Click the picture above to go to the Amazon review page with the video

I made a video review for the book at Amazon. It’s the first time I’ve ever made a video review for anything, and although it took me quite a few takes to make it look like I wasn’t brain dead and a gibbering idiot, I think it turned out okay, thanks to the magic of Windows Movie Maker (which is actually a terrible program and an embarrassment to the otherwise-great Windows Live suite of programs).

But Coke is not common here in Jordan, even though the penetration of tiny 6×6 meter mini-markets into Amman, called “dukkans,” is incredibly high, at a rate of probably around 3 per city block. Without fail, 9 out of 10 of them will stock only Pepsi, their beloved “Beebsee.” I don’t know why they had to pick the one that has two instances of the letter that doesn’t even exist in Arabic. The Tulip family has heard me ponder this lack of Coke before, and gave me some possible theories.

Decades ago, back when all sorts of international trade deals to bring Western products to the Middle East were being signed, Israel and Coca-Cola became affiliated together, and Pepsi went to the Arab countries. Now, with Palestinian refugees and their descendants making up over half of the residents of Amman, old grudges die hard and Coke is still seen as a symbol of Israel. The industrious Palestinians are known as the merchants and importers of Jordan, and own a disproportionate percentage of the dukkans that provide soft drinks to the citizens. I’ve asked about the lack of Coke, point-blank, to some of my local dukkanjis, such as Marwan. Without fail, the response is always “The people don’t ask for Coke, they only want to drink Beebsee.” It’s a classic example of chicken-and-egg. When the markets only sell Pepsi, and the buyers are all either Palestinian or grew up around Palestinians, it’s easy to see how this one-sided market got started.

A Coke can with Hebrew writing, from last month's trip to Nazareth. And I thought the Arabic script of كوكا كولا was hard to read!

I’ve found myself craving Coca-Cola for the past few weeks. I think I can attribute it to my trip to Nazareth in northern Israel/Palestine in mid July, where I was surrounded by the usual unsubtle signage of the Middle East; massive billboards advertising for Coke that I hadn’t seen in months. I know one dukkan in my neighborhood that sells Coke, and I’ve been buying a two liter every few days. I have been watching his fridge stock and can tell that I’m the only one who’s buying the bottles so I know exactly when to clear my throat politely and remind him that he needs to buy new stock. I guess there’s one advantage to being the only Coke drinker in the neighborhood.

I was in the Shemeisani district yesterday afternoon, killing some of my copious summertime before the third choir practice of the season in the evening. Astute readers may remember that I wrote about the bustling business and banking region of the city in late 2008, because Entity Green had its first office in a tall building on its main thoroughfare. I had just finished eating a particularly salty kebab at the Damashqi Schwarma (Damascus) stand, and although they of course had Pepsi available, I decided that I needed a Coke. I wandered down the familiar main street of Shemeisani, looking in the dukkans I used to frequent for an elusive red-labeled bottle instead of the never-ending lines of blue.

Five minutes of walking through the sultry afternoon heat became fifteen as I re-circled the streets, trying to find more dukkans that had either sprung up like unruly dandelions in my absence or that I’d missed two years ago. My mind was now grimly set towards Coca-Cola, and I cast a baleful eye over the rows of 7-Up, Pepsi, and the Arab-made soft drink called “Shani,” which like most things here contains enough sugar to render a camel into diabetic shock. Three dukkans became four, and then six, and as I walked farther and farther up through the dusty blocks, finally eight dukkans. The owners, sweating in the heat and slumped in lawn chairs under dirty old fans, regarded me curiously as I gazed into their refrigerators. “Beebsee?” they queried me helpfully, and then politely apologized when I asked them if they had Coke hidden in some other cooler. “Beebsee is best!” a few reminded me with a friendly smile.

I knew that somewhere in the heart of Shemeisani there was a full grocery store and mall, but I’d never been in there before, and the large residential zone I was in now on the far edge of the district was utterly unfamiliar. I asked some lounging Egyptian construction workers crouching around a massive bowl of fu’ul whether they knew where the store was, and although they did, a passing young man offered to take the finicky foreigner straight to it. The man was a few years younger than me, in a stiff looking suit, and with a briefcase under one arm. He told me that he had just graduated from university, and I correctly guessed that he was touring the banks and looking for a job. We had only been a few blocks away from the Food City supermarket, and with his guidance, I was inside the blasts of the air conditioning within ten minutes.

