Best of Eid - Jerash

This is a long time coming, but here's a brief summary of my excursions during my oh-so-welcome nine day holiday for Eid, the end of Ramadan. You'll remember my previous blog post about driving in the utter madness that is Jordan traffic? Well the REASON I rented a car and aggressively swerved through traffic was so we could take a trip up north to visit the city of Jerash.

Jerash is most famous for the ruins still standing in the city center. They are the most well-preserved and numerous remnants of Jordan under Roman rule still left in the country.

We drove through the back-to-back traffic jam that comprised the marketplace right next to the ruins in Jerash, then parked on a street filled with chicken shops. Lucky me. We headed over to the ruins of the baths (above), then headed toward the main entrance.

We found it, then had to hike for about ten minutes toward Hadrian's Arch to where you by the tickets. We couldn't find it, walked back to the visitor's center, then walked the ten minutes BACK to Hadrian's Arch to find the unobtrusive little ticket booth nestled in a souvenir shop.

We moseyed through the park, stopping occasionally to pose as various relevant gods and goddesses (I wanted to be Dionysus, but tragically he's a god, not a goddess. Apparently I have gender issues as well.). We ended our extremely hot tour at the amphitheater (left).

Fi Mushkala Kabeer m3 Baab!

Well since I'm up...

I drifted off into a comfortable sleep at about midnight this morning. At about 1:15 a.m., I heard a weird banging noise coming from outside my room. "What is that stupid cat doing," I sleepily thought to myself. I pulled myself out of bed and stuck my head into the hallway to find Sine.

"Gretchen?" I heard Heather say from inside her room. "Could you try to open my door for me?" She was rather frantically pulling on the door and rustling with her key. So THAT's where the noises were coming from. I joined her futile attempts.

Apparently, when she had locked it from the inside, the lock had jammed in the door and would not unlock. To make matters worse, Heather REALLY had to go pee. We continued shaking the handle and pushing the door with little success. Heather then tried to pass the key under the door to me so I could try to unlock it from the outside. It got stuck under the door.

I got a spoon from the kitchen and pushed it back through to her. She stuck it through a different part of the door, and I was able to grab it. I stuck it in the lock and turned. Nope. The lock wouldn't budge. That's when we got desperate.

I tried to call the guard that lives in our apartment and speaks no English. Heather yelled Arabic words through the door that I was supposed to say to him. "Fi mushkala kabeer m3 baab! Mumkin ta'al hawn hella2?" There is big problem with door! Possible you come here now? Unfortunately he didn't answer, so I was not able to practice my emergency Arabic skills.

Our next bright idea was to try to break down the door. I thought we could bust out the wooden frame the lock settles in. Heather was all for knocking a hole in the door itself that she could climb out of. We tried the frame idea first.

This idea also gave me the opportunity to try my cop-show door-kicking-in routine. Even at 2 in the morning, I am clever enough to realize that kicking down a door in bare feet and pajama shorts is possibly not a great idea. So I tried slamming the door with my shoulder. The only result was a rather sharp pain in my shoulder. I backed up even with the kitchen door, about twenty feet away. I took a running leap toward the door and slammed into it with quite a bit of force.

Once the pain subsided, I picked myself off the floor and faced the still unmoving door. "Go try to find something blunt in the kitchen we can use as a hammer!" Heather called. Sadly, our kitchen seems to be rather devoid of blunt objects that could be used to hammer through a heavy door.

All options exhausted, we called our friend who now lives down the street from us. Happily, he was awake. I got to run down our stairs in my tiny pajama shorts and no bra to answer the door for him. He came into the apartment, grabbed the key and started turning. Between the two of them, he and Heather wiggled the door, and he exerted enough raw, manly strength to get the key turned, thus unlocking the door and setting Heather free.

Yay! We all hugged in relief. After laughing and talking, during which Heather said she had once again considered jumping out of our third-story window (I really must buy this girl a trampoline before she acts on her window-jumping urges), we told Heather she could now go to the bathroom.

Heather giggled. "I already did," she said with a laugh. Apparently, desperate and with no rescue in sight, Heather had used her trash can as a toilet. This caused me to dissolve in sleep-deprived and pain-induced giggles for the next twenty minutes of our conversation. Next time I want a roommate who's house trained! Or possibly I could just get her a litter box?

Three cheers for emergency Arabic lessons at 2 in the morning. Hella2 fi mashakil kiteer!

Now I am going to bed to see if I can get a good three hours of sleep before school tomorrow, which Heather will have to go to, seeing as she can't use the excuse "I was locked in my bedroom" any longer.

