Original bins

Grace and I rendezvoused with her friends at 7^th circle on the way out of town, heading towards the Dead Sea. I had the opportunity to see how the recycling drop-off point, constructed by Entity Green, had changed over the years. When I left, it was a couple of bins with a big sign over it right next to the Cozmo grocery store. Now it had been moved further away into a parking lot, but it didn’t seem to be a slight – the bins had changed into a mobile home-sized green-painted building with separate room, diagrams of how recycling helps the environment, and separated slots for 5-6 different items. I noted they were still collected stale old bread, something that EG used to collect when I was around and resell to farmers to use as feed.

Entity Green's Cozmo recycling center - it's so big!

All told, we were eight intrepid hikers heading south through the surprisingly green countryside toward the less-green slopes near the sea. Only a month ago, Jordan had issued a minor “emergency” of several inches of snow, causing school to be closed for two days and throwing the city into chaos. Jordanians barely are able to keep from crashing into each other in good weather days; the addition of any extra element into roads is understandably a recipe for disaster. However, the added moisture had done wonders for the appearance of the rocky terrain, and the weather was warm and sunny.

When our two cars reached the point that Nelle had told us about, precisely at the “55km to Amman” road marker across the highway from the Dead Sea’s “O Beach”, we found a nice little semi-cleared flat lot. We could expect to see Bedouin on the trip, as Nelle had pointed out a watermelon patch that her groups had walked through on their way back out of the wadi on the northern cliff overlooking the wadi. The Bedouin’s influence on this area would turn out to be quite beneficial to us later in the day.

At first, I have to admit that we were disappointed. Although there was the usual concrete bridge holding up the highway and allowing the wadi to drain into the Dead Sea…it was absolutely dry. I’d never seen that before in any of the Dead Sea wadis we’d visited before, and I worried that this was going to be more of a rock climb that anything else. Grace even called Nelle (thankfully for us, the nearby hotels mean that there are plenty of cell towers nearby to prevent any loss of coverage, in case of any accidents) to make sure that we were in the right place.

We shouldn’t have worried – the ground grew damp bit by bit, and finally a small trickle of water was found vanishing into the dust. From there, the trickle turned into a small but steadily gurgling stream, filled with the typical thick green strings of algae so common in Jordan’s wadis. As pretty as it is, it’s probably caused by the overuse of fertilizers by Bedouins – it’s commonly known fact in Jordan that crop farmers receive water and fertilizer subsidies from the government even though the GDP from crops in the country is quite small. Many activists in the country wish the government would stop the subsidies in order to try to encourage Jordanians to grow crops more suited to the desert, but of course that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

As we walked through the canyon, we passed in and out of shade quite frequently, a sign of fluctuation in the width and height of the canyon walls. The high exposure to sun, the small amount of water, and the numerous waterfalls, big and small, reminded me a lot of the Wadi Himara hike I’d taken a few weeks before my departure in 2010. Truth be told, although we saw a lot more frogs and crabs than any other wadi hike I’d been on, there was nothing particularly special about the wadi. It boasted several very large waterfalls (probably in the top five in the country, after the country’s largest which is in Himara) that made for a good place to relax and snack in the pleasant shadows of the 40 meter tall canyon walls.

If you squint, I'm the tiny black dot on the wall of the canyon. It was a slippery climb!

It wasn’t without dangers, either. One of our eight members, a tall and quiet Asian fellow named Charles, nearly slid to his death (or at least probable injury) as we were climbing up an almost sheer rock face that Nelle had aptly named “the sketchy part” of the wadi hike. Basically, in order to reach the sought-after deeper water pools further up the stream, getting to the top of that 40 meter waterfall was necessary and the sketchy route was the only one we knew. A slight misstep and a strangled “whoa” and I saw Charles begin to bounce down the slope. He was saved by a large fern plant which stoically grabbed at the edge of the canyon wall, and its large fronds waved in his face as he shakily pulled himself back to his feet. I was the last one in the line of our party of eight – Grace and I probably had the most wadi-hiking experience, and some of the members, including Charles, had none at all. None of us had ever been to the wadi before. The only other close calls that we had – and me personally, too, was people bouncing baseball sized rocks past my head as we struggled up the side of the cliff. I encouraged us to fan out as much as possible on the cliffside to prevent a misstep from dislodging killer rocks on each others’ heads.

It was odd, and exhilarating, to be both an old hand at wadi hiking, yet new at it all over again. The practiced tapping of the rocks with feet to test for stability, the hot sun above us, the smell of the oleanders all around – it was like I had never left, yet I was vividly happy to be back after my long absence. After another 20 minutes of walking above the wadi, we reached what Nelle had called the campsite, a cleared area with plenty of shelf-like flat rocks directly above the waterfall. You don’t want to be a camper who sleepwalks at that campsite, to be sure. I hesitantly gulped down the rest of my falafel sandwiches and watched the water shoot off into space below us, hitting the ground far below beyond our viewpoint. The sun was broiling hot by that point, but there was a small cave that provided some shade at the entrance. No one went too far in, because it appeared that the Bedouin’s sheep had been using it as a public toilet as well.

The others were ready to call it a day, and decided to use the goat tracks on the opposite side of the cliff to make their way to the watermelon patch that we could clearly see in the distance; a little green patch in the red and brown stones. Grace, in her immense kindness, humored my urge to see the pools of water that Nelle had said were still higher above us, but the hike had been easier than I thought and we had gotten farther than I had thought we could in such a short period of time – it was hotter than I figured it would be by the time we reached the campsite. The pools were 45 minutes away, but I decided they would be there the next time I was in the neighborhood, and half an hour after everyone else, we headed back the same way they did.

Ready for the long (and hot) hike back

Apparently another tourist group had arrived at the lower waterfalls while we were snacking, and we could hear their laughter echoing up to us as we grimly traversed the shade-less narrow goat trails. I looked longingly down at the shady lower falls, but we figured that this direct path would be shorter than having to clamber over rocks on the way out. I had hoped, though, that the sun would be lower in the sky by the time we would be leaving. It was a hot hour of walking, but we made it back to our scorching car, and met the others at the Movenpick on the Dead Sea for ice cream (exorbitantly priced at 2.8 dinars for a tiny cup, but I guess that’s what the market is willing to pay, so…)

Back in Amman, I had time to gingerly lie on my bed for half an hour before heading over to Cycling Jordan for a night ride. Whereas my morning companions had all been fellow foreigners, it was time for me to be the only ajnubee in a group of young sporty Arabs. Sa’ad knew I was in the area and was there at his shop to greet me, but to my surprise he told me that he had mostly “retired” from biking. He was sporting hair longer than I’d ever seen on him and was wearing business casual clothes, too – I was sad that he couldn’t join us, but happy to see my old friends Sari, Hussein, and other old biking pals. Instead of posting the Google Earth .kmz file here like I used to do, I’ve tried my hand at making the route in Google Maps instead, and just linking you to a page instead of a file! We started at Cycling Jordan in West Amman, went through the equally-rich and foreigner-filled Abdoun district in the south, and then finally ended up in the belaad for famous knaffeh pastries from Habibeh.

I was greatly enjoying being able to keep up with (most) of the rapid fire Arabic conversations happening around me. I preened a little bit when white tourists passed by us and gave me a curious glance, and I was even happier when Arabs walking past didn’t pay me a single glance – I was fitting in. Of course, that didn’t happen much – one guy stopped by us to ask directions, then commented to my friends and me that I spoke Arabic well. He then said something too quickly to catch to my friends, who declined and said that we were going to Habibeh. I asked what the guy had said, and my friend Mohammad said, “man, you get all the luck! He just invited you to his family’s home for dinner. I declined on your behalf, though – you have knaffeh to eat, hah!”

