Dancing with Bedouin

Hi everyone!  I’m back from an amazing weekend in Wadi Rum (have I ever described any weekend here as anything other than amazing?  I need to come up with some better adjectives. Incredible, astounding, fantastic, wonderful…). Wadi Rum is a beautiful stretch of desert waaaay down in southern Jordan, really close to the Red Sea and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. It’s about a 3 ½ - 4 hour drive from Amman.  It’s known for its huge stretches of bright orange sand and huge rocky cliffs, which jut out of the desert and sometimes form really weird shapes and formations. It’s also famous for being the site where Lawrence of Arabia participated in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire.  

 

Wadi Rum is kind of an isolated area – the closest “real” city is Aqaba, which is a town on the Red Sea about 45 minutes away.  Hotel options in the desert are very limited, and the “thing to do” in the area is stay overnight in a Bedouin (traditional desert nomad) camp. Depending on where you go, the camps offer varying degrees of amenities – in some places you have to bring your own tent or sleep under the stars and there are no bathroom facilities, and on the other hand I’ve heard rumors of tents that include ensuite toilets and showers.  Not being an overly “outdoorsy” type of person, I was a little nervous about the former type of experience, less so about the latter. One thing that I did know was that I had to experience Wadi Rum in some way before I left Jordan, because every person I’ve ever met who has been there told me it was an incredible experience that was not to be missed.

From the beginning, Wadi Rum was the hardest trip for me to organize in Jordan. The public transportation here is very poor – the best you can do is take a bus from Amman to Aqaba, then arrange a cab from Aqaba to Wadi Rum.  This part wouldn’t necessarily be too difficult, but there aren’t really any cabs waiting around in Wadi Rum to get back to Aqaba, so you either have to arrange in advance for a cab to come for you at a specified time, or as my Lonely Planet guide suggested, hitchhike back to Aqaba.  Being a solo female traveler, I was not about to attempt hitchhiking through the desert in a foreign country. Not quite that brave, or stupid, or something. If I was a bit more adventurous, I could have rented a car in Amman and driven down, which is what most groups of tourists do, but the thought of driving in Amman frankly terrifies me because people are crazy drivers here, and I was worried about getting a flat tire or something in the middle of the desert with nobody around to help me on the way down.  I really doubt that my AAA membership works here.  I tried seeing if I could join a group tour, but there were none that were organized on a schedule that was workable for me (damn this whole working-full-time thing…), and most of the private tours that I looked at were ridiculously expensive, like $500 for two days.  Maybe that’s not a lot for some people, but it’s a lot for me. So last week I was starting to get worried that I wouldn’t be able to make it, because I had nobody to take me and it was proving so logistically difficult to arrange it on my own. I mentioned to my boss here that I was really hoping to go, and she called somebody at the travel agency she works with to see if they could arrange something for me.  Finally they were able to arrange a driver and tour guide for me, named Anas, and he was willing to take me down and back, show me around, and book me a night in a Bedouin camp for a little over $300.  Still expensive for a weekend, but much better than my other options.  Deal.

The first dilemma – what does one pack for a Bedouin camping trip in the desert?  I asked my roommate Rebecca for advice, and her response was “a hotel.”  Not very helpful (sorry Becca!). So here’s the final packing list of things that would fit in my backpack, some of which I ended up needing and others I didn’t:

Things I Packed for Wadi Rum:

Lightweight clothes – linen pants, cotton, loose-fitting t-shirts

A sweatshirt for night in case it got cold

Sheets

A light blanket in case it got cold (it’s cold at night in the desert!)

A little towel

Good walking shoes

Hiking sandals

A flashlight

Sunscreen

Bug spray

Hand sanitizer, wet wipes, toilet paper

Benadryl in case I was stung/bitten by a weird desert insect

Snacks (always helpful for hiking excursions plus it’s Ramadan…I’m getting skinnier already…)

A ton of water

Powdered Gatorade packets in case I got really dehydrated

Camera

Things I Didn’t Pack for Wadi Rum

A hotel – didn’t fit in the backpack

Makeup – What’s the point?

Jewelry – Ditto

Downy anti-wrinkle spray – Same

A hairdryer – Completely useless

So, my tour guide Anas picked me up on Friday morning at about 9 am, and we started the journey down the Desert Highway to Wadi Rum.  Anas was really friendly and young – 25, the same age as me.  At one point about 2/3 of the way through the journey, he stopped the car on the side of the road in the middle of the desert and announced, “ok, this is the kidnapping spot, time to get out.”  I gave him a weird look and asked him very politely not to kidnap me.  He laughed and pointed out some different places on the horizon – the direction of Petra, Karak, etc. Rest assured that no kidnapping of any sort occurred on this journey.

 Me, at "the kidnapping spot"

We arrived in Wadi Rum at about 12:30 and went for a hike up to a little water spring at the top of this cliff. This hike unfortunately confirmed how out of shape and unaccustomed to desert cliff-hiking I truly am, but I powered through it and made it to the top with only two breaks to “take pictures” (ie, catch my breath. And take pictures.)  The spring was pretty cool though – it’s the only natural source of water I saw in the entire area, and there’s a decent amount of greenery around it, which (as you can see from my pictures) is a rarity in the area.  The water was really cool and refreshing.  We hung out there for awhile with some goats and their Bedouin shepherd who was also sitting in the area.

 

Up at the spring, with the goats

After coming down from the hike, we ate a huge lunch of grilled chicken, rice, hummus, lentils, and tomato & cucumber salad at the Rum Village Rest House, and then headed to the Jebel Rum Camp where we would be staying for the night. We each got our own tent, and I was relieved to discover that this camp could definitely not be described as “roughing it”.  While I did not have an ensuite toilet and shower (shocking, really!), there were completely legitimate bathroom facilities with flush toilets and fully functioning showers with hot water about 100 yards away. The tents each had two twin beds in them and came with clean linens, blankets, and towels. They also were carpeted and had electric lights in them. It’s a good thing I didn’t pack a hotel because it really would not have been needed.

