Day 77

My body is thirst for sleep. For some reason I am never satisfied physically and I can’t believe it hasn’t broken me down. (A mandatory 6:30am/5days/weeks for class probably doesn’t help). Regardless, as you can see below we have just traveled to the North of Jordan this weekend to check out life outside of the tourist circle (for the most part). Traveling around this area of the world makes me not care if I am running around like a zombie. Neurotransmitters are an amazing thing; dopamine, adrenaline, serotonin all seem to have the ability to keep you going when you are restless with excitement. I know when I go home I will get sick and crash; trust me it’s worth it.

A little about this weekend:

Two friends and I traveled to Jerash, Ajloun and Umm Qais on Friday and Azraq on Saturday. We rented a car and drove an hour to Jerash to visit the Roman ruins and see the local town. This was my first taste of real city life outside of Amman. Petra,Ma'a, Dead Sea, Wadi Rum and Aqaba are all architectural or ecological masterpieces and since the focus is on this, we are not given real insight into what life is like outside the major city. Jerash is a poor city with many ex-animals hanging in the windows for sale and children with clothes too small running around the streets. Everyone seems at peace and we stick out with our Aryan faces. We are always “too welcome, so welcome, very welcome” to Jordan.

The ruins are magnificent and we flash our resident cards and University of Jordan ID cards to reduce the entry fee from 8JD to half a dinar. There is a gladiator show going on which is not to be a missed and we also come across some (obviously) Jordanian Bagpipers. They ask us if we are American and with the positive reinforcement, they begin to the play Yankee Doodle Dandy (on their bagpipes…in Jordan…) We then drove the hour North to Ajloun, another less known rustic town with a thousand year old castle overlooking the Mediterranean landscape. We were glad to see green, even in the form of dried shrubs. Ajloun was not so much ecologically desert and offered a lovely nature trail (closed to us because of the mud- re: RAIN). We decided to brave Umm Qais with our remaining sunlight hours and drove yet another hour towards the Sea of Galilee.

We arrived in the tiny town with the comparably small ruins in our foreview only to decide that we needed a bite to eat before continuing on our trek. We stopped at a restaurant with three chairs and no oven where the owner and a friend were sitting outside and welcomed us in(around 2pm). Apparently they were unclear as to the fact that we had stopped (at their restaurant) for food because it wasn’t until around 5pm (3 hours later) that we left said restaurant. The owner was a remarkable small Arab man who offered me very likely his only jacket when it began to rain torrentially and presumed that when we said “Arabic is hard” that we could not write the alphabet. He and his friend spent the better part of three hours teaching us letters, numbers, countries, showing us his map and where he has been, showing us little trinkets as though in show and tell proud as all hell that he could use his knowledge. He was a bright man, but obviously seldom was he able to talk about himself in such a way. Umm Qais is not exactly the hottest tourist spot.

When we couldn’t hold our hunger any longer, we asked if it would be possible to accrue some sort of sustenance for the road, or for now. He seemed slightly perplexed but left us with his friend to run to the grocery store to pick up some chickens and potatoes. He told us he was going to deliver them to his wife and she cooked us a feast in her residential home while we waited in the restaurant for it to be delivered. It was as fresh as chicken can get and the potatoes were cooked with local spices. After three cups of tea and an Arabic coffee, we were ready to (have a heartattack) see if we could catch a glimpse of the Sea before it became dark. We made it just as the sun set behind the Golan Heights and saw what our cameras couldn’t capture. It was a magnificent sunset scene of the meeting point of four (or five) countries and the biblical body of water in the center. Absolutely beautiful.

The following day we rose early to visit a part of Jordan far enough East to be by the Saudi border. Azraq is a small city located in the definition of the middle of nowhere 200km Southwest of Iraq and 30km West of Saudi Arabia. The drive was sufficiently worthwhile to compensate for the destination, but the destination was remarkable enough as to not require such a perplexing drive. We passed cities that reflected an entirely new scene for me of Jordan, and while the landscape and the architecture were not necessarily so different, the bucolic atmosphere screamed genuineness to me. The scene reminded me of Harlem-125th Street in Arabic writing. It was the essence of culture and in all its mess, it was beautiful. The landscape was slightly hilly but became pure desert after driving several kilometers further. The desert through which we drove for an hour before arriving to Azraq was astonishing. Its vastness allowed the clouds to appear as though magnified ten-fold and as such stunned me the entirety of the drive. There was nothing, and the nothingness was bold. We were blockaded by a herd of camels at one point being shepherded by a Bedouin and I kept my eyes out for Jesus.

We arrived at the fortress and after exploring a little while we asked the man who sold us the 250 cent JD ticket if there was anything else to see in Azraq. He said no. I laughed a little.

We drove 5km to a restaurant which had no food so we continued a bit further to a second one in which we were once again the only people. We made a pact to talk to no one before we ordered our food. As most restaurants in the rural areas, this one had no menu. He told us they had chicken, yogurt, bread, meat and rice so we ordered some Mensaf (meat/yogurt/rice) and had ourselves a virtual feast. I ventured to the bathroom and peed in the hole on the floor. There was soap by the sink which I couldn’t believe, and in my hastiness used the soap before turning on the water to realize there was no plumbing. So I returned to my table with a dollop of soap on my hands and ate the lamb on my rice that had been slaughtered, much to our delight, not possibly more than 15 minutes prior. When we drove out, we saw another sheep being made victim for someone else’s lunch. We heard there was a nature reserve so we drove to see. The security fellow who stood outside where the gates would have been had there been gates told us to drive in. The nature reserve was simply more desert and when we were blockaded once again, we left the car (without much fear of it being stolen...)and went for a walk with the Saudi border on our right. On our left we saw Arabian Oryx, white cows and plenty of camels. We walked through the desert noticing the Bedouin camps in the distance and wondering how much me-time a person could handle before, say, receiving Quranic verses from God.

The drive home was at 3:30pm but already sunset. It was amazing to me how ‘nothing’ could seem so inherently holy. So many times we saw mirages of water bodies and sand dunes on the road that receded as we approached, and we had only been there an afternoon. I will certainly not go into my religious hypotheses of possible development of insanity in the constant presence of nothingness, but it certainly made sense to me. When we drove into Amman, we came from the corner East of the city. This is a part I rarely frequent as it is home to most Palestinian refugees and is the poorest part of Amman. The view of the West, where I live, from the top of the hill on the East was astounding. I wanted to ask to stop the car and let me breathe in the view (instead I tried to capture it from a moving car in stop and go evening traffic…)

This weekend was a much needed reality check into other parts of this diverse country. The warning in our handbook that we must do all we can to not stick out because of the homogeneity of this country: absolute bollocks. The only thing homogenous are the houses - perhaps because they stick out so prominently Americans confuse the culture for the appearance of the crowded beige landscape. For every person or scenario I an encounter, I come across another which refutes it.

If I have learned nothing else while living here it is that nothing is “Jordanian” just as nothing is “American”. We can stereotype all we want, and we can make rules in this program such as “be quiet, modify your dress, and modify your demeanor to fit in” but in reality, all these rules are doing is imposing an Orientalist viewpoint on an impossibly diverse people. They are doing the exact opposite of what they intend with a cultural and linguistic immersion program by saying that Jordanians “don’t, or do” do something. Having brought this up to now multiple English-speaking Jordanians, they are offended. I would be too.

This weekend allowed me to reflect upon and reinforce my opinions of the culture and the people and perspective from which all we students absorb. I hope you are able to enjoy the pictures and reflect on your own perspective and recognize by what it is shaped- who shaped it?