Three of our riders were recently-arrived Iraqis who had heard about Entity Green (Training) from friends. We've become a legend!

After a well-deserved rest the next morning (and, um, early afternoon as well) I did a bit of wandering about the city, trying to manage my remaining few dinars carefully so that I could be assured a taxi or bus ride’s worth back to the airport the next day. I couldn’t believe how fast the trip had gone by, but those are the breaks when you’re a professional I.T. guy in Wisconsin – no more telling Wajih “I’ll be in Central Asia for oh, two or three weeks or something, just pay me a little bit next month” and having that be good. I fit another trip to al-Borij in with Rami (my Dead 2 Red friend; he’s the one on the far right in the above picture) and we saw our friends Mai and Rula in a women’s classical Arabic concert – the two of them also played classical Arabic instruments in Dozan for our trip to Germany in 2010. Here’s one of the pieces below – Deggo al-Mahabeej.

And just like that, I was on my last day in Jordan for the forseeable future. Time to make it count. I got up early to meet Janelle for breakfast – the Waffle House was the venue of choice again; I couldn’t get enough of expensive American breakfasts while I was overseas! – and then stopped by my old grocery store, Haboob, to pick up some tea to bring back. The cashier, a bored-looking guy in his 40s, gave my change and said “Have a good one” in perfect English. Of course this intrigued me, and I figured in this culture no one minds being up front, so I asked him how he came to speak American English so well. “I lived in New York for 12 years, so I’d hope my English was pretty good,” he grunted. Remembering other stories I’d heard of why Americanized Jordanians returned to their home country, I asked him if he wanted to go back. “I sure do. My new wife is from here, though, so I guess I’ll have to wait until she wants to move back with me!”

I had a chance to stop by my old house and chat with Magid. He was busy with his own recycling company, "Green Future" at the time - but it looks like Philip's old garden is doing well.

I took a servicee shared-taxi out to the north part of Amman, so I get baklava from a store that Rami had recommended to me – Tahoona Shamieh, or the Levantine Mill, more or less. It was pretty close to my old go-to store for computer parts, too – PC Circle – so I thought I’d stop by and say hello to my old supplier, Mohammad. I’ll admit it never got old throughout the past week to be given so many warm and heartfelt welcomes, and Mohammad was no exception. The young muhejibeh woman working the checkout counter recognized me at once, and when I asked her, “where’s the boss man himself?” Mohammad immediately emerged from his office in the back and said “Zach! You’ve come back to Jordan!” His father owned the grocery store next to us, so he immediately sent someone over (through a cool secret sliding wall behind us that apparently opened directly into his father’s office) to get some juice for us. I asked him how business was, and whether anything exciting had happened. He and his aid exchanged wry glances. “There was a gas tanker truck that exploded about a block away from here, a few weeks ago.” I knew exactly the kind of trucks he was talking about, and although I was shocked to hear it, and see the videos and photos of the massive explosions that had sent 50 kg gas tanks shooting in all directions from the truck like missiles, I had always wondered why it didn’t happen more often. You see these bored truck drivers smoking cigarettes all the time, screeching to stop signs, and generally behaving in a way that we would term “reckless.” Mohammad took me to the site of the explosion, which I had walked right past on the way there. I never would have guessed that there had been an explosion like what you see below (multiplied by about 30 for the number of tanks that actually ruptured) there.

One of Mohammad's pictures. Amazingly, no one was injured more than some cuts or scrapes - there was plenty of time to evacuate the area when the truck started burning

“Yes, the gas company took care of it all and quite quickly – they paid for redoing all the cars and buildings here. This mobile phone store was completely destroyed,” he said, guesturing to a store behind us, “but as you see, it is completely restocked now.” When things need to move fast in Jordan, they certainly do. As we talked, I watched a fight break out between two groups of young guys – one group ran up to a car with a damaged from section, started pulling the driver out, and the driver and his buddies produced 2×4 clubs of wood and started chasing the original assailants up the hill. Mohammad watched this, and told me that six months ago, a customer at a produce store across the street from his shop got into a fight with a cashier, then found the cashier at his house in the middle of the night and stabbed him. When the wounded man reminded him that there was no way he was getting out of going to prison for this attack, the attacked then stabbed himself in the gut, and then tried to tell the police that it was a “fight” between them and the cashier was equally as guilty. Mohammad shook his head. “We’re about ready for a little less excitement around here.”

After making a couple final stops at Whitman and PTEE to say my final farewells to people, I was ready for the final major event of the trip – appearing in a press release for Dozan wa Awtar, a little mini concert of current songs for their upcoming musicals concert (I posted about that a few days ago) and more importantly for an old-timer like me, several of their older selections too. Thankfully, I was staying with a musically gifted Dozan member with a piano who helped me practice the few new songs, too! It felt just like old times to be having the show at the bank, with a mixture of familiar faces and new ones. The assembled men and women of Jordanian TV and newspapers seemed to like us, and asked rapid fire questions of Shireen afterwards. I was brought forward as an example too – she was talking quickly, but I think Shireen said something along the lines of “Zach left Jordan two years ago, but now in his vacation trip he came back to sing with us. That’s what Dozan is – we’re a family and once you’re with us, you’re always part of the family.”

Night had fallen on the city when Jen and I drove back to her house so I could finish packing. A few of my old biking friends who had been out of the country on business during the night ride wanted to take me out to dinner and catch up, so I selected Abu Jbara as my traditional “last meal in Jordan” stop. I’ve eaten there alone, with Haitham, and now with Wafa’ and Mohammad. At least this time the employees of the restaurant didn’t request that I sing Michael Jackson songs, which has definitely happened a few times. Wafa’, an investor and architect only a few years older than me, pushed plate after plate of fu’ul, baba ganooush, fetteh, and bread at me. “No one is going to want to sit next to you on the plane, you’re eating so many kinds of beans,” he laughed.

I departed Jordan at 2:30 in the morning, more or less the same time that I arrived 8 days prior. Even though I hadn’t been able to do quite as much wadi walloping as I would have liked, in exchange I got to see many more people and more frequently then I had planned. So in all, I think the trip went better than I thought. After all, the wadis will hopefully be there for at least the rest of my life (even after the Dead Sea dries up entirely and vanishes) but the people that made Jordan special to me might not choose to spend their lives there – they could be anywhere in the Middle East or the world – and I can’t necessarily easily get into the other Middle Eastern countries as easily as Jordan!

Ahmad should get an award for tolerating my constant photo-taking. The photo on the left is from August 2008, a week after my arrival. The right is from yesterday.

The past three days of my vacation in Jordan have been hot and tiring, but very satisfying. I’m throwing myself back into my “old ways” of being in the country with great gusto, but perhaps with slightly detrimental results. I should have remembered that it took time for my body to adapt to Jordan’s food, water, heat, and my active lifestyle here. Sure, I’ve been biking regularly in America, but that can’t compare with the wadi hiking and constant walking that I was doing while I lived here. By the time I started hiking in the wadis in 2010, for example, I’d already lived here for a year and a half and my body was already able to cope with extreme heat and walking. By contrast, I think I’ve really strained my muscles with walking and playing frisbee this time around.