 My tent

After settling in at the camp, we headed back out into the desert for a drive and some more hiking. We climbed a huge sand dune and spent some time just admiring the scenery, and then Anas tried his hand at off-road driving, which worked fairly well on the flat, pretty hard-caked sand, and less well on the deep, loose sand that is widespread throughout the area.  We got pretty badly stuck at one point, but very luckily a couple of Bedouin in a pickup truck just happened to be driving in the area and pushed us out of the sand. So, all’s well that ends well, I guess. After that we decided to head back to the camp and not get into any more trouble for the evening. The sun was setting anyways.

 Anas and I climbing the sand dune

We enjoyed sunset at the camp, which creates some really astonishingly beautiful colors on the sand structures all throughout the desert. That evening, the Bedouin camp owners cooked us dinner in a zerb, which is an underground fire pit oven thing.  They put lamb and chicken in a cage, and then put the cage inside a huge cauldron, which then they bury underground.  The meat cooks for hours underground and comes out really tender, falling off the bones. There were about ten other tourists staying at the camp, so we all enjoyed a huge dinner of lamb, chicken, rice, couscous, a variety of salads, bread, hummus, and some sort of coconut cake thing for dessert.  It was delicious.

 Digging out our dinner

Dinner - Yum!

After dinner, our Bedouin hosts played music and taught us some traditional dances around the campfire. I learned how to do the dabka, which is a Arabic step dance, and then the Bedouin performed a really complicated step dance for us that I would never have been able to do.  After dancing for awhile, Anas and I went for a night hike into the desert to see the stars. As you can imagine, there’s very little light out in the desert, so you could basically see the entire galaxy.  It was a surreal experience, and I understood why some people opt to just sleep outside under the stars (although I still wasn’t feeling quite that adventurous). Then I went to bed and actually slept like a baby despite being in a tent in the middle of the Jordanian desert. At one point I woke up and had the confused “where am I?” moment. Then I remembered – tent, desert, Wadi Rum.  Ok, back to sleep.

 Bedouin dancing

On Saturday morning, we got up and ate breakfast (hardboiled eggs, bread, cheese, jam and coffee, pretty standard), and then went on a truck tour around the whole Wadi Rum area.  At first I planned to take a camel tour, but because the area is so big, I found out that the best way to see most of the place is on a truck or Jeep that’s fit for off-road driving. The pick-up truck that we hired was fitted with seats in the back so you could see the whole area well and take pictures while it was driving around. We made several stops along the way too so that I could explore some areas more in depth – I climbed a huge sand dune for a panoramic view of the area, and we made a stop at the cave where Lawrence of Arabia hid out for awhile.  My favorite part was when we stopped to climb this huge arch built into a rock.  It looked pretty high at first and I am not an experienced rock-climber by any variety, but I managed to make it up without too much trouble.  It was pretty high, but the view was amazing and I was so proud that I was able to climb it!  On the way back to the camp, we stopped at a Bedouin campsite for some sage tea, which was really good.  I’ve never had sage tea before. 

 Me on the sand dune that I climbed

 The arch that I climbed

 View from the arch.

After the truck tour, it was unfortunately time to head back to Amman.  I slept for most of the car ride back because I was completely exhausted, and it was really hot on Saturday, definitely over 100 degrees in the south. I spent much of the rest of the day trying to clean orange sand off of myself and all of my belongings, haha.  My sneakers, which were brand new and pitch black before coming to Jordan are now a shade of orangey-brown.  At least they match the scenery better.

Now it’s less than two weeks before my friends come, and I’ll be back in Washington DC three weeks from today.  The time is seriously flying, but I am super excited for my trip to Petra and Israel with my friends and Aunt Michele, and I’m looking forward to seeing my friends back home again. I don’t have any plans for next weekend yet, but unless somebody suggests something truly spectacular, I’ll probably just stay in and rest up before my week-long vacation.  It’s going to be so incredibly busy for that week that my friends are here that I’ll need all the energy I can get!

Anyways, hope you’re all doing well.  I’ll talk to you soon!

Love,

Sarah

Back Roads of Bethlehem, and other stories…

Hey everyone, Ramadan Kareem! Before I head off for a weekend of camel trekking and Bedouin camping (more on that later), I thought I’d update my blog and let you know about my adventures in Palestine.  

Last week I decided to spend a long weekend in Palestine visiting some friends in Bethlehem and Ramallah. My friend Mona, who’s in my program at Georgetown, is doing an internship in Bethlehem this summer and living in the bordering town of Beit Sahour. I thought it would be nice to visit her for a day to catch up and tour Bethlehem, and then head north to Ramallah to visit my friend and colleague Darin and meet the rest of the Palestine EFE team. Darin is the PEFE Program Manager, and we’ve met a few times before at conferences and work retreats and stuff. I left on Thursday evening right after work to cross the border, and stayed until Sunday night so that I could work one day from the PEFE office.

The journey into the West Bank was quite an adventure.  Amman and Bethlehem aren’t that far apart, the drive would probably take less than two hours if you didn’t have to make the border crossing. However, the Allenby/King Hussein Bridge crossing between Jordan and Israel is notorious for having lengthy delays, and I got detained for extra questioning because I was going to the West Bank and wasn’t particularly well-organized for it, although this wasn’t completely my own fault. First, the rules and even opening times of the border crossing seem to be fairly arbitrary – I heard like 4 different versions of their opening hours, even from credible sources like guidebooks. It seems that they change the rules so often that nobody really knows. Second, the crossing is fairly chaotic so its difficult to know what’s happening and where you’re going and what you’re supposed to be doing the whole time.

