad. When I moseyed into the little stall, did the unzipping, Mohammad rushed up behind me to close the wide-open wooden door. I turned my head around, too late to protest or help him out, but met his eyes. He had this stupefied look, like I was about to eat an unwrapped snickers bar off the bathroom floor. When I finished my pee in solitary confinement, I came out and the guy at the sink next to me was smirking. My look to him said Sorry, I didn’t know about the lock-yourself-in rule. Mohammad was waiting for me outside the door, and I grinned bashfully at him. “Close the door even for number one, huh?”. He gave me that snickers-off-the-bathroom-floor look, and then I had to spend ten minutes explaining to him, in Arabic, the subtleties of numbers one and two.

^^^That's me, running up a hill, with the Dead Sea desert for a backdrop.

Last weekend I ran the Dead2Red Ultra Relay--a 242km run from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea. It's name should be the "Dead to really really Dead" relay. Haha, it sucked. But also amazing. Wierd how that works out sometimes.

I mean the whole idea of running from the lowest point on earth, up through the desert, and then back down to the shores of the Red Sea, just seems like someone trying to prove something. Something really absurd. And I guess absurd is the buzz word. Because when you're on the 200th kilometer, and you think you see the shimmering promise of the ocean on the horizon, only to run up a hill and realize, "hey, that's just a mirage", it's a bit hard not to question the rationale of the race.

But I did the thing, along with 300 other runners, and we're still here, still sore but also more the wiser. I mean at the very least I know I'm never going to do an "ultra-relay" again. The format of the race was simple--I took turns running, with 9 other team members, from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea. For a ten person team, like mine, that meant each person was theoritically responsible for a 24km chunk of the road. That's how it was supposed to go, and through the first half of the race we stuck to our system--one person runs 2km at time, then switches out with the next runner in the chase van. The 2 km sections meant each person ran for >10 min at time, giving us a chance to keep a high pace throughout. But of course towards the end some people were so exhausted they couldn't run anymore, so the rest of our team had to pick up the slack and run extra.

Some teams who actually cared about their results (we were doing it "for fun" ????) switched out every 100m. Sure, they went fast, but I remember driving by one of their vans about 20km in, and everyone in it already looked pissed about playing this game of musical chairs from hell.

I trained every day, months before the race, usually with daily 8km run. I thought myself in good shape, and I guess if the race were a long, slow run, I'd be fine.
But after my fifth or sixth leg, when the soreness set in, I started to realize the human body is not conditioned for ultra-relays: to run really fast, then stop immediately to sit in a van for 45 minutes, then get out again and run really fast, then go right back into the van without cooling down...
But the real challenge, it turns out, is trying to stay awake and motivated for 20 hours...

It's 3:12 A.M. Our van is stopped along the side of the road. The moon rising, a chunk of ice over the desert. Someone in the back seat mutters, "Are we in the Sahara?" Spilled out in every direction, sand dunes. I get out, slam the door, the sound gets lost in the empty horizon. The highway shoulder slopes down sharply into the desert, and I skid down the sand bank to pee. Someone shouts "Matt it's your turn!" and I scramble back up to wait for the oncoming runner. A minute later I am the runner. I feel only my pangs of breath, a million grains of sand sloshing in my shoes.

These photos are from Umm Qayys, also known as Gedara (site of Jesus' miracle of casting demons into swine). It's a series of Roman/Ottoman ruins that overlooks Tiberius Lake, or the Sea of Galilee. Pretty spectucular, though as you can see the weather didn't cooperate.

Habit-forming weeks

In my house here, my family has a maid in who lives with us: a young, petite Indonesian woman, can’t be much older than me, whose name I still haven’t figured out but rhymes with Teanie. Apparently she speaks Arabic, because the family talks with her, but that’s news to me. I’m still working on learning the family’s tumbling colloquial, haven’t really started to decipher slang Arabic from Indonesia. Our program director told me in the beginning to “avoid developing a relationship with the housekeeper, families here treat them differently than in the states.” I wasn’t sure what to make of her esoteric advice—so it’s probably not ok to ask the maid out to cocktails, but am I allowed to introduce myself? Or do I just start leaving dirty underwear and socks in the clothes hamper, and leave the housekeeper to figure out whose odd American garments these are, and where they go. Can I smile, can I say thank you?

