This weekend, approaching one of my last weekends in Jordan, I spent in Syria. Nine of us left from Amman in search of the Abdali “bus station” which people failed to inform us was simply a street where many cabs congregated and we split up on our ride to Damascus. “Wasta” is a term in Jordan which connotes that the one possessing it has many connections. Our cab driver appeared to breathe wasta and smoothly paved our entry to the Immigration office where we were warned prior might be a 3-5 hour wait. I tried with all my might to use my smile to convince the patrol officers to take my French passport instead of my American and they could not understand why I was so adamant. One finally whispered in my ear “Have you been to Israel?” and nervously I explained that I had never been and might potentially like to visit Palestine and would prefer a stamp in my French visa. They told me if I could persuade the “boss” over there in the uniform with the stern mustache that I would be okay. I decided I would rather be interrogated at length in “Palestine” than try to bribe a Syrian police man and be put in jail for failing.
We entered the border at 11am. After approximately two hours, I decided to see what was going on with our passports. In Jordan (and apparently Syria) lines are not straight but instead a horizontal mass with flailing limbs and body odor. When I finally made my way to the “front”, I glued my nose to the glass for an hour and a half until the bald, stoic man behind the counter would pay my American face any attention (we noticed the stain from my forehead when I backed away from the glass). People were trying to shove me to the side, slipping passports underneath my grip on the counter but I wanted to get to Syria. Three hours later, two of my friends and I had been cleared for entry. One had been turned away and sent back to Jordan which put a damper on our day. No excuse was given. Not long after I found myself next to a woman who handed the officer her Iraqi passport (noted: born in Baghdad). She looked at me and smiled. In perfect English she asked me if I needed any help. I told her I didn't understand what the hold up was and she kindly translated my concerns to the officer in Arabic and back to me in Arabic. We chatted briefly and she was as warm as anyone I had met, and spoke kindly to me, laughing about the incompetence of the officers etc. I found myself tongue tied, fearing being almost cold to her as I was taken aback by her kindness with the haunting thought of what I had done to her birthplace, to her home, to her friends, to her. I sat there clamming up wondering how you could be so kind to a stranger like me and so able to separate the government from the people when in the US no one can separate Arab from terrorist. By 10pm, all my friends had been cleared. 11 hours at the border was not exactly what had been anticipated and after a series of unfortunate negotiations with Syrian cab drivers, we found the least sketchy and on our guard began our journey.
Arriving to the hostel was not without its share of stress, and we were told our room would not be ready until 1:30am. We explored the night and found that the food may not be Syria’s best quality. My friend ventured so far as to order lamb brain. The waiter cringed as he wrote the order. The street circles were divided into pentagons much like France and we quickly found that we were some of the only non-Arab people most of Damascus had seen. By 1:30am, we were dead and slept until 8 to begin a day of souks and exploration. Damascus struck us with an air of antiquity that goes way beyond description. It is among the worlds longest continuously inhabited cities and each time you turn in the Old City it does not let you forget that. The depth of the covered souk hits you hard, so does the sprawl of stuffed coyote corpses, veiled wedding dresses, and fluffy red lingerie. The end of the first souk is met by the famous Umayyad mosque and a courtyard ready with a blockade of pigeons that is literally squared off with a steel barrier, as well as a Mickey Mouse man making shawerma. We entered the courtyard as the call to prayer began and the ruins surrounding us with the echo of the call and the swarm of pigeons made us feel as though we were in a trance. We were quite the hot commodity for visual intrigue here. White foreigners are shockingly few. Around and behind the courtyard and the gargantuan mosque lay small shops with wooden doors and stone walls with jewelry and scarves so unique it would put any designer to shame. We certainly helped ourselves to a generous quantity of their stock.