My driver picked me up from work at about 5:30 last Thursday afternoon, and it took about 45 minutes to get from West Amman to the border crossing. Apparently regular cabs can’t drive the last few kilometers up to the border, so the taxi dropped me off at the entrance to the road that leads to the border and then I had to take a different cab for the last few kilometers. The Jordan side of the border didn’t take too long to get through, probably about 15-20 minutes, but it was kind of a confusing free-for-all. You have to go to one of the desks, wait for one of the Jordanian border officials to help you, and then give them your passport, pay an exit tax, and fill out a piece of paper with your name and passport information. Then they hold on to your passport and send you over to a seating area where you have to wait for the bus to the Israeli side of the border, which is a few kilometers away. I made friends in the waiting area with several other tourists, including a Canadian couple, another American woman, and a Czech couple, so that helped to pass the time.

After waiting about 45 minutes, we were able to get on the bus to the Israeli side of the border. The bus stopped several times along the way, and at one point turned around, went halfway back to the Jordan border, then turned around again and came back to Israel. Love traveling in the Middle East. The Israel side of the border was pretty crowded and chaotic when I got there, but I also decided it would be a good idea to travel at night and right before the start of Ramadan when people are going to visit their families with their whole family of 8 and all their belongings in tow.

After waiting in line for quite awhile, we made it up to these windows where they put stickers on our baggage and we had to put them on conveyer belts to go through the scanners. I had my purse, a backpack and a tote bag on me, and they made me give up both my tote bag and my backpack.  I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time and completely forgot to take out my hotel reservations in Ramallah and notebook where I had written my friend Mona’s address, etc. I forgot that I didn’t have the info on me anywhere else and I didn’t realize that I wouldn’t get my luggage back right away.  This was a huge mistake.

After going through a few more checkpoints, I got to the real security check, where they asked me tons of questions about where I was going, who I was staying with, etc.  Since I didn’t have my hotel reservations or my friend Mona’s address, I’m sure I looked pretty suspicious.  Also, I was only going to the West Bank and had spent over a month in Jordan. That didn’t help either. So after questioning me for awhile, they sent me back to the corner to wait, and eventually this border guard came over and took me back into a hallway where I had to wait for further questioning. I was getting pretty scared at this point because I wasn’t sure if I was in trouble or what was going to happen, or how long they would keep me and if I’d be able to get a cab to Bethlehem or back to Amman or anywhere after they let me go. All the others who were being held back there (there about 8 of us) and all my friends who I was frantically texting assured me that this was fairly normal and that they would eventually let me through, and that I should be able to get a taxi.  That calmed me down a little bit, but it was still a pretty nerve-wracking experience.

After a lot of waiting, I went through another round of questioning, and then they called my friends Mona and Darin to check up on my story, make sure I was staying with them, etc. Luckily by this time I had gotten in touch with both of them and was able to get the addresses of where I was staying, etc. Mostly the border guards just asked me the same questions over and over to see if I changed my story, and I just tried to stay calm and tell the truth, since I had nothing to hide. Finally, they gave me an entry card for 3 months inside my passport and told me I was free to go. At this point I was finally reunited with my luggage, which was then searched, and led out of the building. 

It was after midnight when I finally got through the border and there weren’t any buses to Bethlehem left, so I took a taxi all the way there, which was unfortunately quite expensive. I finally made it to Bethlehem at about 1 am and met up with Mona. I had a super-late dinner and then collapsed into bed, completely exhausted from my 7 ½ hour journey to go something like 90 miles.

On Friday, Mona and I slept in a bit and then headed out for a day touring Bethlehem. We walked up the big hill from her apartment in Beit Sahour into the Bethlehem city center, and went to the Church of the Nativity, which is supposedly the spot where Jesus was born.  It’s now divided into several different Christian churches, including a Greek Orthodox cathedral and a Roman Catholic church.  We started to walk through it but it was so crowded during the day with tour groups that we decided to come back later when it was a bit more peaceful.  

View of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour

 

 Church of the Nativity

We then walked a few blocks over to the Milk Grotto Church, which according to legend is the place where Mary breastfed Jesus while they were fleeing to Egypt.  Frankly, they hadn’t fled too far at that point, because it’s only about 100 yards from the nativity site. But, that’s the story. The Milk Grotto Church was actually really beautiful and much more quiet and contemplative than the Church of the Nativity. They have a courtyard on the roof with a nice garden that we were able to explore.

 Milk Grotto Church

After viewing the churches, we walked all around the back roads of the city and saw the souq (although it was closed because it was Friday prayer time), Bethlehem University, and Star Street, which was an ancient pilgrimage route to Bethlehem. We stopped for lunch at Café Sima, which had good sandwiches and coffee and cupcakes, and we met up with several of Mona’s friends from work. It was a nice place to relax after all the walking.

Back roads of Bethlehem

Lunch at Cafe Sima with Mona (next to me) and her friends.

After lunch, we went to walk around the wall that separates Israel from the West Bank.  It was built after the second Intifada in 2002.  Although the Israelis argue that it is for security and that it creates a more distinct border between the two territories, the Palestinians have labeled it an “apartheid wall” and have a lot of resentment towards it, saying that the Israelis purposely cut through communities and neighborhoods when they built it to take as much land as possible. It’s covered in graffiti on the Palestinian side, some of it more eloquent than others. While we were walking around the wall, we met a woman whose house was literally about twenty feet from the wall.  She and her family are now forbidden from going up on their roof or carrying on a lot of other normal activities because the wall was built so close to them and they could see into Israel. She told us a lot about her story, and I bought a few souvenirs from her little shop that she keeps on the ground floor of the house. It was clear that she was out looking for tourists to come to the shop, but she was nice and I wanted to buy souvenirs anyways.