But I quickly figured out what my director meant; imagine our family as a big vacuum cleaner—me and my brothers and the parents are the machine itself. But Teanie is the little plastic tube that stretches out and cleans hard to reach places, like the gunk in between sofa cushions, the debris under dressers. Very useful, yes, but not an integral, intimate part of the family. If that sounds cruel, I don’t mean to demean her or question her worth. It’s just here, she’s treated like what she is: a foreigner hired to tidy the house, to mop the floors, to follow the instructions of the house without question.
But she and I do communicate, usually through a complex system of points, head nods, ‘ehh?s’ and the colloquial for “want”, “tea” and “egg”. By this point, I’m beyond tired of eggs and tea; I just think it’s funny when I come in every morning for breakfast and there they are, waiting. Two dumb dogs just sitting there, happy you’re up.

Teanie makes every meal here. And every meal is homemade—no cereal for breakfast, no frozen lasagnas for dinner. It’s just good ol’ Arab homecooking—from the Indonesian housekeeper. I mean the recipes come are the family’s, like the soured creamy mensaf, the even creamier, olive oil-doused zatiri, and the reigning olive oil chug champion, botatos (French fries if you will). Yea, olive oil for breakfast, lunch, dinner, mouthwash, shampoo, etc etc. But Teanie’s interpretations of oil + other things are always zakee. My mom seeks me out after each meal to find out how it went over—and you have to say zakee at least three times to get across that, yes, it was in fact delicious. She’ll report to Teanie—‘the boy liked the food’ (they call me ‘the boy’ in Arabic here). Teanie just giggles, because as I learned one night a few weeks ago, she thinks I eat “like a cat” compared with the family. I mean I thought I could eat, but let’s just say for my family, Sesame Street is always brought to you by the letters E-A-T.

I’m starting to grow into the full time mess-minder deal. Not that I go out of my way to indulge in slobbishness, but I finally stopped trying to make my bed each morning after I would come back from the bathroom and find my bed re-made (admittedly in a less boyish way). That’s Teanie saying, nice try, kid. I don’t mind, although sometimes I make the mistake of leaving my Dr. Scholl’s shoe spray out, and find it nestled next to the Crisco in the kitchen.

Teanie sleeps on small cot in the kitchen. The other night I forgot that, and stumbled in at three am for some water. If she hadn’t seen a guy in just his green undies before, she has now. The next morning I walked back into my room from breakfast, and she was folding my socks. I looked at her, she looked at me, and I think she smiled. Just a little.

It's been raining for three days now. No patches of blue sky, just dark gray boulders of clouds. Sometimes the rain stops and everything gets really shiny, and the land looks so wet like it's been raining for a hundred days. But it doesn't take much water to saturate the rocky soil here, or to paint what were vacant lots of dirt a virile green. The grass comes out of nowhere, or the earth itself, and places I thought barren are now waving with shoots of life. I think the city's million stray cats are pissed though, because they're stuck under their garbage bins and porches, wherever it is that they live; in the days of rain I have seen only one small black cat scurrying into a garage. The rest are hidden, and wait for the sun.

The call to prayer is coming down now from the minarets, wailing like a tornado siren. It just started to hail.

The pics below are from Jabal Al-Qal'a (Citadel Mountain), the Roman amphitheater, and one of King Abdullah Mosque. The ruin is Hercules' Temple, which is situated on Jabal Al-Qal'a---people love to fly kites from there. Surrounding is the heart of Amman. My little digital camera wasn't made for landscapes, so sorry about the poor image quality.

More Petra Pics above. The second up is called the Monastery, my favorite place. The desert hills are outside Al-Shobak, the desert castle.

Children liked to sell cool rocks at Petra too.