I had been walking for almost fifty minutes now in this mad search for the fabled Coca-Cola of Jordan, and I rasped at the security desk. “SOFT DRINKS.” A tall man immediately leaped up and took me directly and proudly to a Pepsi product display located in the center of the store, making a Vanna White-esque gesture towards it. “The other brand,” I told him in Arabic. “I need Coca-Cola.” Startled, he led me to a second, smaller display in the back of the large supermarket with the familiar red highlights.

I picked up a two liter and cradled it lovingly. The man probably thought my brain had melted in the heat and he gently tried to put the bottle in a plastic bag for me right there in the aisle, which I equally gently prevented him from doing. I have searched for this bottle for almost an hour through eight dukkans, I told him. “But Beebsee is better!” he protested, then “…are you an American?” “Yes.” I replied. “My people need Coca-Cola to live.”

Feeling some sort of combination of proud and embarrassed, I made my way back to the other side of the district, clutching my bottle visibly in front of me like a trophy pheasant. I had drank a quarter of it by the time I made my way to the Umnia mobile telephone headquarters a few blocks from the Union Bank that hosts our biweekly practices. I had the Umnia “Double Turdo” Wimax device in my backpack, and now that my six months have expired since I wrote that blog post, I was returning the now-useless device to get my deposit back.

It wasn’t until I had walked back to the bank and settled down to wait the last hour before practice, that I discovered that my headphones were missing. With their unique spring-winding system that coils itself into a small drum when not in use, my brother gave them to me for Christmas in 2008 and I hated to lose them. I pulled myself out of the chair in our practice auditorium and started to retrace my steps back towards the Umnia office. I guessed what had happened; the carabineer clip on the headphones had suddenly gotten very loose over the past few days and I figured that it must have fallen off of my belt buckle somewhere in the past few minutes.

As I turned off of the side streets to rejoin the main highway, I saw two children playing in a parking lot that I had cut through on my earlier journey. I had seen them earlier, too, and the younger one was still on his tricycle. He couldn’t have been more than four years old. He was busily wrapping some black wires around his handlebars. I came closer to him, and sure enough, he had the headphone’s case in one hand and was tugging on the wires to try to get more of them out of their spring-case. A few more moments of his tugging and I probably would have been too late and I wouldn’t have bothered trying reclaimed useless twisted wires, but I crouched next to him and demonstrated how the plug fit into my iPod. The little boy looked up at me in quiet open-mouthed silence. The older boy came around the corner. He was probably about six or so, and he confirmed that this was his little brother Ala’a, and his own name was Ahmad. I explained to the boy how I had dropped my headphones, and showed him the iPod. Ahmad immediately crouched next to his brother and began to unwind the wires, and then handed me the completely undamaged headphones with a big smile. The two boys went back to their games and tricycling without a further glance back at me, and within seconds had pedaled and skipped away around the corner of the building and were out of sight.

It’s been an extremely hot summer, and the government has apparently been initiating mandatory power shutoffs to random neighbors to take pressure off of Jordan’s power plants. The Tulip family up the street had one a few nights ago, and my turn came last night as I was re-heating some spaghetti. I sat there in the dark with only the dim light of a cheap flashlight and the glow of the gas jets heating the water for the noodles. Thankfully it was only for an hour. The neighborhood kids, shouted with joy and there was applause up and down the street.

It’s going to be an interesting weekend. A friend on Facebook just posted this excerpt of an email from the American embassy here in Jordan.

On Saturday the Ministry of Education intends to release the results of the summer high-school exam. Families throughout Amman often celebrate when the results are announced, and for some the celebration is exuberant. Groups of young adults may drive around in cars blowing horns, and some individuals may shoot celebratory gunfire into the air. Please do not be surprised if you hear gunfire.

Ah, Jordan! I’m going to miss your gunfire-laden celebrations.

Our elders explained that it was a common theory in the Arab world that at night, plants start taking in and using oxygen and compete with humans for it. Because of this theory, many people here make sure that they remove all the plants from their bedroom at night and put them outside in the hall. I confirmed this with a friend of mine here who has a bachelor’s degree in nursing. “Of course you put the plants outside of the room, especially in a hospital,” he said. “Otherwise, they might suck up all of the oxygen in the room.”

I was completely dumbfounded by this. Now, I can’t speak for all of the countries in the west, or other states besides Wisconsin, or even other school systems besides the ones I went to. However, I’m pretty sure that it’s a standard part of middle school biology classes that we learn that plants = good for oxygen, regardless of the time of day. On that same topic, I learned that there are old superstitions here that walking through a forest at night can be harmful to your health, for the same reasons.