In the late afternoon, Mona and I went back to the Church of the Nativity, which was much calmer by this time, and walked around the whole church. Then we went back to Beit Sahour and had dinner at a restaurant called The Tent, which was, as the name would suggest, in a large tent. It’s a pretty huge place on the top of a hill that looks over all of Bethlehem, and we had shish kabob and tabbouleh and smoked argileh, which is the local name for hookah. We stayed there for hours talking and relaxing and had a really nice night.

 Inside The Tent

On Saturday morning, I took a bus from Bethlehem up to Ramallah, which is about an hour away. I checked into the hotel where I was staying in Ramallah, the Royal Court Hotel, and then went across the street for lunch at this little European-style café called Au Bon Paix.  They had an amazing smoked salmon sandwich and cappuccino. After lunch, Darin met up with me at the hotel and showed me around Ramallah.  Ramallah is a small city but it’s really nice and full of life – I loved it. We walked around the downtown area, had some ice cream at a famous ice cream shop (I forgot the name!), and then walked over to the site of the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat’s grave. The tomb is guarded 24/7 by the Palestinian military, and it was interesting to see.  We then went over to a museum about Mahmoud Darwish, who was a famous Palestinian poet and writer who was imprisoned several times by Israel. While most of the museum exhibits were in Arabic and I didn’t understand all of them, I did learn a lot about his life and all the books he wrote in a variety of languages.

 Downtown Ramallah

 

 Mahmoud Darwish

 Darin and I overlooking Ramallah

At night, Darin had gotten us both tickets to go to the Mohammed Assaf concert in Jericho.  Mohammed Assaf was this year’s winner of Arab idol, and the first Palestinian ever to win. He is from Gaza and was held up at the border between Gaza and Egypt for two days before they final let him through to go to the auditions.  Once he got there, the auditions were closed, so he jumped over the wall into the building, and eventually got somebody to give him their audition number after they determined that he had a better chance of making it into the finals than they did. He ended up going all the way to the finals and winning the whole competition, and it’s spurred huge celebrations and national pride in Palestine. Anyways, Darin heard that there would be a great concert in Jericho, so she got tickets and we went down with a group of her friends to the concert. Unfortunately, the concert organizers were the most disorganized company imaginable. The concert was supposed to start at 8 pm, and at that point they had just started building the stage for the concert.  We waited for over 3 hours, with them telling us regularly that they would need 15 more minutes, 20 more minutes, and then finally had to head back to Ramallah at around 11 pm because we were exhausted and had to work the next day. Apparently he eventually did sing at about 11:15, but by that time a ton of people had left and most of the audience was cranky and exhausted. I felt kind of bad for him, because he had been there and ready to sing since 7 pm, but he needs to fire his organizing company. I felt really bad for Darin, who was so disappointed not to see the concert and felt horrible that the plans she had arranged for my visit hadn’t worked out.

On Sunday, I spent the day at the PEFE office, working from there and meeting the team. I had only met a couple of them before so it was nice to finally put some faces with names and meet the whole group.  They were incredibly friendly and welcoming, and they brought in a nice lunch for me of falafel and hummus and knafeh (shredded dough stuffed with a mild-flavored cheese, baked, and then drizzled with honey, yum!) for dessert. It was delicious and I had a really nice time with the team.  I hope I’ll get the opportunity to go back someday. 

After work on Sunday, I went to Darin’s house and met her family, and her mother served us an early dinner of lamb in a tomato sauce with green beans and rice.  It was really delicious.  Then I took a taxi back to the border crossing and headed back into Jordan. The journey back was much less stressful – the Israelis let you right through after you pay your exit tax, and the Jordanians didn’t give me any trouble coming back in either. The longest part was just waiting for the bus from one side to the other.  My driver met me on the Jordanian side of the border and took me back to Amman, and then I went to bed, exhausted from the long weekend.

This week flew by, and now I only have two more weeks of work in Amman before my friends and Aunt come for vacation. I’ll be home in less than a month. Today,I’m got up early to head down to southern Jordan for a weekend in Wadi Rum. It’s a protected area in the desert, and I’ve heard from multiple people that it’s supposed to be one of the most beautiful and amazing places in Jordan.  I have a driver who is taking me down, and then I will be going on a camel tour of the desert and then sleeping overnight in a Bedouin camp.  I’ll have a private tent and stuff, and there are supposedly bathrooms and showers, so…we’ll see how this goes.  I’m a little nervous about the camping experience since I’m not known for being an outdoorsy sort of person, but it’ll be an adventure.  I know that I’d always regret it if I left Jordan without doing this.  So, as the Jordanians say, inchallah I’ll talk to you all next week with amazing photos and great experiences to share!

Love,

Sarah

I found the water in Jordan!*

 

*And, by water, I mean one little river and a small, really salty sea.

Hi everyone, I’m sorry I’ve been so behind in my blog posts!  Happy belated Fourth of July – I can’t believe it’s July already.  I have only thirteen work days left in Jordan and then one week of vacation before I come back stateside. I’ll be back in DC on August 4^th.  I’ve gotten to the point in my travels lately where I’m simultaneously starting to get exhausted and starting to panic that I need to do everything possible before I leave Jordan.  I’ve been traveling every weekend since I got here, and I’ve had some amazing experiences but man, I am tired. I think that when I get back to DC in August, all I’ll want to do is sleep and bum around during my free time. It’s good that I’ll get a couple weeks of a break between traveling and starting back up at grad school.