Meeting a person

Met a local guy outside the police station today. He also happened to be guarding the station, and was toting a big gun. (We had to register with the police: give them fingerprints, photos, the like, to obtain our permanent residency cards—which are awesome, you get into any Jordanian tourist site basically for free). Anyway I was leaning against the station’s fence, waiting for the university bus to come back, and he walked right toward me. Uh oh, I thought, what did I do. But then he smiled, offered me some water. Something about his face just relaxed me. He didn’t speak much English so we kinda skidded through a conversation in Arabic—lots of him standing there expectantly and me searching for the right word(s). Did well enough to learn he was only a year older than me, from a small mountain town to the north, works six days in a row then goes home for a five day break. During an awkward pause I asked if he liked movies (al-cinema), his face lit up and he verily nodded “Avatar, Avatar”. That seems to be a jackpot topic here; every Jordanian loves to tell me about Avatar’s merits. I still haven’t seen it, and told him that, and he looked confounded. “Next day, we go with me”. I smiled, said I would enjoy that, and was about to take down his cell number when another guard called him inside. My bus pulled up then, I had to get on. I didn’t see him come out until the bus was pulling away—I turned and waved, and he waved right back.

Visit to a Castle and Petra (later that day…)

Around highway km 257, the desert starts to gather relief and vegetation. The bus arrived at an old crusader castle called Al-Shubak (“the place” in Arabic). Pretty spectacular, a fortress about the size of two football field atop a steep, rocky hill. The Crusaders built a series of five or so impressive outposts to thwart Persian invasions from the east, toward Jerusalem; this particular castle offered a stunning view of the mountains and Jordan valley below, and from the way sounds of birds, donkeys carried up to it for miles, it was easy to understand the castle’s robust defensive position. It even had a tunnel some 130 feet deep into the rock that offered the Crusaders a secret back door escape. When boys make-believe impregnable fortresses, this is what they conjure—something so solid and so imposing that its keepers feel invincible. But the Crusaders proved very mortal, and Arabs took over the castle. Inscribed in the stone walls of Al-Shubak were Qur’anic verses from the 13th century, when soldiers from the Caliphate manned the fort. Centuries later, Bedouin inhabited the castle, the ancient ceilings still black with their campfire smoke. Now, the Jordanian Tourist Police guard the castle, and you can get a stuffed camel at the giftshop for 6JD.
Leaving the castle, we came on a field of snow (the highlands got several feet the week before) and of course picked a snowball fight with our professors and guide. Ali, Dr. Najeh, and Ahmad had a particularly epic one-on-one-on-one fight. Ali and Ahmad are employees for CIEE (my study abroad program), both young and really outgoing jokesters. Dr. Najeh is head of Arabic language instruction at the University of Jordan—a pretty big deal—and also really down-to-earth with his students. Anyway, it was funny seeing these proud Arab guys in keffiyas chunking snow at each other, like they’re ten. I guess it doesn’t matter what culture you’re from, when you see snow you just want to chuck it at someone. I bet the Crusaders even left their solid walls every now and then for a nice snow battle.
Later that day, our tour bus careened down the highway into Wadi Musa, the dry valley hiding Petra. (Note: Wadis aren’t like valleys in occidental mountains, but are rocky, rugged depressions often more mountainous than the surrounding highlands. Petra is sheltered in one these Wadis.) We turned a switchback, and boom, the unmistakable sandstone mountains and boulders glowing rust-red. First stop was “Little Petra”, a smaller suburb of the main city. 2500 years ago, camel caravans coming from Arabia, Syria, and Turkey stopped on here their journey into the Orient. We pulled up and of course saw a herd (?) of camels just hanging out in this big field—apparently that’s what the field was used for 2500 years ago too. A camel parking lot, smelled like crap. The coolest part of Little Petra was the 600,000 cubic meter cistern they carved into the rock to store rainwater, and the little water-filled pockets carved in the front of each dwelling—people cleaned their feet in them before they went inside.
Next morning I loaded up my camera gear like any self-respecting tourist, and set out early for Petra with my friend Collin. We walked through the small village of gift shops—counted four “Indiana Jones Shops”-- then through the turnstiles, and then set out on the dirt path to Petra. At first it’s a bit anticlimactic because it’s literally just an exposed, flat sandy trail; plus these locals kept riding by us on their donkeys asking if we needed a ride/knew any American girls. But then we came to this towering slot canyon, and the path changed to a stone-paved road. We walked for twenty minutes in the canyon’s shade, past walls with worn carvings of camels and men. We turned a corner, and saw it: google Petra and it’s like half the picture results that come up. The first, most stunning building is known as the Treasury, and yes it’s even cooler than Indiana Jones. Spent half an hour just craning my neck up to take in the whole thing. It’s impossible to communicate how the wind-worn sandstone glows in the morning sun, and how little and young it makes you feel. The only word Collin and I could muster , over and over: “wiiild”. So that’s it. Petra.
But wait just kidding, there’s actually a whole city nestled in the canyon, once home to 40,000 Nabateans. And every carved edifice makes you ask, “what the hell were these people eating, drinking, dreaming about?” So I’m not going to detail every bright-cornered temple, every quiet arch I ducked under, because really this place doesn’t belong in my words. Even today it’s filled with the motion of humanity: hundreds of local Bedouin children hawk postcards (“Hey mister Happy Hour over here, this for 1JD”), hundreds of wide eyed tourists buy them. These camels and donkeys just kind of wander around, saddled but without their owner. About every fifty feet is a tea shop, clothing stand, hookah bar—all make “nice gift for your mother-in-law” as one Bedouin lady told me. It’s a modern town among an ancient one. I guess that was my favorite part: just watching the hustle of people, the buzz of their transactions echoing off the ruins. As old as this place is, it is full of life. Somehow I think it will stay that way.