On Thursday morning, I stopped by Amman’s massive “City Mall,” where I knew my old friend Ahmad was working. The cavernous space hadn’t changed much, but I took the opportunity to buy a sack of Nescafe 3-in-1, a “coffee” drink that my parents and I both like, and isn’t available in America. Ahmad found me soon after, and the two of us headed to the new Entity Green office – new to me, I mean. Ahmad is another example of someone that’s had a lot change for him in the past two years. He’s gotten married, bought a car (he couldn’t even legally drive when I was here)  and been promoted to overseer of six Entity Green recycling-sorting employees at City Mall’s collection point. I asked him if he missed working in the EGT office, his old job when I had been around. He sighed and reminded me that all the foreign employees, including myself, had left Jordan in 2010. “What job was there for me to translate for when you all left?” I was embarrassed that I had forgotten that the Arab “dream job,” according to Haitham, involved putting your feet up in an office and drinking coffee all day. It might have been a promotion to become a manager in my eyes, but to Ahmad this was debatable. I teasingly asked him if he and his wife Amani had any kids yet. “Not yet,” he chuckled. “Soon, insha’allah.” To be married and not have any kids at 24 is a bit “odd”; he’s probably asked this question by Arabs all the time, and probably with more seriousness.

Khalil greeted me warmly at the office, but couldn’t chat at the moment – he more or less manages the day-to-day operations of Entity Green now and always has many meetings to attend with the new director, Thomas. I had a chance to sit down with the two of them a little later, coffee in hand (the new office is directly above a Starbucks in West Amman, leading to a noticeable increase in the consumption of American coffee versus the Turkish coffee we all used to drink by the tank full). I joked with Khalil that I had half-expected Wusam, the starry-eyed young Palestinian who used to serve us coffee in Ein al Basha, (and tell me how famous I was, repeatedly) to bring it to me. He told me in complete seriousness that Wusam was still with the company, but working at the border to Iraq, hours away, in a new contract with BP that had been signed after I’d left.

The tall and serious-looking Thomas had time to chat with me about the overarching goals for Entity Green, increasing profitability and site locations throughout the country, and furthering the public’s knowledge of the company and recycling. Between Khalil’s long-time knowledge of the ins and outs of the company as Wajih’s right-hand man, and now as the same for Thomas, and the latter’s eye for the future, it warms my heart with pride that I was part of the foundation of the company. I hope Philip feels the same when he hears about it – Entity Green was his baby, after all!

It was only a short walk down the street from the Entity Green office to the Royal Automobile Club of Jordan, hidden behind high walls that I’d biked past many times but of course never set foot inside. I had always assumed that it was literally a car club, but I found out that it was created by wealthy Jordanians to sponsor the numerous car rallies that the former King Hussein had always enjoyed during his lifetime. There was nary a fancy classic car in sight, but I didn’t spend much time outside in the cool evening – the dinner was in a clean, simple dining hall. I didn’t know a single person there, but found out a little about my excited and nervous tablemates, who were from all over the world. The dinner was only available to people who had paid a JD80 “foreigner’s” entry fee; Jordanians and foreigners with residence permits only paid JD15 for the race itself, but didn’t get the dinner. My tablemates were from Portugal, Singapore, Brazil, and – after I was complimented enthusiastically for being a foreigner with “such an incredible grasp of the Jordanian accent!” – an Iraqi-Englishman.

I wince whenever I see exposed outdoor swimming pools in desert countries like Jordan - or Israel. They had a passable buffet, though.

I will admit to a bit of a white lie here. When my tablemates asked me what race I was running the next morning, the event organizers were right nearby, and I wasn’t sure what the policies were for a non-runner, non-racer who had just happened to be handed a ticket to the dinner from a friend. So I lied and said that I was running the full 50 kilometers from the middle of Amman to the Dead Sea. The Englishman and I chatted for half an hour after everyone else had left, and I was very embarrassed to continue the lie, but by that point it would have been weird to lean over and confess that although everything else I had said about my work with Iraqi refugees and Entity Green was true (even if it was from two years ago instead of now, another lie I spun so as to not mention that I was only here on vacation) – I wasn’t going to be running the race. He looked flabbergasted when I mentioned I was going out for drinks with some friends after this dinner. “But your 50 kilometers starts at 5 in the morning – don’t you want to get some sleep?” He gave me his email so I could send him a picture we took together – I’ll write to him when I get back to America and confess my deception and ask him how his race went. He had been looking forward to setting an unofficial speed record, because he was doing the half marathon (21km) on skates, instead of running. I hope the race administrators didn’t give him any trouble – Jordanian administrators love nothing more than creating hassles, after all!

It was lucky that I wasn’t running the next day, because a few pints of familiar Amstel beer at Rover’s Return in West Amman went a long way to causing me to sleep in the next day. My friends Mai and Hala, who also went to Austria with me in 2010, were some of my friends who came to the bar, and we had fun going over the old pictures from our trip on my laptop. I got to meet Mai’s fiancee Khalid for the first time, and my friend Rula gave me a free ticket to an Arabic instrumental concert at the Ras al-Ein cultural center that she and Mai play in. My old biking friend Rami is a mutual friend of Mai’s (they used to be coworkers at Intracom, the sponsor of my 3rd-placing Dead2Red cycling team in 2010) and so I’ll be able to sit with Khalid and Rami at the concert! I’m looking forward to that quite a bit.

Hala holds picture of Hala, holding a picture of Hala. The point was to replicate the extremely serious expression she was wearing for the Austrian photographer.

Friday was a day to hang out with fellow foreigners again. I got an “American breekfahst” at the Waffle House near Rainbow Street, a new restaurant that several foreigner friends had recommended. I was amused to see that, like so many businesses in Jordan, the owners had opened up their restaurant right next to an identical restaurant selling the exact same thing – the Bake House, a place that Rami and I had eaten at many times in 2009 and 10. The intrepid Janelle my dear readers will remember from almost every wadi hiking trip I’ve written about was present at breakfast, giving advice and photos to my friend Grace and I, but I was sad to hear she wouldn’t be able to attend – a badly broken leg will prevent any major wadi adventures for quite awhile in her case. However, Janelle is always the queen of organization, and she documented how to get to the wadi and particularly dangerous or interesting points within to exact detail.

Yep - two American-style breakfast restaurants literally next door to each other. "It's the Jordanian Way"

I played ultimate frisbee with Grace’s friends for a couple hours afterward at the Modern American School in West Amman, another place I’d seen many times (I often used to shout “You are welcome in Modern American School” in a stereotypical taxi driver accent when I drove past it) but never been in. My legs and ankles are still throbbing from the exertion of it now, a day and a half later! Afterwards, I decided to join my friend Margie and one of her friends at a nearby movie theater to see “The Hunger Games,” which I was a little unsure of (having heard from coworkers in Wisconsin that it was a chick flick, based on a chick book) but I enjoyed quite a bit, actually. I enjoyed it despite having Arabic subtitles taking up 15% of the screen, an annoyance which I’d forgotten about. Ticket prices had jumped 2 dinar since my last movie watching – it’s now about the same price as watching movies in America, although the screen and seats are better than the American average. Hollywood and its international distributors need to cool it with the price increases in the Middle East – they should know better than anyone that they walk a thin line between paying customers, and irritated people who will merely walk to a DVD store a block from their house, or a vendor on a corner, who will sell them any movie for a dinar. Theaters in Jordan shouldn’t be anymore than 4-5 dinar, really.