Part of the reason I’ve been so bad at the blog updates is that I’ve spent a lot of weeknights lately planning my vacation for the end of this month. On July 26^th, my friends Rebecca and Mike and my Aunt Michele will be flying in to Amman for a visit.  We’ll spend the day on the 27^th touring Amman, and then on the 28^th and 29^th we’ll head down to Petra, stopping to see Madaba and the Dead Sea along the way.  We’ll come back up to Amman on the night of the 29^th, and then cross the border into Israel on the 30^th and go to Jerusalem.  We’ll spend two and a half days or so in Jerusalem and head to Tel Aviv on August 1^st, spend the 2^nd in Tel Aviv, and then head back to DC on August 3^rd.  It’s going to be a tightly packed trip but it should be a lot of fun!

So…a ton of things have happened since I last posted, but I’ll start at the beginning and go back to two weekends ago, June 28^th & 29^th. On Friday the 28^th, my friend Mohammad invited me to join him and a group of his coworkers for a picnic and barbecue at the King Talal Dam, which is just a bit north of Amman. Mohammad used to be a Program Coordinator at JCEF, the organization where I’m working, and we met at the One Young World conference in Zurich, Switzerland, that I attended a few years ago, and then again here in Amman when I visited Jordan in 2011. He unfortunately left JCEF several months ago, but he now has an interesting job working as a Youth Activities Coordinator for the International Medical Corps at the Zaatari Refugee Camp in northern Jordan, where over 140,000 Syrian refugees are currently living. One of Mohammad’s coworkers knew somebody who was able to get us into the King Talal Dam to have the picnic (as Mohammad put it, “today we are going to do a corruption”), so we headed there on Friday for the day with a big group of other staff members from the IMC and their friends.

The picnic was a lot of fun – I really enjoyed meeting Mohammad’s coworkers, and we had an amazing barbecue with shish kabob, grilled vegetables, bread, salad, and fruit. I ate so much grilled lamb, it was amazing. We spent about 8 hours out there, cooking, eating, talking and playing games. The area around the King Talal Dam is stunning…it’s in the mountains and there was an incredible view from all around the picnic site. In the evening, we headed to the site of the actual dam (the picnic was about a mile away) to watch the sun set over the mountains. It was one of the most amazing sunsets I’ve ever seen.

 View from the campsite

View from the campsite

Sunset over the mountains

Part of me wonders about the logic of having dams in Jordan – there are several all around the country.  On the one hand, hydropower is a good, clean source of electricity, but I wonder if damming some of the few natural sources of water in the country and thus messing with the environment will end up causing more trouble over time?  I don’t know enough about the environmental impact of the dams to really assess it. What I do know is that I have never been so aware of water and how much I use on a daily basis until coming here. I’ve been lucky in my life to always live in water-abundant areas and never to really know what it’s like to have a shortage. It’s not the same here.  Not only do you quickly notice how dry the air and ground is, and the fact that it never, ever, ever rains, at least in the summer, but water is scarce even in a big, developed city like Amman. The water has been cut off twice in my office altogether, and I hear this is a common occurrence for many people in their homes. I’ve been lucky never to lose all running water in my apartment, but we once completely emptied the hot water tank, and even when we’re careful not to use very much, the water when I shower in the morning is rarely more than warm. I think I’m definitely more mindful of how much water I’m using now on a daily basis, and I’m careful to always turn off the tap really quickly and to take much faster showers. I know I should continue these habits when I go back to the US, and I feel a lot more grateful to always have water, especially hot water, in my apartment back home.

Anyways, now that I’ve finished with that side note, back to my weekend. On June 29^th, I went on an excursion to Madaba, Mt. Nebo, and the Dead Sea.  I hired the driver who previously took me to Iraq Al-Emir, Shawki, to take me around for the day.  It was a pretty reasonable price, only about $75. He picked me up at 9 am from my apartment and we first headed south to Madaba.  Madaba is about a 40 minute drive from Amman, and it’s got a large Christian population.  It’s known for its wide collection of historic mosaics, especially the map in St. George’s Church. The church dates back to 6 BC, during the Byzantine Empire, and it has a huge mosaic map of the Middle East from Turkey down to Egypt that stretches across the entire floor of the church.  It’s covered in symbolic mosaic pictures, such as two fish that are meant to symbolize Christians and non-Christians, and has labels for tons of cities and landforms throughout the region. After going to the church, we went to the archaeological area, which also boasts tons of ancient mosaics dating back to the time of Christ.

 Part of the map across the floor of the church

After touring Madaba for about an hour, Shawki took me to Mount Nebo, which is theoretically the place where Moses first saw the Holy Land and the place where he died. The site is at the top of a huge mountain and you can see for dozens of miles all around the place.  Supposedly on a clear day you can see all the way into Israel, but it was not an especially clear day when I was there – it was pretty dusty. There’s a church on the site that is currently being rebuilt, so unfortunately there’s not much to see at the moment other than the scenery around the area.  It was a pretty cool view though, and has a lot of religious significance.

 View from Mount Nebo

At around noon, Shawki dropped me off at the Oh Beach Resort on the Dead Sea.  Most of the Dead Sea area is really built up and only accessible through resorts and private beaches.  There are a few public beaches, but even those require an entrance fee. I had heard that it was safest for a solo female traveler to go to one of the resorts, so I decided to go to Oh Beach, which was one of the cheapest resorts but still really nice. It has a lot of seating, a freshwater pool, a nice restaurant, and a spa. The spa treatments were pretty pricey so I didn’t do any of them, but I spent my day floating in the Dead Sea and reading and relaxing in one of the lounge chairs. 