I had to find out where this completely contradictory idea came from.

In my completely scientific research process of “searching The Google” I came across some pretty interesting articles, the most credible of these being from “Yahoo! Health Expert” Doctor Maoshing Ni. I checked his credentials – he’s a specialist in Chinese medicine and anti-aging research.

To get through the night, most plants reverse the process of photosynthesis and breathe, like you and I, by burning carbohydrates and oxygen while producing carbon dioxide and water. So surround yourself with plants during the day but remove them from your bedroom at night when you sleep.

On this Yahoo! Answers question thread, I found the back-and-forth between people to be particularly interesting. The reactions of most of the question answers that you can see if you scroll down the page (that the asker did not select to be “best answer”) were the same as mine – incredulous that someone would even ask the question (also note the citation on the “best answer” selection is Dr. Maoshing’s article).

Finally, the page that I found to be the most helpful was this one from the Aroid Forum. After establishing that yes, plants do shut down photosynthetic reactions at night, I learned that yes, that does mean that they need to carry out simple respiration at night, same as humans. Maybe it was just my school, but strike one against me: I was wrong. I don’t recall ever learning that plants carry out human-like respiration in the absence of light.

But is the Eastern World right? Let’s look at the math from Aroid Forum. (Bold emphasis added by me)

I asked a friend who did his doctoral work on plant respiration and got the approximation that the emission of CO2 in the dark is unlikely to exceed 4 micro moles per square meter of leaf surface per second. This is the same as the O2 taken up. Say our plants have a leaf area of one meter. Let’s say for the sake of argument that both upper and lower leaf surfaces emit at that rate, so our plants use up 8 micro moles PER SECOND (please excuse the upper case, but when we think of a whole night the seconds really add up).

In an 8-hour night, we have the 8 micro moles/s x 3600 s/h x 8 h = 230400 micro moles of oxygen the plants take up. That is only millionths of moles, so it amounts to 0.23 mole. That got the number back down in a hurry.

How much oxygen was in the room to start with?
A room 4 m x 4 m x 2.4 m has 38.4 cubic meters of air. That is 38400 liters.
At room temperature, a mole of gas is about 25 liters, so the room has 1536 moles of air.
If we say the air in the room is 20 % oxygen, we have 307 moles of oxygen to start with.

How much of the total oxygen in the room did the plant use? It is 0.23/307 = 0.075 %.

What about our oxygen-starved sleeper?
A person breathes out about 900 g CO2 per day or about 300 g in an 8-hour night.
CO2 has a mole weight of 44.
300/44 = 6.8 moles CO2 emitted = moles O2 taken up by a person in the night.

The 6.8 moles of oxygen used by the sleeping person amounts to only about 6.8/307 = 2.2 % of that available.

How do the plant and the sleeper compare? The plant uses 0.23/6.8 = 3.4 % as much.

With all the guessing (“approximation” in science-speak), none of the numbers has any meaning unless it’s rounded off to only one digit. You can insist that a sleeping person uses less oxygen than an active one, the room is smaller and the plant larger, but that doesn’t change anything. A good-sized plant surface won’t reduce the oxygen content of the room by much more than a tenth of a percent, and that is only about three percent of what the inhabitant uses up.

So, that takes care of that. To summarize, no one has been getting the complete picture so everyone’s a little bit wrong. My American school never taught me that plants consume any oxygen at all, and Eastern schools don’t mention exactly how ridiculously small the amount of consumed oxygen is.

And bottom line: how many of us sleep in completely air-tight sealed rooms, anyway? Eastern science really needs to take that into their considerations, otherwise they’re ignoring the question of how humans don’t just kill themselves off with the amount of CO2 we use up in one night. Or, for that matter, why a husband and wife who sleep in the same bed don’t suffer from oxygen deprivation. Unless you sleep with your head in a plastic bag (in which case you probably have bigger problems, my friend) that plant next to your bed, or even an entire roomful of them, isn’t going harm you a single bit.

Science!

Why not make your breathing mask fun? You're going to get stared and hollered at anyway; might as well go all the way.

Biking in the streets of Amman is nothing like biking back when I was in college in Madison. For one thing, you fear for your life a lot more, either from being pancaked into the grille of a Hummer or from being asphyxiated by vehicle fumes. It’s a common joke here in Jordan that most of the heavy transport trucks seen around the city were purchased on the cheap by local companies from Europe because they simply wouldn’t pass European emissions laws. Well, Europe’s garbage is our treasure here in Jordan, I guess, because these smog-belching vehicles from the last century are quite prevalent. Whether you’re on a bicycle or in a car with an open window, you can always tell when one of these beasts is coming up behind you, because somehow they’re so foul that their pollution actually precedes them, causing eyes to water and vision to blur.