After chatting with Grace and Janelle and making plans for my last days in Jordan after the wadi hike tomorrow, it seemed to me that I would be moving out of West Amman activities and back into my old neighbor for Dozan wa Awtar, church, hiking meet-ups. I bid farewell to Dick and Robin, my exceedingly kind hosts on the West side of the city on Saturday afternoon (after putting together their new personal computer and transferring their data over from the old system, which was a lot of fun because there were plenty of things to fix and improve for them). My friends Mark and Jen had offered their guest room to me when I came over for a ride to Dozan practice on Wednesday, and I took them up on the offer. Their three kids are so much fun, I knew I shouldn’t pass up on the chance to have five housemates for a few days.

Getting moved into Mark and Jen’s before Saturday night gave me the opportunity to join them at church, too. Pastor Lex and his wife told me that the next time I was in the country, I had to be sure to let them know beforehand so that they could have me over for dinner, and as usual Lex gave a great Sermon on Palm Sunday. For those of you who don’t know, it won’t be Easter tomorrow, but Palm Sunday. Orthodox Christians have different dates for both Christmas and Easter than Lutherans/Roman Catholics, so to compromise, Christmas is celebrated in Jordan on the Western schedule, but Easter is celebrated on the Orthodox timetable – a week after us. It was a little bit of a disappointment when I rediscovered that – I originally bought the ticket and was excited to celebrate Easter in Jordan, even if it meant missing it in America, but as it turns out I don’t get to have Easter in either country!

I should probably get to bed. I’m meeting Grace and her friends at a little before 8 tomorrow morning for our big hiking trip to Wadi Manshalla, and I don’t know what I’m going to do for breakfast! Hopefully the Abu Jbara that I always used to frequent is open that early.

This restaurant, Snack Town, near Duwar Waha, seemed completely classy upstairs. Then I found this awesome picture.

Identities of certain clothing store owners have been hidden under protest that "headdresses are for women only!"

At first it seemed like Jordan had become a quieter city in my absence. Less traffic, fewer weather-beaten looking pedestrians. However, that may have been because my arrival in the country was at 2:30 in the morning. I had been afraid that the visa price at the airport would have tripled (some of my friends had warned me of this possibility) but it had only doubled, to JD20. One thing that American visitors to Jordan never have to worry about is the exchange rate changing – the currency is still locked to the USD at 1.41USD = 1JD. Makes planning much easier.

My former director at the PTEE, Dick, picked me up from the airport. The tall man in the pressed wool jacket was easy to pick out from the crowd of shorter Jordanians around him. My seat from Frankfurt to Amman had been near the rear of the plane, making me one of the very last passengers to make it out of the security checks.

In all seriousness, it didn’t seem like much had changed at all as we sped through the quiet city. Airport road had been completely torn up, not for touristic remodeling as I had originally thought, but for the placement of water transport pipes below the road. It’s going to be interesting seeing that road in the daylight and all of the bypasses and switches on it. If I thought Jordanians were crazy drivers before… But the huge twin towers of the Jordan Gate buildings still sat derelict and unfinished, a sad reminder of poor financing protection in Jordan. It looked like some of the huge panes of glass had fallen off.

My old colleagues at PTEE and Whitman were happy to see me the next morning. Dick hadn’t told any of his colleagues, but his wife Robin had mentioned it to some of her teachers at Whitman, so various levels of surprise played across people’s faces. The last time I saw the new PTEE building, it had just been purchased and was basically little more than rubble – the inside was a total disaster area. Now, the second floor had been completely finished and everyone had moved in. The place looked extremely modern and western, with hidden upward-facing lighting on the ceiling, and in-wall cabling for power and networking – no trunks on the walls here, unlike everywhere else I’ve seen in Jordan!

I jokingly asked Muna, Whitman’s secretary, whether anything looked different about me since I’d last been there. The only difference (I hope) was the mustache I brought back as a souvenir from Costa Rica, and she pointed to it and said, “you have a schwarib now, I see!” I pretended to mishear her and said, “you mean, this schwarma on my upper lip? Yes, I’m saving that for later.” I’ll admit I’ve used that joke several times with my Arab friends in the past few days; no more than once per person though. I suppose it’s the vocabulary equivalent of saying that I have a mustard on my lip.

Speaking of schwarma, one of the moments I had been waiting for was biting into one of the amazing grilled schwarma from the little shop a couple blocks from Whitman, a place Silas had introduced me to years ago. Their prices hadn’t changed from 60 gersh per sandwich, and neither had the taste. I need to franchise some of these schwarma restaurants into the USA. I can’t go for twenty months without having one anymore!

I did a once-over Whitman to make sure that they hadn’t made any major changes I’d missed, like adding yet another floor onto the building like they did in the summer of 2009, but once satisfied, hung out in the teachers lounge and chatted with my former coworkers when their schedules allowed it. Several of them started to ask me computer-related questions, then stopped with slightly embarrassed looks on their faces. “It’s like you never left!” one commented.

After Whitman, I took a leisurely hour at al-Borij to enjoy a smoothie and a hookah. Here was one place where I could count on prices to stay the same - JD2.50 for the two items!

As it turned out, one of my former high school classmates from Brodhead was also in Jordan, and I was able make excuses to myself to get more schwarma and then go to Hashem’s in the bellad with her. I hadn’t seen Rachel since graduation, almost 8 years ago, but we were both here for a vacation – me from America, and she from the Arab Gulf, where she currently works. She hadn’t yet tried the famous food at Schwarma Reem or at Hashem’s yet, so I met her near the battered old Reem stand (already being heavily trafficked even though it was only 6) and made our order. The manager of the shop recognized me right away through the crowd and immediately called out to the 3-4 men carving the meat and slicing the vegetables – “Zakky’s here – he’s come back to Jordan!” He reached over two or three shoulders and grabbed my hand in a hearty handshake. His employees, of course, were extremely busy, but I stopped by their window and they looked up, grinned, and waved. “Try not to wait two years before coming back again!” one of them called out to me. I didn’t have time to make my schwarma/schwarib joke to them before I was shoved aside by droll-faced Jordanians but it was probably for the best.

Rachel and I had fun comparing the differences and similarities between the Gulf and Jordan – things like heat, cleanliness of the street, and so on. I recalled that when I was still living here, we had exchanged a couple of messages about her interest in working in the Middle East, so it was great to see that she had brought her goal to fruition. As she only had a couple days left in Jordan, and I needed to do some souvenir shopping anyway, after a second snack of fuul at Hashem’s we combined forces to hunt for some deals, or at least shops that were willing to haggle with Americans.

I first stopped by the open-air keffiyeh shop run by two guys around my age. One of them recognized me, and smiled broadly. I told them I was back for more keffiyehs – they’ve always given me good prices for high-quality keffiyehs, made by the “Basaam al-Owsli” factory (Basaam the Original) that Arabs have told me is a good buy. I picked two up, and extended a ten-dinar bill in my hand for them. They wouldn’t take it, telling me – “we know you will come back again, please take these ones for free and tell your friends about us!” I thought I’d seen everything in Jordan, but I never could have imagine street vendors in the tourist-heavy bellad area giving away their product not just at a discount, but belaash – for free. So, ahem, everyone who happens to find themselves in the bellad and in the market for keffiyehs, check out the little shop inside the “Souq al Bisharat” – and you can contact Ziad, the man I spoke to, at 079-688-7899. Tell ‘em that Zach the ajnubee taweel sent you and he’ll give you a great deal (although probably not quite as good as the one he gave me; you’ll have to go there at least a half dozen times to get that!)