The Dead Sea is a nice but kind of weird experience. The water is so salty that it’s more like a brine, and has a weird texture that’s almost slimy. The floor of the sea has huge chunks of salt just sitting in it like rocks, and you can actually see the salt and other minerals swirling around in the water. It’s almost impossible to swim in the sea – you just kind of float around, and you have to hold on to something like a rock or the dock to keep yourself from floating away. Theoretically the water and mud are supposed to be really good for your skin though, and tons of stores sell Dead Sea skincare products all around Jordan.  The sea is also really small –only about the size of an average lake, and certainly a lot smaller than the Great Lakes in Michigan.  You can see the West Bank across on the other side, and we were so close to Palestine that my phone actually thought I was in Palestine in parts of the resort.  Whenever I’d go down close to the water it would send me “Welcome to Palestine!” text messages, and then it would welcome me back into Jordan when I’d walk up towards the road.

The Dead Sea

The resort was half-empty when I was there because it’s the low season in Jordan – as explained by the fact that the temperature reached about 110 degrees in the afternoon.  Luckily I was able to find a chair in the shade and sleep for awhile when it got too hot for comfort, and I made sure to drink a ton of water when I was there.  Since the Dead Sea is the lowest place on earth, it’s comparable to Death Valley in terms of heat in the summer. This is why we’ll only stay a couple of hours when I go with my friends and Aunt Michele at the end of the month!  It got a lot cooler and more comfortable in the late afternoon and evening once the sun started to set.  The sunset over the Dead Sea and the West Bank was really beautiful.  I took tons of pictures because the colors were just stunning.

Last week in the office was pretty uneventful other than the somewhat frustrating attempt to renew my visa.  There is a dearth of information available on the process and documentation needed to actually renew your visa in Jordan, other than the fact that you have to go to the police station. Usually when staff members from my office have applied for visas to other countries in the Middle East, all they’ve needed is a letter from the organization where they are working confirming that they are traveling on business, etc. I got JCEF to sign a letter, but upon arriving at the police station for my first attempt to renew the visa, I found out that I also needed the full name and address of the person that I was staying with.  Apparently the first and last name of my host here was not enough, I was also supposed to give her father’s name and grandfather’s name (in the Middle East, women’s names go as follows – First Name, Father’s Name, Paternal Grandfather’s Name, Last Name, so I would be Sarah John John Little.  It is not that uncommon to have the same second and third name if both your father and grandfather are named alike.) Since I didn’t have her father and grandfather’s name at the time, I was denied the visa renewal the first day and told to come back.  On the second day, I came back with all the information and was able to renew my visa without any trouble.  I now have permission to legally stay here until September.  It was very relieving to know I would not be deported or fined.

Last weekend, I headed to the West Bank to visit friends in Bethlehem and Ramallah.  It was quite an adventure, starting off with a long, exhausting, and somewhat scary experience crossing the border, followed by several amazing days touring Palestine. At least I learned a lot from the experience that will help my planning process for when my friends and I cross over to Israel at the end of the month.  But…this is the story for another blog post, which I will try my hardest to have up soon.

Miss you all!

Love,

Sarah

My Jordanian-Roman Holiday

Hi everyone,

I can’t believe I’m almost halfway through my stay in Jordan already!  Time has been seriously speeding by. I remembered this week that I need to go to a police station to renew my visa sometime in the next few days. American citizens usually only get a 30-day visa when you enter the country and you have to renew it at a police station if you want to say longer.  Hopefully this will be a pretty simple process.  I was talking to my friend Dana about it and jokingly told her that I hoped they didn’t deport me.  She replied, “Sarah, you can buy [bootlegged] copies of DVDs all over this country for 1 JD. They like Americans. They will not deport you.”  Hopefully this is an encouraging sign.

Last Friday I went to Jerash and Ajloun with Dana and my coworker Farah, and it was one of the coolest experiences in my life. Jerash is about a thirty minute drive from Amman, and Ajloun is only 15-20 minutes farther than that, but they feel like a world apart. They’re both in northern Jordan, where the ground is much more fertile.  There were so many produce stands on the way up that sold amazing fruit (I bought some plums and figs and they were so delicious!), and there are so many more trees around, especially in Ajloun.

Jerash is known for having some of the best preserved Roman ruins in the world. When you first enter the city, it doesn’t look like anything special – the modern part looks a lot like Amman and there isn’t much to see. But there’s a huge archaeological site with all of the ruins that is enclosed in the ancient city walls on the one end of the city. Immediately when you enter, there’s a huge forum encircled with Roman columns, which is a pretty cool site.  My favorite part was walking down the Cardo Maximus, which is a long colonnaded street that goes from one side the other of the site.  It’s lined with tons of amazing ruins, like a huge fountain, cool gateways and lots of columns, some still standing and others in pieces along the side of the road. There are two Roman theaters in Jerash, at least one of which is still in use.  Every summer they have a cultural festival held in one of the theaters.  As an American, I’ve always found Jordan’s treatment of their ancient artifacts to be a bit weird, because I imagine that in the United States they wouldn’t allow anybody to touch these artifacts or actually use the structures in order to preserve them.  In Jordan, you can just walk right up to a column that is thousands of years old and touch it, or sit on a piece of one. You can attend a play in the crumbling ruins of an ancient theater.  Part of me hopes that tourists aren’t destroying these ruins so that they’re around for many more centuries, but another part of me thinks its cool that you can really live in history around here and make use of these structures. Just different ways of approaching historical artifacts, I guess.

Farah, Dana and I at the Forum.

 The Cardo Maximus

Me and a really cool gateway.

Amazing fountain

After spending a few hours walking around Jerash and climbing ruins, we headed to Ajloun, where there is a castle built by Sala’Addin during the Crusades. The area around Jerash and Ajloun is really hilly (or mountainous? Not sure what constitutes a small mountain vs. a large hill), and the castle is built waayyy up at the top of the tallest hill in the area.  You can see for miles at the top, and the view is stunning.  The northern part of Jordan is really beautiful. 

