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.