Ironically, the opposite quality of vehicle is proportionally just as prevalent in Jordan. There are Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, and Hummer dealerships all within a few kilometers of each other near Mecca Street where Cycling Jordan has its shops, and it seems as if drivers here have a mindset that the nicer their car is, the more right they have to crush you like a bug if you do something as foolish as obey common traffic etiquette rules.

So yes, fearing for my life was how I started out the morning. I had successfully made it back from choir to my house last night, even without my helmet, a light, or any reflective clothes. But that was a 3 minute drive at 10:00 at night when the roads were comparatively empty. My heart sank at the thought of biking 22 KM to work, all the way in Ayn al Basha, and then coming back up the hill. I left home at 10:25 in the morning, but immediately ran into problems when I discovered I couldn’t shift into the lowest gear on my front set. Not a huge deal in the Jebel Amman area with its moderate hills, but there’s a 350 meter climb from Ayn al Basha back into Amman and I knew that would be impossible without that low gear. I decided to head to the shop first to have the specialists look at it.

It was an interesting trip, just like I knew it would be. Amman during the work week is much busier than the silent Friday holy day, and my colorful yellow and green jersey, helmet, and facemask got a lot of stares and calls from peanut gallery. “HELLO WHAT THIS? WHERE YOU GO?” was a frequent phrase bellowed at me from the sidewalk. Bikers here just learn to smile, wave, and ignore everything else… “Polite Indifference” is the best way to deal with gawking hecklers. Then there are the busloads of soldiers who whoop uncontrollably at you, the drivers that play chicken with you, and the aforementioned black smoke following behind 15% of the vehicles on the road. But of course there are the fun parts, like when little children stare at you from their driveways, awestruck, and rush out to the edge of the road, jumping up and down with huge smiles, waving and crying “HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!”

Hussein, the lanky young Egyptian man who manages the shop for Sa’ad, looked me up and down and chuckled as I entered. He’s a wizard with bike maintenance and had the gears readjusted and a new water bottle holder installed in 5 minutes. He asked me where I was heading, and raised his bushy eyebrow when I said I was going down into the Ayn al Basha region. And you’re going to go back up the hill then, too? he asked, to which I merely replied, “insha’allah!”

Of course, the ride down that magnificent hill wasn’t without problems. A hidden pothole got me as I was only a few hundred meters from the bottom of the hill, causing the handlebars to slide downwards a little bit. The bike itself was completely undamaged (although I almost had a heart attack after narrowly avoiding being struck by a manure truck) but I knew that before I would attempt to return up this hill, the handlebars would need to be re-aligned. My coworkers found my getup to be hilarious, especially the mask and shorts. Shorts are an article of clothing that just isn’t worn in Jordan unless you’re a child or on the beach. One of the other teachers asked to buy the bike from me for reasons I can’t fathom (Taher’s never biked a day in his life) and our janitor, Wusam, wanted to know if he could join the Dead 2 Red team.

Khalil drove me back up to the top of the hill in his truck, after Wajih and Aaron derided me for not biking the behemoth instead. “Next time!” I told them, “when the whole bike is working in perfect condition!” The sun was going down by now, and I suddenly realized that just because I was in a desert country in February didn’t mean that it wasn’t February. I was wearing a biking jersey and shorts, and I was cold. Jordan doesn’t usually have much wind chill (or wind for that matter, except for about 50 days in April and May) but that becomes moot when you’re biking down a highway at 30 km/h.

Honestly, regardless of the small mishaps of the day, I really enjoyed re-introducing myself to the practicality of a bike. I joke about how terrifying the drivers can be, but actually they were a lot better than I was dreading. I’ve never biked in New York City, but I imagine that this is how New York would be for bikers if they didn’t have nice things like emissions laws and biking lanes. And the time saving! It normally takes me 50 minutes to walk from 6th Circle back to my house, but on the bike going along the same route I’m able to do it in 15-20 minutes. I’m going to be sad to give the bike back to Sa’ad after the Dead 2 Red is over…but maybe this experience will be the thing that pushes me in the bike-owners category!