The castle at Ajloun

 The view from Ajloun Castle

We headed back to Amman at around 5 pm because Farah had to be home to attend a wedding, and then Dana and I went out to dinner at this American restaurant in Amman.  She had a philly cheesesteak and I had a burger, and I introduced her to the concept of mozzarella sticks, which she greatly enjoyed.  All in all, it was a pretty fantastic day.

On Saturday, I went exploring around the downtown area and spoke to a couple of hotels about trips to Wadi Rum.  Apparently one of the coolest things you can do in Jordan is go on an overnight camping trip in Wadi Rum and sleep in a Bedouin tent in the desert. Although the entire concept of camping in the desert makes me a bit nervous, I really want to go, but I don’t want to go by myself.  There are a few hostels in downtown Amman that run tours to the area, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to join one of them and go. It sounds like an incredible opportunity but it might just be a bit logistically complicated to arrange.  This weekend I’m hoping to go down to the Dead Sea for at least a day.  I’ve heard it’s supposed to be an incredibly relaxing experience and that will be nice after all this running around for the past few weeks.

Anyways, I’ll keep you all posted on my adventures.  Talk to you soon!

Sarah 

Settling In

Hi everyone, sorry for the long delay in updating the blog!  I can’t believe I’ve been here for almost three weeks, time is flying by.  I’ve been settling in pretty well here in Jordan, and I’ve started gradually learning my way around Amman. While I certainly don’t know the whole city yet, I’ve started to get at least a feel for where I am and the neighborhoods, and I’m getting better at giving taxi drivers directions. I think that traveling to the Middle East (and probably many areas of the world) can be confusing for Americans/other Westerners because people really don’t use addresses or street names here. You can’t just put an address into Google Maps or a GPS and expect it to find the location, and you definitely can’t just give a cab driver a street address and have him know where it is. You have to memorize landmarks around the place or tell them which “circle” it’s near (Amman consists of a series of huge traffic circles and they’re major landmarks for getting around). It might not be a problem if you’re just a tourist and only going to well-known places, but given that I’m staying in a residential neighborhood and going to offices and stuff that aren’t necessarily known, it can be a little challenging.  The first few days I literally had no idea where I was going when I’d get in a cab and would get frustrated when they would ask me tons of questions just to get me to the office.

Work has been a little crazy – the office here doesn’t have a lot of grant funding at the moment and is really understaffed, so I’ve been taking on a ton of projects.  It’s good though, I’ve been doing some interesting work and I’ve gotten to use a little bit of my Arabic there.  The whole team has been really welcoming and friendly. I’ve become friends with my colleagues and some of the Media Fellows at the organization where I’m working, the Jordan Career Education Foundation (JCEF).  The Media Fellowship Program was a training program that JCEF started running this past February to train youth in a range of media skills, like journalism, news anchoring, photography, graphic design, PR and event management, filmmaking, etc. There were ten Fellows in the program, all of whom have now completed the in-class training and are doing internships with companies and organizations in the media industry, and eventually will begin jobs with these companies or start their own media businesses.  In the meantime, they’re also all volunteering with JCEF to help with its communications and marketing strategy, so they’ve been in and out of the office and helping me a lot.  I’ve also been helping with doing English translations and editing for the marketing materials and videos that they’ve been producing.

Last weekend, my new friend Dana, who is one of the Media Fellows, invited me to join her and some of her friends in this program put on by the East West Initiative.  It’s an organization that brings British and American youth to Jordan and Jordanian youth to the US or UK for week-long cultural tours.  Dana started volunteering with them a few years ago and also participated in one of their trips to the UK, and this past week she was acting as a host for a group of people visiting from the US and Britain. This weekend they were doing a bunch of tours and activities around Amman and in the nearby city of Salt, and Dana invited me to join the group. On Friday, she picked me up in the morning and we met up with the rest of the group of Americans, Brits and Jordanians – there were about 25 of us in total. We were divided into groups and hosted by Jordanian families for a large, traditional lunch. My group went to the home of another volunteer named Asal.  She lives in a beautiful home in West Amman, and her whole family was really nice and welcoming.  We had so much amazing food – chicken biryani, kefta (spiced lamb meatballs) and potatoes, salad, rice, yogurt, and some sort of pudding type dessert with pistachios.  I seriously wished I could expand my stomach so I could just keep eating.

After lunch, the program organizers designed this scavenger hunt in downtown Amman.  We started up at the Citadel and then were given clues that we had to figure out as groups to get to the next destination.  My group had a lot of fun until we started going to the wrong destination at one point and ended up having to walk up one of the most miserable hills I’ve ever climbed in my life under the blazing sun with no water.  At that point I considered just sitting down and calling in reinforcements.  The weather in Amman is really different from what I’m used to.  It’s actually not as hot here as it usually is in DC, and because it’s a dry heat it feels a lot more comfortable a lot of the time.  However, the sun is really strong, and because the air is so dry I think I get thirsty here a lot more quickly than in DC.  It’s a terrible idea to walk anywhere without a huge bottle of water.

My group eventually caught up with the others (although we came in last since we started heading in the wrong direction), and then we had some free time to explore downtown Amman.  We walked along Rainbow Street, which is a really famous street right in the center of the city with a ton of shops and restaurants.  On Fridays they also have this huge open-air market and art show called Souq Jara, where there are tons of artists selling jewelry and paintings and souvenirs of all types.  It’s really cool and I hope to go back sometime, especially because they had some really pretty and unique jewelry there.  We ate dinner at this hot dog restaurant called Wazzup Dog that specializes in selling (all-beef) hotdogs with a variety of toppings.  It kind of reminded me of one of the food trucks that line the streets in DC at lunch time and usually specialize in certain types of street foods.  Although it wasn’t that different from what I could get in America, it was still pretty good, and nice to have a small dinner after such a big lunch.