TWO Month Anniversary

It has now been exactly two months since I landed in Amman. How time flies when you are frantically adjusting to a new culture, avoiding fasting and teaching at all hours of the morning. I mean, how time flies when you are having fun.

End of Ramadan Blues... Or One of Those Colors

It has now been two weeks since the end of Ramadan. And I would just like to note how extraordinarily happy I am about this.

I can drink water in taxis, while walking down the street, in buses, everywhere.

I can munch on an apple in public.

I can sit outside and eat during sunlight hours.

I can eat lunch at any restaurant in town; I am not resigned to the one Christian restaurant we went to roughly a million times during Ramadan.

I can buy alcohol at a liquor store, all of which are now open again.

I can go to bars and clubs.

I can make it home from school through the traffic in less than an hour and a half.

Life is bliss again.

On the other hand, I AM suffering from Ramadan-sweets withdraw. Oh well. Nothing is perfect.

Dirty Looks are Still Better Than Dirty Needles

This morning, on my day off (and the one day I get to sleep in, I might add), I had to be at school at 9 a.m. to go with a group to get a blood test for my hopefully future residency card (which may or may not take another year to get; the bureaucracy here is not what anyone would call prompt).

I staggered out of bed at 8:10 a.m. and wandered out the door by 8:40 a.m. I caught a taxi in no time. Little did I know it was the only shy taxi driver in Amman who actually goes the speed limit. I rushed up to the school at 9:07 a.m., worried that they had left without me. There, I found my school friend and another guy waiting around and unsure about what was going on. The usual. I shouldn't have worried.

After another ten or fifteen minutes of phone calls and waiting around, we finally found the bus driver who had been coerced into driving us all to the Health Center.

We hopped off the bus and followed our enthusiastic and fortunately Arabic-speaking (but not English-speaking... that caused some problems) bus driver to the clinic, a massive building with roughly fifty guys milling around in various semblances of lines. My friend and I, both in tank tops, quickly became the star attraction in the area. We crossed our arms and looked apprehensively at the huge line of men stretching beyond the building.

Happily, it was not the line for the blood test. Our bus driver finished negotiating with our passports and herded us up some stairs to a tiny room.

Let me pause for a moment. In America when I have to get blood drawn, they take you into a specially prepared metal room with a nice chair you can lie back in. The nurse comes in, calms you down a little bit (well, at least for me they calm me down. I heartily dislike needles and my blood being anywhere but in my body), shows you all of the cleaned and packaged equipment she will use and eventually blood will be gently removed from your arm, usually with a comforting story or some other distraction.

This room looked more like a classroom than a doctor's office. There were two desks set up across from a row of dingy waiting-room chairs. The woman taking the blood had an array of supplies set up on the desk in front of her and was in civilian clothes. Filled blood tubes sat stickily to the side of the desk. It was not exactly the comforting environment I had in mind. I had also been warned that these government clinics don't even change their gloves between customers.

The three of us huddled in the corner in trepidation, cracking nervous jokes and trying not to think about the general lack of sterility in the place we were soon going to stabbed. Much too soon, I heard them call, "Christine!" Whew, I thought. A few minute reprieve. But no, they were all staring at us. And my friends' names are Maya and Paul. So that could only mean... "Christine Marie!" Crap.

"It's Gretchen," I snapped nervously. Eminent pain makes me testy. I approached the desk. She had the needle ready. "Can you change your gloves?" I asked, in what I thought was a polite, albeit tension-filled voice. She glared at me as if this was completely unreasonable but pulled on some new gloves. "And that's a new needle, right?" Gritting her teeth, she threw away the needle in front of her (which in all likelihood she had taken out of a new package while I was hiding in the corner) and pulled out a new needle still in its package so I could see it. It's extremely possible I was acting like a total snot at this point, but I can live with perceived snottiness. I can not, however, live with contracting hepatitis. And in my defense, I'm a huge baby when it comes to shots.

She dabbed a minuscule (what, like there's a shortage?) dab of rubbing alcohol on my arm (thank goodness. That eensy trickle will make all the difference to decontamination), and I stared across the room at Maya, who was dancing for my enjoyment. Then it was done, and I was handed a shred of cotton, which took roughly ten seconds to soak with blood. I shakily staggered back to the corner and mopped the blood off my arm.