We wandered the streets for about an hour. Of course, every vendor attempted to woo Rachel, and most of them assumed that she and I were married and playfully demanded to know where the babies were. Sometimes I swear there’s a script that these guys all read for their lascivious yet friendly behavior. Of course, these generic vendors haven’t been the only ones – some of my own friends and colleagues have coyly requested details and information about relationships. I suppose this is the Christian Conservative way, though – get married, have kids, then travel around the world spreading Christianity and aid. Or at least two out of three.

Staying with my former employers meant it was easy to attend a business meeting at PTEE the next day. I remembered that when I was a regular employee, the weekly meetings often had friends of PTEE sit in and take part in the fellowship, and now it was my turn to be a Friend. Do-it-yourself falafel sandwich ingredients were brought up, with thick French bread, hummous, vegetables, and of course scalding hot falafel. We all drank tea and Nescafe around the big meeting table as Dick and the others shared perspectives on PTEE’s activities. My friend Robert Miner (who had graciously invited me to stay with his son when I was in Innsbruck in 2010) took me aside with another gift – a buffet dinner ticket to a “carbo loading pasta party” for the Amman to Dead Sea Ultramarathon. He couldn’t attend and he didn’t want the ticket to go to waste, so he told me that if I could be sure to use it in his stead (and “eat enough for three” as the others had asked to hear about how my skinniness had contributed to my collapsed lung) that I should take it off his hands. Before I departed, Ramzi, who had replaced me as PTEE’s I.T. specialist, proudly led me around the office floor, showing the networking system he’d put in place and his plans for future wireless additions, and I played the role of outside consultant for a bit to talk about future expansions to networking, server, and licensing.

Why did I take this picture? To show off the ceiling moulding and hidden lighting! I've never seen it in Jordan before - I was impressed.

I had been invited to join my old choir, Dozan wa Awtar, at one of their weekly rehearsals that evening, but after my shopping spree the previous night, I was down to a few measly half-dinar coins, barely enough for a taxi ride the 3^rd circle. Just like the old days, Jennifer offered to give me a ride, and I was excited because as one of my old neighbors, it was an excuse to go into my old haunts again. After the taxi dropped me off, I politely hailed two elderly gentlemen outside a minimarket around the busy circle, and asked them where the closest money changer might be. One of the men pursed his lips, and pointed in the opposite direction from where I needed to get to. The other man, looking dignified in a dusty old brown suit jacket and tie, looked from him to me, and narrowed his eyes incredulously. He said, you’ve lived here for two years and you don’t know there’s one just up the street from your house? You remember me, I asked him with surprise, to which he replied with a snort, of course, you live in the big glass house only a few blocks from here! I guess the tall white guy was more memorable than I figured, even for people that I didn’t directly interact with!

It was great to Jen, Mark, and their family again. Their youngest son, who had always been referred to by his big brothers as “little Zach, because you’re big Zach,” when I came by, was now talking and for the first time, I really felt like almost two years had gone by. As Jen and I got ready to go to practice, he overcame his shyness, hugged me, and squealed “you’re big Zach, and I’m little Zach!” happily. Of course my heart melted into a big soggy mess.

Coming to Dozan meant, of course, meant more embraces and exclamations of happiness. I definitely need to come back to Jordan every few years just to experience the incredible hospitality and exuberance of my friends. I settled down in the practice room to see what the new choir sounded like, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the percentage of Arabs to foreigners had increased to almost 85%. Although of course I knew that all of the foreigners that had been there during my days had departed, same as I, it was a little sad to not know many people. Jennifer and I agreed that it was better that the unofficial Jordanian national choir should be made almost totally of Jordanians, instead of the 60% Arabs the choir used to have. And the amount of Arab to Western music has apparently also increased along with the singers – for example, while I was there, the group was practicing for “Dozan: the Musical, from Broadway to Weibde,” with a healthy split between well-known American songs and both classical and modern Arab songs. Check out the Facebook event in the link there – if you’re in Jordan later this month, you should check it out!

The men of Dozan practice for the Pirates of Penzance number out in the bank hallway

I would have loved to gone out for drinks with my choir friends afterward, but it was already 9:30 when we got out, so we’re shooting for tomorrow instead. It will be cutting it close to make it from the Royal Automobile Club, where the Ultramarathon carb-loading party is, to wherever we choose to rendezvous, but hopefully I’ll be able to waddle out without too much of a problem. Maybe I’ll find a fancy royal auto to borrow.

Frankfurt's skyscrapers, as seen from the train into the city from the airport.

I’ve begun a return trip to Jordan. It was rather spur of the moment, as ticket prices suddenly dropped $300 for the first week in April, and I bought them on a whim last month, a craving for schwarma and wadis re-awakening deep within me. I’ve just finished off the first part of trip, a 11 hour excursion through Frankfurt, Germany, the location of my single layover before reaching Amman in another few hours.

My morning started off inauspiciously. I apparently neglected to drink enough “brain juice” (i.e. coffee) to function properly, and as I sat at the kitchen table emptying out my wallet of every nonessential, I for some reason thought I wouldn’t need my debit card, only my credit card. Of course, when the taxi dropped me off at the Memorial Union 20 minutes later and I went inside to withdraw some money, I facepalmed my head pretty hard. What choice did I have? I called up the same taxi company (Green Cab) and requested a rapid round-trip service to my house and back to the Union again to collect a single piece of plastic, tripling my taxi fees. I suppose I’ve paid the stupidity tax for the day.

Transportation here in Frankfurt, however, has been a breeze. The eight hour journey, plus a seven hour time zone change, passed smoothly (I was amazed that Lufthansa has apparently embedded tablet computers, like Kindle Fires or something, into each plane seat, allowing completely autonomous movie/music enjoyment without needing to follow a plane-wide schedule). I didn’t get more than an hour of sleep, as the seats seemed to be gradually moving closer together in a vise-like fashion, but I figured I would find some more brain juice in Germany and play it by ear.

I had heard from friends before I arrived in Germany that there just isn’t much to do in Frankfurt. But with almost 14 hours between my flights, there was no way I was going to waste it sitting in an air conditioned advertisement center like Frankfurt Flugelhafen (which, by the way, should go on record for the funniest word ever).

I bought a Frankfurt Day Pass (I love these things; you may recall me using them in Salzburg, Innsbruck, and Vienna two years ago) which gave me unlimited public transport usage and 50% off all museums. It wasn’t quite as nice as the free-access passes that the Austrian passes gave me, but this pass was only 9 euro, instead of in the 20′s like the others. It was a fair trade, especially since I had such little time.

As the train burst out into the 7 AM sunrise, I blinked and found myself staring at a wall of graffiti. Was I actually in New York? The graffiti even seemed to be in English. However, the copious huge and lovely conifer trees surrounding me definitely weren’t in New York, and when we rounded a corner and saw an immense football (soccer) field, my juice-less brain finally hooked into the “yes, you are in Germany” mode.

At least a dozen skyscrapers rose across the Main River to greet me. I disembarked at the stereotypical European-esque central train station, the Hauptbahnhof (they all basically look alike, I’ve realized) and headed east into the city. My map, which the friendly lady at the Frankfurt Day Pass booth had also given me, pointed me towards the old city which was just ahead.