After dinner we sat for awhile at the Jordan Royal Film Commission, which is an outdoor movie theater that shows artsy films.  It’s built into the side of a hill and looks over the entire downtown area, including the Citadel and Roman Theater.  We only saw part of the film they were showing that night, which was a French movie about the Algerian War, but it was still a really amazing experience. The place is government owned and completely free for everyone who comes, and they serve water and tea to everyone there. I’m going to check out their website to see what other films they have coming and hopefully I’ll go back with some of my colleagues or something.

We spent the night on Friday at a hotel in Salt, which is a city about 20 minutes outside of Amman.  The hotel was brand new – it just opened last month – and it’s also a vocational training school for youth in the city of Salt.  The city didn’t have any hotels until this one opened, and its run by local residents who are also students in their hospitality business school.  It was actually really nice – clean, well-decorated, and with friendly staff – and a really good deal too, only about $25/night.

On Saturday morning, we went for a little tour around Salt, and then came back to Amman for a tour of the King Abdullah I Mosque.  It’s the only mosque in Amman that allows non-Muslims inside, and it’s got a beautiful blue dome on the top and cool architecture on the inside. Women have to put on an abaya, which is a full-length robe that covers your body (the ones they had available to tourists were actually indistinguishable from a graduation gown), and either cover your head with the hood on the abaya or with a headscarf. I had a scarf with me so I was able to turn it into a hijab. We toured the inside of the mosque and then listened to a lecture on Islam by a prominent Muslim scholar. Then we went to another office for a lunch and a discussion about Jordan’s economy.

Later in the afternoon on Saturday, we went to the Baqa Refugee camp to do a community service project.  Usually when I think of refugees, I think about temporary camps with tents and stuff, but the Baqa camp by this point is a pretty permanent settlement and is mostly filled with Palestinian refugees who have been forced to live there for generations. After Israel was established in 1947, millions of Palestinian refugees were forced to leave their homes and fled to nearby countries, especially Lebanon and Jordan. Most of them weren’t able to obtain any sort of legal status or identification in those countries because doing so required a lot of money and connections, so they’ve been living in these refugee camps with their families for years as stateless people.  Although the camp had permanent buildings, touring the inside of it was still pretty horrifying.  Huge families were living together in tiny rooms, without much indoor plumbing, and bugs were running around everywhere.  There aren’t any landfills or places for people to put their garbage so for the most part it was just rotting in the streets.  The smell was pretty putrid. It was a sad and eye-opening experience – nowhere in America have I seen this type of poverty.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a pretty contentious issue around here, and I try to avoid discussing it whenever I can.  I’ve studied it a lot and written numerous papers about it so I have a pretty good understanding of the issues, but it’s just such an emotional issue for people in the Middle East that I don’t like to talk about it. I consider myself to be fairly neutral on the issue – I understand the desire of the Israelis to have a Jewish state, the religious significance of the land to them, and the reason they take their defense so seriously.  However, I know too many Palestinians who go through hell everyday just trying to live their lives not to have sympathy for them and their cause. Most of them are unable to travel from the occupied territory or refugee camp in which they live, and they have very few opportunities to improve their lives. Unemployment is a serious issue throughout all of Palestine, but it is appallingly high in the Gaza Strip. Seeing the refugee camp last weekend made me feel pretty disgusted because it seems like the world has just turned its back on these people.  I don’t think there are any perfect solutions at this point, but something has got to be done.  It’s no wonder that people turn to radical religious groups or violence in such desperate conditions. The status quo is clearly not working.

Anyways, at the Baqa Camp we were divided into groups for a tour of the camp and to do a community service project.  We delivered food and supplies to an elderly woman, and she told us about her experience fleeing Israel in 1947 and coming to the Baqa camp on foot. I also met a couple of nice Palestinian women and their children, who stayed with us for most of the afternoon. I got a nice opportunity to practice my Arabic with them, and they complimented my speaking abilities.  I think they were mostly being polite, but most people are impressed that I speak any Arabic at all.  After touring the camp and talking to some different residents, we helped paint used tires and turn them into planters for flowers and other plants along the entrance to the camp.  A lot of kids came out to watch us and we had fun playing with them.

The rest of the people in the East West Initiative were having a cultural night and then going south to Petra, but unfortunately Dana and I had to leave them after the Baqa camp to go back to Amman because we had to work on Sunday. We went out for dinner in Amman at this restaurant called Abu Jbara, where we ordered a whole bunch of Arabic appetizers, like hummus, foul, some sort of hummus/yogurt mix, and falafel.  The falafel was the best I’ve ever tasted – crunchy, a little spicy, and it just melted in your mouth.  I’m getting hungry now just thinking about it.  After dinner, I headed back to my apartment and just got ready for the work week.

Anyways, I think I’m going to bring this novel-length blog post to a close here, and I’ll write more about this week in a couple of days.  Tomorrow I’m going with Dana and my colleague Farah to Jerash and Ajloun, which are two cities about 30 and 45 minutes north of here. Jerash is supposedly filled with amazingly well-preserved Roman ruins dating back to 64 BC, and Ajloun has an amazing castle called the Qala’at Ar-Rabad, which was built during the Crusades for protection. I’m pretty excited to see them both, I’ve heard from a lot of people that they’re really cool.

Anyways, I’ll try to get another blog post up soon, hopefully quicker than I got this one up.  Talk to you all soon!

Love,

Sarah