Afterward, we were back outside waiting for the last member of our group, who showed up later, to finish her test. My fellow blood testers thanked me for demanding a change of gloves because the nurse used the same gloves with them. At least they can only catch what I've got (a cold?). But when my last friend came downstairs, she said she had NOT been snotty enough to ask for new gloves. And the nurse had been talking on a cell phone seconds before sticking a needle in my friend's arm. Does anyone else realize how many germs are on a cell phone?

In the nurse's defense, it hadn't hurt that much really. Residency, here I come! Hopefully remaining hepatitis free.

Who Needs Turn Signals Anyway?

On the Saturday before Eid started, a group of us decided to go on a trip to North Jordan to see Jerash, a city with the most roman ruins, Ajloun, which has an ancient desert castle, and Um Qais, another ruins sight with a great view of the Sea of Galilee. However, none of these places are within walking distance. This meant we needed a car. It also meant one of us ex-pats was going to have to drive in the madness that is Jordan traffic. Mostly because I'm missing a few brain cells, I volunteered.

The day before our trip, we stopped by a rental car office and strenuously negotiated a car for one day. They let us drive it off the lot. We had no car insurance whatsoever, and (don't tell them this) but I was driving with an expired Texas license because I haven't received my new one in the mail yet. Fortunately they couldn't read English very well in the shop, and dates go DAY/MONTH/YEAR instead of MONTH/DAY/YEAR like in America, so we had all kinds of confusion going for us. Regardless and contrary to popular judgment calls, they let me rent a car.

Let me explain something. Although several of my American friends will disagree, I am actually a very good driver. I accelerate fast, and I break late, but unlike my brother (who always gets to drive my Dad's when Dad won't let me), I have never had an accident. I have also driven in foreign countries before: France and Ireland. Ireland was tricky because of that whole wrong-side-of-the-road thing. France was tricky because the two-way roads are all roughly the width of half your car. Jordan is tricky because, once again, everyone drives like a maniac. So it was with some degree of trepidation that I slid behind the wheel. Driving out of town on highways is one thing. Driving in the heart of Amman, with disorganized traffic circles and crazed, fasting drivers is another.

My first hurdle was driving on to the street and around the corner to the gas station. However, a large van was parked (illegally in the US, completely normally for Jordan) in the middle of the road to my left, so I couldn't see anything. I gritted my teeth, gripped the wheel and made a Hail-Mary turn out on to the road.

We made it. I zipped out into Jordanian traffic, swung around the under the road and missed the turn to the gas station. Fortunately there was another road we could take back to it just beyond. I pulled in, the guys ripped us off while pumping gas, we went back and gave them a talking to, and our first car-owning challenge was met.

And I drove home. It wasn't really that bad. Sure, it required about a thousand times the concentration that driving in America requires, and I had to remember to curb my natural impulses to use turn signals, stay in lanes and be nice to people. But it turns out I'm pretty good at turning up my road aggression and swerving around other cars.

The trip north was extremely uneventful, car wise, besides the stares and ill-disguised astonishment that a woman was driving (the north is more conservative than Amman). In fact, I was driving and my female friend was in the passenger seat while the two guys sat in the back. That must have blown their minds.

I was following another friend of mine in his car, so all I had to do was keep on his tail. That was easy on the highway. In the evening, however, we had to head back into Amman to return the car. It had rained for about five seconds that afternoon, which did not wash the car; it merely turned all the dust into mud. Funnily enough, my windowshield wipers worked about as well as our stove does at home (not very), and soon I was staring out of a smeared concoction of glass, dirt and mud trying to stay just behind my friend’s taillights. Then we entered the city.

The traffic went from three or four other cars on the road, to every car in Amman trying to merge in front of me. Cars were passing a centimeter from my car, going 80 mph. I was swerving, cutting people off, passing people by centimeters myself as I tried in vain to stay directly behind my friend. We entered a traffic circle, one of the most annoying and disorganized parts of Jordanian traffic, and that’s when the rental place decided to call and ask where their car was.

So I’m frantically trying to keep my friend’s car in sight while negotiating around eight cars trying to merge into me from different directions, while driving around a traffic circle, while listening to a man yell at me in broken English. I was not a happy camper.

We made it to the rental place. I parked, calmly got out of the car and suffered a complete mental meltdown. As in, my brain was mush. I literally was so tired from concentrating that hard that I could not form complete sentences.

So all-in-all, my first driving experience was a success.

Apologies

First of all, I want to apologize for my break from blogging over the past two weeks. I was too busy frolicking and having fun over Eid, and immediately after Eid I got sick. So it was all kinds of tiring just to do my job while coughing up a lung. Now, however, I am much better and actually have, well not FREE time, but time I can devote to blogging again.

So off we go!