The rant of the night is the lack of a standardized power plug in Jordan. This country has a ridiculous lack of standardization, and it seems to be the worse when it comes to just choosing a power plug to use. Check out this map:

Poor little Jordan has at least 5 listed

It’s one thing to have this entire country filled with so many plug standards I have to carry a sack of clinking adapters in my backpack to make sure I’ll be able to plug in my laptop where I need to work. That’s bad enough. It’s even worse when we have four different plug standards at the training center in Ayn al Basha!

When I first came to Ayn al Basha, the only building that had electricity (or even existed for that matter) was the lime-green administration building. All the plugs in there are using the Italian “L” standard; three prongs in a straight line. Then when we built the first classrooms in September and October of 2008, the electricians put in the German “Schuko” style plug. Now, after I returned from America on my vacation, I discovered that some numbskull had wired my new classroom with British “MK” plugs – my most-despised type of plug that’s used here. Then, just a couple days ago while I was with the TOT class in the assembly room, I saw that the plugs there were using some weird hybrid of the USA “A” standard, combined with widened holes to fit the “Europlug.” Supposedly, it’s some sort of Chinese sub-standard. You know what really gets me? Aaron told me that the electrician that did up my new computer lab was the same one who installed the “Schuko” plugs in all the other classrooms last year, so he should have known better than to just stick another random outlet standard into the walls. It’s just a coincidence that because of their complexity, MK outlets cost twice and cables cost thrice more as any other type, right? Hmmm.

The British MK outlet and plug are indeed the absolute worse, relics of the 1930’s with a plug that requires its own built-in fuse and an outlet box that usually has an utterly pointless power switch next to it. The pins on the MK are huge, ungainly, and if you are unlucky enough to step on one in the middle of the night you will beg for death. “They’re impossible to break, though,” some of my English friends here will say with a grin, and one even proudly showed me a thick ugly scar on his right foot where he drove an MK a centimeter through his sole while running across a room to answer a phone. The MK needs to die. Or at least, Jordan needs to stop using it – but it’s unlikely, seeing that it’s probably second after the Europlug in the number of buildings it’s used in.

The Europlug – a bland, non-grounded little weak thing. Most lower-amperage devices in Jordan use this style of plug, and mercifully it seems to fit into most of the outlets found here. However, because of its lack of ground, it’s useless for computers. Also, they also feel like they’re going to fall apart in my hand. Pass.

The “Schuko” plug would definitely be my favorite if the American “B” standard didn’t exist. Strong and sturdy with an ingenious way to add a ground wire to the system. Philip thought ahead when he had his house built and had each wall outlet contain two sockets – one using the Italian “L” plug and the other using the “Schuko.” The only problem with them is that they’re still too large for my taste. When I need to buy power strips (which is quite a bit), you can only fit four “Schuko” plugs on there, like the MK. If you tried to sell a power strip in America with only four outlets on it, you’d be tarred and feathered. By me, at least, if no one else would.

The USA “NEMA 5″ plug is by far the best of them all, and after having to work with this bizarre hodgepodge for the past year, I don’t think I’ll find much resistance to that claim. Our plugs and outlets are like our citizens: a well-grounded combination of strength, size, and electrical amperage. It’s no shock that we invented electricity, really, and it feels good to be able to say for once that America is indisputably the best at something besides starting wars. Without further ado…

USA! USA! USA! USA!

Glad I got that out of my system.

Basically, the TSA’s plan boils down to this – people coming into America from international flights can now expect random “surprises,” for example, not being able to move from your chair for the last hour of the flight – for any reason. Another great one they’re cooking up is not letting anyone use any electronic devices, or even have them in carry-on luggage. Imagine, say, a 14 hour flight to Jordan, without so much as an electronic song playing machine to keep you company. It’s enough to make me want to brush up on my saxophone skills and bring one of those aboard – if only! Pity that part of the plan is also to restrict international travelers to one carry-on bag only…previously, I’ve always brought my backpack as a “personal item” and then a second small piece of luggage as the official “carry-on.” I’m not sure how that’s affected but I’m sure I’ll find out soon.

Seriously, how does not letting us use electronics on inbound flights keep us safer from diaper bombs? In my opinion, here’s what we should have had right after the 9/11 attacks: armed, trained National Guard-types in every plane, armed with rubber-bullet guns or some other sort of weaponry that wouldn’t depressurize a plane. Watch people standing up, moving around, and basically just keep watch. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

It’s at times like this when only XKCD.com knows how to sum up a situation. And now that laptop-less paranoid world parodied below may very well have come.