The Desert

“Then a messenger arrived. We had been sent for. Nothing else happened…”
--From the opening scene of the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; I’m not sure why, but driving through the desert made me think of this. In the play’s beginning, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern just kind of appear in a blank space, and try to glean some meaning from their existence. I could kind of see their predicament when I was in the desert—because here, desert means nothingness. Like the natural equivalent of a mall parking lot, that goes on, and on, and on, it’s just hard to get anything from it.
Anyway, they say the country of Jordan is almost 80 percent empty—not sparsely inhabited or lightly developed—but void of any humanity, any life. Before taking the bus from Amman to Petra, I couldn’t fathom that; imagine the US: from West Virginia to Utah, Minnesota to Oklahoma, there is nothing. No people live there, no water runs through it, nobody says, “let’s go hiking in the wilderness”; because really, it’s just sun-torched dirt. From Amman (via the King’s Highway), you slope down from the capital’s rich highlands into the dry crotch that chafes its way across much of the Middle East: from its western extent in Jordan, east to Iraq, and south through Arabia. Even in the cool winter temperatures, the harsh sun shivered out mirages on the asphalt. The road just kept rolling out before the bus, the scenery reliable and immutable: no trees, no road signs—steady as a treadmill. Chicken wire fences unfurled along both sides of the highway, as if someone were trying to repel unseen poultry. Caught in the wire were plastic bags of every color, waving like prayer flags in the dry wind. In this monochromatic land, trash provides shocks of color and motion.
Halfway between Amman and Petra, our bus pulled into Al-Sultani Tourism rest house (basically a Travelodge, with a hookah bar and the gift shop from Epcot). I just sat outside the bus and looked around at the village: about a dozen squat cinderblock buildings, rusted rebar poking through the tops of their walls. They were white, all but one—it was painted a pastel pink, and outside it hung bright garments bobbing on a clothesline. The small police/firestation next door displayed a loud billboard of King Abdullah II in military regalia. A guard in a government police uniform (ubiquitous black jumpsuit complete with beret) shuffled around. After a bit another guard poked his head out the door and shouted something in Arabic at guard one. Then guard one proceeded to chase guard two back inside, then guard two charged back out with his Kalashnikov leveled at guard one. Then they both laughed, and guard one turned away again to stare out at the desert, not sure what exactly he was guarding against.