But first I wandered through a decidedly new-city neighborhood filled with nothing but ads and shops selling sex toys and sex shows. At this hour in the morning nothing was open of course, and it was basically just me, some street cleaners, and a few tired-looking businessmen who owned the sexy streets of Frankfurt. I was quite hungry; my chicken teriyaki on the plane had been either 6 or 13 hours ago and I wasn’t about to frequent the numerous McDonalds that were strewn about between the sex shops.

I finally found a place that was open, a suspiciously chain-looking restaurant named Der Bäcker Eifler and had a cappuccino and some sort of pastry with strawberries on it. Revitalized, and smarting against the cold of the open-air shop (there were no seats either, just tables to stand at) I decided to visit the Seckenberg Natural History Museum and wait until the sun rose higher in the sky before doing any more walking exploration.

The museum was positively gorgeous. They had exhibits ranging from plant evolutionary biology to dinosaurs to meteorites, and also continental divide, mammalian, reptilian, and avian exhibits numbering in the thousands, and a special exhibit on spiders that I did not pay an extra 2 euro to see. Unfortunately, 90% of it was in German. I suppose I shouldn’t have been too shocked, being that I had firmly decided that I was in Germany, but at the same time, I was. I’m used to major metropolitan museums in every country I’ve been to having their descriptions in the native language, and also English. Maybe Arab countries have spoiled me. Most of the reptiles had been translated into English, as well as most of the dinosaur skeletons, but that was about it. It was even more painful because the exhibits were amazing, with diagrams and flip charts and all kinds of details that I would have loved to have known more about. I had even asked the woman at the desk when I bought my 50% reduced ticket if the exhibits were in English, to which she replied “ya!” A slight miscommunication.

The museum was so good that even with me being able to understand very little of it (and skipping the plant evolution section altogether) I stayed there for two hours. By the time I left, the museum was packed with little German children, who appeared to be having the time of their lives. I will admit to jealousy. I wanted to take an educated-looking German person hostage and force them to translate the museum into English for me.

They also had an exhibit on human biology. Children's museums in Germany are a little less conservative than ours.

I next headed up to the Main Tower, which might seem like a boring name, but then you have to remember their river is named Main, too. The elevator had a small counter in it which showed us the rate of speed we ascended at (around 18 km/h) and we shot up to 190 meters in about 20 seconds. The sun was out by now and the observation deck was comfortably busy. I was expecting Empire State Building levels of “don’t kill yourselves, morons” security, but the the railing only came up to my hips. A lone security guard wandered the concrete deck, frowning at air molecules and crossing his arms. I could distantly see the Flugelhafen (hee hee) in the distance, and unsucessfully tried to find the museum. I was, however, able to use my map and my high vantage point to plot out my walking path around the old city.

By this point it was a little after noon, and I needed something besides sugar and caffeine to keep me going. I didn’t want to follow the instructions of my guidebook, and instead lucked out – as it was lunchtime, I merely watched the flow of importantly-dressed businesspeople flowing out of the skyscrapers, and went to the shop where I saw the most well-dressed people congregated. Ebenster’s Suppenstrube was my choice, and for a little under 3 euros I got a rostbratwurst on a kaiser roll with brown mustard. Wisconsinites rejoice; we truly are the descendents of these people. I would have photographed my immense wurst (it was over 8 inches long) but the people in business suits were already casting sidelong glances at me as I ate at their picnic tables in the sidewalk, so I decided to forgo the photo, this one time.

I wandered into the old city, and up into the “Dom” or cathedral. My Frankfurt pass got me a 1.5 euro ticket to climb the bell tower – 298 steps, a mere 66 meters. Remember how it took 20 seconds to get up the Main Tower in the elevator? It took me a good 10 minutes to climb a mere third of that, but I appreciated the view all the more. Sandwiched in a little crevice-like catwalk space, right below the spire of the main tower, surrounded by carved red gothic stonework and tacked-on lightning rods, I felt far more adventurous here than on the wide concrete slab of the Main Tower. Besides, from here I was only a stone’s throw away from the interesting architecture of the old city, instead of a hundred and fifty meters above it. Pigeons fluttered around me, but they didn’t land to cast aside their loads (so to speak): the church had wisely installed thin metal wires on every upward-facing surface above the catwalk, preventing birds from landing in opportune places.

66 meters doesn't seem like much compared to 200, but when you're climbing up steep stairs in a low-ceiling tower...

After the harrowing descent (cracking my forehead into the low stones several times), I headed across the Main into the Suchenhachen, a district known for its alcohol brewing. My crossing took me over the Eiserner Steg, a wrought-iron pedestrian bridge with hundreds of padlocks curiously locked into every iron crevice, sometimes in clusters of a dozen or more. I peered over at one group, and found that they had couple’s names and dates engraved on them. I can only assume it’s a Frankfurt tradition that when couples get married, they add a lock onto the bridge to symbolize their unbreaking love.

I liked the message written in English at the bottom.

I was looking for the best apple wine-serving pubs that a young tourist could afford. My guidebook recommended three different ones, but curiously enough two of them were completely closed on Mondays. I couldn’t imagine why, but it made my choice of Kanonesteppel all the easier. And what a great choice it ended up being!

I walked hesitantly into the courtyard, afraid of another defeat after being turned aside at my previous choices. A solitary man was walking ahead of me, and disappeared into the building at the opposite end. I followed him into the building, and rounded a corner to find him being handed a huge jug of dark yellow liquid wine by a smiling bartender. I found that the tender spoke English quite well, and we struck up a conversation about the food, the wine, motorcycles (he had just purchased a new Harley Davidson, and his eyes lit up with recognition when I said I was from Wisconsin). The barkeep, Marcus, gave me free samples of the wine and his favorite item on the menu, frankfurterschnitzel. Of course I sat down to be served a full meal with a couple glasses of the tasty wine, and nearly exploded trying to eat it all. Marcus patted his stomach and commented, “this is why most Germans look like this! You must eat more, you are built like a stick!” As I paid my check using my last euros (I had withdrawn 30 for the day, not counting the Frankfurt pass) he produced a wineglass filled with an even dark yellow beverage with a fruit floating in it. “My gift to you,” he beamed. It was an apple brandy with some sort of fruit called a mispel floating in it, and although the room swam a bit as I drank it, I managed to find Marcus’ extended hand and give it a firm and grateful shake.

I had seen these blue stoneware jugs all over the place; now I knew they were for storing apple wine. I got to pour my own glass!

I had given myself 2 hours of leeway to make it back to the airport before my flight to Amman at 8:20 PM, but it turned out that this much caution was unnecessary. Like most modern European cities, there is a rail station built underneathe the Flugelhafen (last time I use it, I promise) and I was able to make it from Kanonesteppel to the terminal in under 30 minutes. As I climbed the escalator into the main concourse, I was suddenly surrounded by tweeting, honking, and drumming people covered in protest signs. I thought I had stumbled into a march from Occupy Frankfurt (I had seen their tents assembled as I walked past the sex shops this morning) but it turned out that they were protesting the expansion of Frankfurt Airport due to the massive noise pollution it had created in their small peaceful villages to the southwest of the city. A young woman about my age (with impeccable English, of course) explained the situation to me, and when I mentioned that I wished there was something I could do to help, she smiled and said “anyone from anywhere in the world should make their solidarity known to our government!” When I scratched my name and address down on the piece of paper she extended to me, she noticed my name and said “Your surname is Heise, so you are a German anyway! How wonderful to have a German American stand with us!”