The people with whom we interacted in Damascus were unfailingly kind and immeasurably hospitable. Store owner after store owner would offer to make us tea and would love to talk to us about anything. I found myself negotiating in Spanish with an Arab shopkeeper and translating English to a French couple. The languages in this country confound the senses. What struck us more than the trance-like state of archaic sensory overload and inestimable Syrian hospitality was the amount of males and specifically male children. While I have never been to Egypt, what I have heard from my fellow travelers regarding the children and adolescents and most males in the streets is that they harass and when they try to sell you something they are aggressive and sometimes very rude. These boys were genuinely interested in us and followed us everywhere. Not simply a group, but swarms of boys everywhere we went wanted to watch us, giggled, smiled asked “How are you? What’s your name?” and when we indulged would ask for pictures or a hand shake or simply some attention. Even the children were genuinely kind. After we returned to our hostel (which, I must say, was incomparable to Talal’s in Lebanon) we were greeted with more hospitality and assurance for our safety and aid in our travels and directions to restaurants by our hotel managers (three brothers). We wandered around the city after recuperating in search of a restaurant which took us the better part of an hour (maybe two) and we were unpleasantly surprised with more “French-influenced” food. The best reasoning I could come up with is that Syrians are pissed about the colonization from France and that this was the best retaliatory move they could muster- ruin the food. Most times, when we told people that we were American, they would greet us with crinkly-eyed smiles and say “Ahlan wa sahlan!” (You are welcome), on the rarer occasion, we would get the response of the head hung down in shame and no verbal acknowledgement but “Tsk, tsk , tsk”.
The following day we hired a driver to take us to Palmyra three hours north to see the ruins that ended almost putting Petra to shame. On our drive there we stopped at Baghdad Café and were welcomed warmly by Bedouins who ran the hut. They insisted on ushering us to their tents and dressing us up as them. We spent the next half hour in a Bedouin garb photo shoot with chickens, tractors and shells which gave the Bedouins a solid guttural release. I can only imagine how those photos are going to appear. After taking off our dress-up things, we continued to Palmyra and were blown away by the ruins. We spent four hours exploring them and making our way up the Citadel which gave way to a view expanding miles to the panoramic horizon. The day was fantastic minus the flare up in my throat which allowed me the pleasure of communicating as a pre-pubescent young male who sucked on helium (in English, let alone in Arabic).
We returned to Jordan later the following day and while most of us were glad to return home, I was quite sad to leave Damascus. Never, even in Jordan, have I met a kinder collective group of people (minus the border patrol) and I hope dearly to return.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
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?
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?
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Weekend: Jerash, Ajloun, Umm Qais, Azraq etc.
Amman by night
A view from East Amman
The drive along the Saudi Arabian border
The roads...
Landscape
Blockade!
The fortress at Azraq
The clouds and vast expanse of nothingness...
Reference points... 
GRASS!
The castle at Ajloun
Too cool for danger...
Dominating Jerash
Some views of the Roman ruins at Jerash
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Day 72
It's into November now. One month of class left, one month until my parents come to see me and what I've been doing, one month until I go home. It's more bitter than sweet. I am looking forward to being clean, to leaving the water running and just watching it and to eating my weight in fruit (and to play with my puppy). I'm not going to lament and I'm not going to reflect yet because on the other hand, I STILL have a month left and I'm going to soak it up.
I celebrated by walking around my block here and taking pictures of the exact area in which I live. We live in the medical district so I tried to capture what it is like being surrounded by every clinic possible (from IVF clinics to toe surgeons). It's rather raw honesty in the pictures, but I will always love Jabal Amman.
It was 72 degrees and sunny here, a perfect afternoon. Everything feels right in place and I can't imagine being somewhere else.
This weekend I'm off to Jerash, Ajloun, Umm Qais and Azraq so next time I post I'll have tales of the North of Jordan that I have not yet explored.
More to come...!
Pictues of the 'hood
My apartment (I'm on the third floor!) and the living room. 
The only patch of grass in Amman. 
The only dogs in Amman.
It wouldn't be Jordan without the cats.
<3>
Our highway by third circle
The block.
The phallic symbol that is Le Royal Hotel.
We live in the medicine district, so here are some of things you can do when you're in Amman.
Curves?
The landmark we use to get home. Moustashfa Farah.
My street
Nice view for an eye-center.
More fun stuff to do at the hospital.
The hilllssss
View from my block.
The Abdoun brige (into Abdoun!)
Hospital district
View from the living room.
View from my bedroom.
The only dogs in Amman.
It wouldn't be Jordan without the cats.
<3>
Our highway by third circle
The block.
The phallic symbol that is Le Royal Hotel.
We live in the medicine district, so here are some of things you can do when you're in Amman.
Curves?
The landmark we use to get home. Moustashfa Farah.
My street
Nice view for an eye-center.
More fun stuff to do at the hospital.
The hilllssss
View from my block.
The Abdoun brige (into Abdoun!)
Hospital district
View from the living room.
View from my bedroom.
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