I use it a lot more now that I live in Jordan, however. The main reason for this is because for whatever reason, I can pretty much be guaranteed accurate, up-to-date imagery of Jordan and other Arab countries. Although Google didn’t have street names in Amman for my first five months in Jordan, they’ve added those since then – although their use is debatable since no person, be he taxi driver or King of Jordan, has any idea what 99% of the street names are in Amman. No one uses them, using major buildings or traffic circles as directional landmarks instead.

When I came back to Madison a couple weeks ago, I wanted to see if they’d updated the Google Earth map to reflect the fact that my venerable Ogg residence Hall was demolished a year ago and since then two entirely new dorms have been built in its place. Google Maps (as in the website) is less effective here because it only provides a copyright date, which is always just the current year. Google Earth, however, informed me right away that downtown Madison, at an elevation of around 7 kilometers, hasn’t been updated since late August 2004.

Madison, WI, USA: Last updated late August 2004

You can easily see the imagery date in every recent version of Google Earth, there in the lower left part of the screenshot I took. Compare that five and half year update span to this screenshot from Amman which I captured on the same evening.

Amman, Jordan: Last updated early July 2009

This picture is from mid July of 2009. Since I was already in the Middle East, I flew around to other large capitol cities from other Middle Eastern countries.

Beirut, Lebanon: Last updated late August 2009

Riyadth, Saudia: Last updated late May 2009

Tehran, Iran: Last updated late June 2009

Even more interesting, when I hovered over Baghdad, the former center of America’s “War on Terror” not even a date was displayed for the current photography. Using Google’s “previous imagery” function, I deduced that the last satellite photos that were given an official timestamp were from back in 2005. Out of the dozen searches I conducted, Baghdad was the only city that did not prominently display the date of its images in the lower left.

Baghdad, Iraq: Last updated...???

So, it’s obvious that there’s merely more satellites posed over the relatively small area of the Middle East compared with the vastly larger North American continent, right? And it should therefore stand to reason that they just happen to be taking more pictures of everyone under their cameras. Not necessarily. These Arab capitols I’ve just shown you weren’t the only ones I photographed. Below are the two major cities of Jordan’s next door neighbor, Israel.

Tel Aviv, Israel: Last updated early February 2006

Jerusalem, Palestine/Israel: last updated late November 2007

So, in the span of a few hundred kilometers, we have five capitols of Arab nations, that have all had their satellite imagery updated within the past year. However, easily within that same range, we have a country that is considered Jewish that has pictures that are many times older. Why are there no satellite images of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in the same time scale as the other cities? From the looks of the Arab pictures from May, June, July, and then August (and who knows for Baghdad) there was a definite system to these photography. Shouldn’t Israel be in there in, for example, April or September?

Taking these screenshots reminded me of my trip into Jerusalem a few months ago. Our Palestinian driver from the border pointed out a zeppelin that flew high above the center of town. He told us that it was a security blimp, positioned up there to be able to focus down at the Muslim mosques below with high resolution cameras. Supposedly, they carefully keep logs and records by name on every Muslim who enters the mosques, keeping special care to note how devout they are to their prayers and how frequently they attend. How very generous of Israel to take up that responsibility!

I’m not the first person to raise an eyebrow about Google’s satellite image-server policy. This article from the Arab News Blog questions the differences in resolution (clarity) of the images that are used over Iraq, Egypt, and Israel. In my own completely non-scientific article, I don’t speculate on resolutions and how easy it is to see various things in each city, but instead just how frequently things are updated. You can check all of this out yourself in Google Earth if you like; and if you don’t have it it’s free to download and useful for many more things than mere casual observations such as these!

So, my friends and colleagues in the Arab and Persian worlds, feel free to shoot a jaunty wave up to the beautiful blue skies above you (or grayish, if you’re in Cairo) because you can rest assured that you’re being watched and photographed – perhaps even a bit more than your neighbors. For your safety and convenience, of course.

In other news, I had my first government-required blood test. Apparently this is a thing that they roll out every few years or so. My mother mentioned it to me even before I first arrived in Jordan, but no one ever asked me to get one before dutifully stamping my paperwork. This time, however, it was different. Maybe because of H1N1 or something, but they’re being much more strict about doing things in the official manner. I went to the good ol’ 8th Circle police station again (probably the sixth time I’ve been there) and the officer in charge of foreigner relations immediately told me to bring a sheet of paper with a blood test results from the Ministry of Health, a 20 minute taxi ride away.