Now, as I sit at gate B20, waiting for the loading to start in 20 minutes, I’m surrounded by the familiar, yet sadly unfamiliar sound of Levantine Arabic. How much have I remembered, versus forgotten? Will my old Zain phone number still work? Will taxi drivers smell blood in the water again like they used to when I first arrived? Most importantly, is the Bu’ab al-Urdan completed yet? I’ll find out very soon.

First of all, hats off to Microsoft’s developers. They’ve clearly spent huge amounts of time modifying existing applications and creating new ones to create by far the newest, freshest user interface since iOS came out in 2007. Unlike Apple however, they’ve almost seamlessly integrated the original “desktop” style of computing with the new “Metro” style of computing, whereas judging by the early previews and opinions on OSX 10.8 “Mountain Lion” Apple seems content to whimper and clutch to the status quo of the iOS titan, and slowly merge the two operating systems into one. Blech.

If Microsoft is heading down that path (depressingly, they probably are, but at least we’ll have at least another generation to wait for that pendulum to swing into our torsos) they’ve at least thrown users who enjoy control and information a bone with the desktop interface. Metro seems like it will be “fun” for tablets and phones, but productivity? Hardly. I tried out a few games like “Cut the Rope” and the new Pinball game, and those seem like those could utilize touch sensitivity well, but for quickly navigating through a folder structure to find carefully sorted and organized pictures seems like it will be impossible. Your main computer will never use Metro as a primary interface.

Microsoft attempts to hide where Metro stores “apps” that it downloads from the “store” – but I wanted to see how much space they took up. Metro doesn’t tell you that. Where’s my Run dialog key? It wasn’t until I hacked together a shortcut using “rundll32.exe shell32.exe,#61″ to create a run menu and access appwiz.cpl that I saw that Microsoft doesn’t list a single Metro-installed app under the good old “Installed Programs” menu. (I later discovered I could right-click the lower left corner to have an option to open up the run dialog).

So where are the Apps themselves? Good luck finding the command prompt in Metro. CMD.exe in the run dialog again. Running a search of all hidden program file folders in c:\program files resulted in a hidden folder called “WindowsApps” being discovered. Ironically, as a fellow blogger points out, you have to wrest ownership of the folder in order to be able to see inside. And there’s where everything is! Cut the Rope is some 50-odd megabytes in size, and that pinball game is almost 200MB. Unfortunately, the “store” doesn’t have changelogs yet, unlike the Android and iOS markets, which is a glaring hole that Microsoft should remedy posthaste.

I opened up the Metro mail app for a laugh, and saw that it had automatically and annoyingly migrated in my Hotmail account and all of my hundreds of never-used personal contacts that I’ve had in MSN Messenger since 2001. Thanks for giving me the option, Microsoft. I guess if I ever use Windows 8, it will encourage me to actually clear out 90% of my unused contacts.

I was accessing this Windows 8 session remotely from another computer, and realized that with the start menu gone (completely disappeared!) there was no way for me to “disconnect” my session without logging off completely, something I didn’t want to do. Back to the command line again, and the command TSDISCON worked to sever my connection without logging me out.

Microsoft definitely has some work to do. Hopefully (but I’m not holding my breath) they’ll bring back the original Start Menu as an option for users who can’t be bothered to deal with the cumbersome Metro interface.

What I thought would be a quick confirmation of the partial collapse and then a surgery schedule/release turned into a week-long stay in the hospital and a lot of time in bed with IV catheters, chest tubes, stitches, spinal epiderals, and catheter-catheters (yes, that kind). I’d never been under general anesthetic before, so that was kind of fun to discover that yes, it’s just like how they say it is – one second I’m lying on a a hard table in a gown, and the next I’m staring up a bunch of different faces and wondering why there are so many wires running into me. It really was as instantaneous as a switch being flipped.

It's definitely an upgrade in drama from the previous hospital stay, where all I had on me was a breath mask!

After another 3 days in the hospital recuperating and slowly learning how to walk again while being on intense painkillers, I was released back home on Friday and have been trying to keep on the mend. The last time I had intensive surgery was when I was 7 or so when surgeons merely had to pull some glass out of my chest (punching a window is never a good idea) and those were relatively shallow cuts. This time, my entire left lung had to been deflated and blown back up over the course of a few hours. Every time I try to take a deep breath I feel like my ribs are in a vice, and there is a 5″ square patch of skin on my chest that’s completely numb because the chest tube incision required that a bunch of nerves in that area had to be severed that led to that area. It might take 2-3 months for those to grow back, even after the scars themselves have closed over (hopefully!)

The pneumothorax occurred just a few days after one of the most unusual Thanksgiving dinners I’ve ever been part of – and I’m counting roasting a turkey in a 50 gallon oil drum buried in the Jordanian desert sand in that one too! My father has been sent to Antarctica – specifically the South Pole – for work on the Ice Cube Project. He’ll be doing some drilling there to plant the optical sensors that he helped build during his normal work here in Wisconsin. He left just a week before Thanksgiving, so we had an internet-powered teleconference with him while he was in layover in New Zealand. He could see and hear us from our laptop on our side of the ocean, but he could only type back to us (his laptop wasn’t equipped for transmitting anything but text, unfortunately). So he watched us as the 7 of us at the table carried on with our usual boistrous conversation at the table, and I glanced at the screen occasionally and transmitted dad’s questions and comments to the rest of the table so that they could ask him new ones.

As dad is normally the main chef for Thanksgiving, it was amusing watching mom holding the laptop’s webcam up to the turkey so that dad could inspect its moisture levels, and demurring the state of the drippings left in the roaster to a screen (especially when she was just reading what he was saying and not telling the rest of us, so it looked like she was just having an argument with herself).

Since then, dad has since arrived at the South Pole and presumably he’s set to work! I’ve created a posting account for him here on this website (there might as well be a 2nd Heise on HeiseHeise.com, right?) but I see there aren’t any drafts in the admin section of the website yet, unfortunately. He’s a great writer (where do you think I get it from?) so I hope that if he has time, he’ll share more of his thoughts on the incredibly unique experience of a 5-week driller down at the South Pole. To be honest, I’m jealous – it’s an incredible opportunity that such a tiny percentage of humans will ever experience, and he didn’t even need to sign up for a year-long contract down there in the frozen wasteland – just a little over a month!

I’ve been letting the blog languish quite a bit, unfortunately. Without something new and exciting like a trip across a major ocean, I just don’t seem to have the energy to write the lengthy blog entries that people came to expect from me. I’ll be going camping for a 5 day weekend at the end of the month, right before Halloween. I’ll be rejoining my old friends from Jordan who have all since returned stateside, like me, for a little bit of Appalachian mountain hiking and camping.

A little bit of fun that my friends and I have been having over the past couple months are Lords of the Trident music videos. My friend Ty is the lead singer of this amazing metal band, and not only does he sing like a guttural, insane, metaltastic songbird, he also does most of his own mixing, artwork, back-story writing, and now – music videos.

Here’s the first one that he did – his most recent album’s title song, “Chains on Fire.” Both my brother Josh and I are in it – him you can recognize with the axe and venomous look on his face during the crowd shots. You can’t recognize me because I’m wearing a robe and death’s head mask.