By this point, nothing surprises me about the Jordanian bureaucracy anymore, so I merely got into the taxi and went; no point in arguing. I paid my JD20 for the blood test, and went upstairs to the top floor. There, two maternal muhijabeh (covered with scarves) women fussed over me, asked me about my Arabic and about my children (surprised that I didn’t have any; they assume most foreigners here are married, apparently). Same as in America, I winced when they jabbed me, but it was over in a half second and they patted me on the head. I picked up the results this morning (I had passed, somehow; even without studying) and returned to the 8th Circle.

The same officer of foreign relations chuckled when he saw me enter. He accepted my paperwork, commenting that he figured it was probably the same as last time. He looked up my passport file in the government database (I love having files in government databases) and frowned to his colleague, sitting in the couch on the other side of his office. He asked me why I had been coming in and out of the country so much and why I didn’t just get a permanent residency card. I didn’t really have an answer for him, so he winked and pointed over at the police officer on the couch. “Are you married?” he asked me. It’s a pretty common question here. When I told him no, he nodded to the other officer and told me, “That man over there has a pretty sister, what do you think?” Once again, I found myself strangely unable to form a response to a man’s question. There’s something about discussing someone’s sister, while both parties are wearing automatic handguns strapped to their chests, that just makes me quieter than usual.

The man on the couch rolled his eyes. “He’s my younger brother, so my sister is his sister as well,” he grunted. I took a gamble and replied, “If that’s what it takes to get a permanent residency card and be a real Jordanian, sounds good to me – where do I sign?” The two of them crowed with laughter, slapped me on the back, and had me sit down for coffee. I learned that the main officer’s name was Aadel, which means “Justice” in Arabic, and commented it was convenient for his line of work. He told me that he remembered me from the first time he’d ever seen me, and sure enough – it was the same man that I had originally referred to as “Tony Soprano” back in September of last year. His brother dryly told me that I might as well be married into the family because of how often they saw me. As we talked, he occasionally paused to do his job, which seemed mostly to tell wealthy Jordanians that they’d need to have their Filipino housemaids tested at the Ministry of Health before he could approve their residency. After a large group of Filipinos, herded by a stern looking older woman, had left the office, I asked him if that was who he normally saw during his work day. He assented, telling me that it got pretty boring. The three of us chatted for a few moments about traveling around the area and police work in the country as we sipped our cardamom-filled coffee. I tried to get a picture with Aadel, but he told me it was prohibited and pointed to the camera above his door, staring down at him. He shook my hand warmly as I left, and I called him “nijma bil samooaht,” (A star among the heavens) which I felt was slightly more acceptable than the first thing I said to him a year ago (if you don’t remember the horribly embarrassing thing I told him last year, read the article linked above).

Strange to think of how much my opinion of the police here have changed in the past year; I imagine that’s come with my grasp of the language so I can understand what they’re saying about me. Really, because of the emphasis on family, connections, hospitality, and honor here in the Arab world, it seems even easier to socialize with your average police officer here than it does in America (ironically, that could be because they will gladly stop and chat with you and get coffee while they should be guarding a street; I never said they were the most professional).

There’s less than three weeks now before I return to America for a long vacation. I can’t wait to see how the country has changed in the year since I’ve last seen it. I can’t believe when I left before, Obama hadn’t even become president yet! It’ll be great to see how much everything has “change”d since he’s taken office…oh, wait.

Pause for a moment after reading that. Let the bile clear from your throat. Think about where you’ve heard things like “no racial intermixing” before. Warning of the “dangers” of it, and how it’s an “unnatural phenomenon.” Things like America’s old Jim Crowe laws et al. come to mind, perhaps? How about this one?

Marriages between * and citizens of * or kindred blood are forbidden. Marriages concluded in defiance of this law are void, even if, for the purpose of evading this law, they were concluded abroad.

Where’s that from? It’s from the Nuremberg Laws, ironically. In the original Nazi-created laws, the asterisks were “Jews” and “Germans.” And, to throw the Israeli propaganda department a bone here, the second part of Nuremberg, Section 1, Number 1 has not yet come to pass; inter-religious marriages are only recognized by Israel if they are performed outside the country. Bizarre, isn’t it?

Let’s get a little bit more general here. This has (apparently) been going on for a long time in Israel, not just because of the perceived danger of “The Exploitative Arab” (Season Premiere at 9/8 Central!) to the “innocence” of the Jewess. If not for the fact that it’s vile and disgusting to degrade someone’s marriage “outside of the faith,” I’d find it amusing. You’d think that they would have at least waited a century before pulling literally identical propaganda tactics that their former Nazi persecutors did to them.

As the women warm up with "You Will Be His," a very special lady joins them in the back (sssh, it's a secret!)

After what Dozan wa Awtar billed as the first combination of Iftaar, plus singing concert, plus quiz game night (probably not hard to be first at that combination, actually) at Books@Cafe, I just returned home from a packed rooftop audience. It was a good night, even though the venue was a little bit cramped (with us in a corner of the outdoor cafe area) but the sound setup was quite powerful – even deafeningly so when I had the accidental misfortune of standing too close to one of their speakers and my ears rang for a good 5 minutes.

We did a compilation of all of our other concerts since the beginning, most of which had been shortened for time limit purposes. Each one of the songs we sang had a question related to it which was put up on a projector sitting on the roof of the main building in front of the audience. Surprisingly, there were about 50 questions, and we as a concert only provided clues to half of them. The other half were related to questions our “DJ” asked in both English and Arabic, and to songs that were played over the speakers that people were asked to identify. There was a good mix of foreigners and locals in the crowd that night, which meant that the questions were mixed as well. Some questions, like “name the main character in this theme song” (Mickey Mouse Theme Song) might have been easy for the Westerners in the group, but when the choir danced out the opening number to an Arab cartoon named “Belle and Sebastian” I certainly know I was as baffled as the foreigners in the audience looked.

During those small mini-intermissions where the audience was working on questions unrelated to our singing ability, the choir members milled about, chatted with friends in the audience, or in the case of Yanal and Nedy and I, sampled the local hot chocolate. Because it’s Ramadan, no alcohol can be served or purchased anywhere in the country for the entire month. Some more liberal businesses have been known to evade the rules, though, and I remember last year, Books@Cafe was shut down for the entire month of Ramadan for alcohol-serving infractions. I was helping Nedy grade some first-round quiz sheets that had come in, and Yanal handed me a white mug in passing and said, “Can you hold my hot chocolate for me?” I grasped the wet base of the mug and looked at him in confusion. “Yanal, this mug is covered in condensate…?” He looked at me blankly and said, “You know, my hot chocolate. Feel free to have some.” Following his directions, I quickly discovered that the mug contained neither hotness nor chocolate.

Wait a second...

Besides questions on songs we’d already done, and mp3’s courtesy of Yanal’s laptop, many of the singers in Dozan also did solo or small-group bits and pieces from musicals. Besides famous Western ones like Miss Saigon and Grease, there were also (apparently) famous Arabic musicals as well. I was a back-up singer for my English friend John’s rendition of “Bui-doi” from Miss Saigon and part of the militant men’s number of “Do You Hear the People Sing” from Les Miserables (which took me back to high school when I sang the same song in costume for one of my favorite performances of all time). The last act of the evening, though, was our director Shireen and I singing a little cut from Grease’s “Summer Nights” which was a lot of fun. I wish they would have let me sing the whole song, but oh well!

In other news, class has resumed at Ayn al Basha for the second year. I was there on the first day of class on Sunday. It was strange to be there as a technical support contractor and not a teacher for the first time, and many of my former Hardware students or other random people came up joyfully to shake my hand, and expressed their disappointment when I told them I wouldn’t be teaching this time around. I have so many other jobs to do now that I’ll probably only be at the training center one or two days a week to check over the computers and the network.

I have to say, I was extremely impressed with how Jeff handled everything. With both Aaron and Ahmad on vacation, he handled the entire center and everyone’s questions with amazing professionalism and calm. In the half hour before classes started, he probably had 20 people milling around him, demanding to know why they didn’t get into this-or-that class for this-or-that reason (usually no one’s fault but their own for not properly filling out the application previously). As I observed from the sidelines, wrists-deep in a server case that needed to have hard drives replaced, I knew that if I was in his shoes there, I would have gone insane and started shouting epithets in Arabic and Wamidh would have to administer tranquilizers to me with an elephant gun. But Jeff held his ground with every demand and cajole and calmly took everyone’s questions in an ordered and logical matter. If I had been wearing a hat, I would have taken it off to him.

We’re getting good turnout at EGT, or so I’ve heard. There was some worry as to whether or not people would show up because of Ramadan, but people are apparently coming to class as they should be. We had a little “celebration” party and iftaar at my house a week ago to commemorate the end of the first year, and Aaron and Jeff went over the policies of the new year with the teachers. It sounds like things are more strict now then previously in terms of attendance and behavior, but EGT has really built up a respectful name for itself and the students, both young and old, seem to have a craving for rules and order. After living in Iraq, a country that is decidedly unregulated in many respects, it’s probably a breath of fresh air to have a nice daily schedule to fall into.