Today’s shooting, however, is for “Face of the Enemy,” and is going for a more story-based video instead of melt-your-face rocking like “Chains on Fire.” We spent three hours rolling about on the concrete getting some great shots (and “shot” at), with Ty acting as our director. Making an action video is so much easier in the 21st century for a bunch of young folks – you don’t need blanks, fake blood, or questionably legal explosive compounds – just a high definition camera and Adobe After Effects (please note in the previous video: Ty did not actually light a stone building on fire, or disintegrate those people (including Christine, one of the poor vaporized victims)).

It took 3 takes of me pulling off my shades and sprinting towards Bookman, our hero in the khaki trenchcoat. I destroyed my black shades on the first take when they hit the ground, then Ty gave me his to use, which I promptly scuffed against the concrete on the second take. Two casualties in less than five minutes! Some soldiers never go home…

So, enjoy the first rough cut! And of course, I’ll be posting the final as soon as Ty completes it. He tends to work himself to the bone on these videos, so I expect we’ll see the entire thing shot, edited, and with special effects within 3 days. Just kidding, Ty.

Our trip started off with my usual trip from Madison on the bus, and we took the front two seats. The difference was this time I discovered that our driver was the uncle of one of my best friends back when I went to school in Janesville almost two decades ago, so we began chatting. Then he continued chatting with me as I started to take a nap, and Christine muttered to me in Arabic “mumkin hatha kursi mish kwayis” – maybe this wasn’t such a good seat. However, I enjoy bantering and learned that Illinois drivers are terrible, and also that the Texas Roadhouse is a darn good steakhouse.

Out of the two modes of transportation for today, though, Spirit Airlines was definitely the worse of the two. We weren’t overly perterbed when we saw that our flight from O’Hare to Fort Lauderdale had been bumped back an hour (apparently because it had been struck by lightning and it needed to be “safety checked” or something silly and inconsequential like that) but we became less happy when Spirit told us they were booting us from our second flight from Florida to Costa Rica. I knew Spirit was budget, but they basically just screwed up the travel plans for at least 2 dozen people (it was a long line to get the answer to my question, with only one computer and no screen with times on it at the gate) because the second Spirit airline wouldn’t wait 15 minutes for our flight. Then, the discounts that they offered us for a hotel for the night were approaching $80 (and that’s with the so-called “discount code” they provided me). I called their hotline and left them a formal complaint, but what could we do?

I regaled my companion with the story of when my family spent the night sleeping in O’Hare airport after returning from Colorado, but she wasn’t going for it – a hotel was needed. Thanks to some quick smartphone searching, we found a Rodeway hotel for $60, only 1.5 miles away from the airport and with a free shuttle. Of course, as it was now 11 at night, the shuttle was no longer running and we had to pony up for a $22, 10 minute taxi ride by a disgruntled guy with a Carribean accent. Jordan pricing, this was not. And Spirit will never get our business again, that’s for sure – an extra $80 because of this ridiculous delay means it’s not so budget anymore. Hopefully the post title will show up in some search engines for other people thinking they’re getting a “bargain.”

It all seemed worth it, though, after getting checked in at the hotel and confirming our shuttle times for the next morning, with a bottle of wine out by the pool (“it’s closed now,” said our hostess, “but if you’re quiet no one is going to care”) and watching a few shooting stars coming in from the Perseid shower.

Hopefully tomorrow will go better.

I have no way of posting pictures from my actual camera now (and I shan’t insult people by using cameraphone pictures) but I’ll have to add them all into my posts when I get back to America.

I’m no stranger to back pains, even ones that last for a couple days. But these ones were different – they didn’t seem to be caused by lying, standing, sitting, or slouching in a particular way. It was kind of a dull ache that was focused specifically on my lower left shoulder blade, and over the next few days, i found that its intensity would increase while walking, running, biking, or doing anything that wasn’t sitting perfectly still. I noticed at work that I was getting a bit out of breath while climbing the stairs (and since the elevator up to the 8th floor has been out all summer and I have numerous computers to configure up there, I have been using those stairs pretty constantly). After returning my desk, though, the pain would fade to its general dull ache. At its worse, it felt like a needle being jammed into my lower back that would slowly radiate pain up into my upper shoulder – but always on my left side. At my parents’ house for my birthday this past weekend, my family urged me to look into seeing a doctor. But I kept hoping it would just go away.

Besides taking a sick day off of work and sitting with an ice pack occasionally at home, I didn’t do anything about it until a week later, when I finally called the doctor this past Monday. I imagined at best it was pleurisy, at worse it was a very slow-acting heart attack. Most likely it was just a deep muscle ache that a back rub couldn’t reach. But why was I short of breath?

Although I wouldn’t be able to use my new “primary care provider” due to a 9 month long waiting list for an introductory appointment (ah, so that’s why people make fun of HMOs) they got me into an appointment on Thursday, although they said that if it was an emergency of course they wanted me to come in right away. I told them that if I had made it this long without seeing anyone, I probably wasn’t going to keel over.

At yesterday’s appointment with UW Health, they shuttled me between the x-ray room and the on-call doctor. After explaining to a nurse and Dr Greg my entire family medical history – a downside of switching to my own insurance with a different provider than my parents – Greg listened to my lungs through his stethescope several times. He reported that my left one sounded different, and sent me down for the first set of xrays. He looked at them, then sent me down again to do more, this time while exhaling my breath entirely outwards so that they could see where my lungs were. I could tell what they were assuming, and it didn’t look good.

After I returned to the exam room, Greg sat me down with the xrays and showed how the upper edge of my left lung had detached itself from the pleura and there was now a pocket of air pushing its way around between my lung and the inside of my body cavity. The bubble would shift itself around as I moved about, and would probably explain why I felt most comfortable while lying down. He transferred me over to a pulmonologist in another building who explained things even more clearly – apparently, I am the perfect demographic to get this injury, which is called primary spontaneous pneumothorax, PSP, or more colloquially – a partially collapsed lung. Sufferers are usually tall, skinny, male, and between 20 and 30 – how fitting that I had just passed my mid-twentieth birthday. “Basically, people who look like Abraham Lincoln,” joked my specialist, Dr. Cole. He further explained that it was because I was tall and skinny that my lungs had a lot of surface area on them, and a lot of weight pulling them downwards – apparently, the left one had succumbed to gravity and pulled away from the upper pleura.

I had several options, he continued. I could either wait and see how quickly it would heal – as it was only a 3% partial collapse, he figured that I should heal up nicely. More drastic measures would be to stick a needle into me and pull the lung wall back out again, taking the air with it, or keep a quarter-inch thick chest tube in my side for a week to siphon out the air. But those would be overreacting, he concluded. Because I have a trip to Costa Rica planned for next month, however, I asked him if there was anything else I should worry about.

He got a little more somber and told me that possible health complications could result from the air pressure change in a flight, and that although the risk was small in my case, it could be a big problem if that air pocket swelled while in reduced air pressure. Some airlines don’t even let you fly unless you can tell them you haven’t had a pneumothorax for 6 weeks or longer. He said that if we could get it done with 2 weeks of safe period before the flight, he’d think I was safe.

Two weeks from today is when I fly out. Well then, our fastest and least invasive procedure is treating you overnight on 100% oxygen, he told me. It seemed suspiciously easy to me – lie in an air conditioned hospital room with a mask on? How could that possibly remove air trapped in my chest? Because the air in that pocket is plain atmospheric air, Dr Cole explained. Pure oxygen in your lungs will cause the nitrogen-rich regular air molecules to diffuse through the lining and back into your lungs, where it can be exhaled normally. Then your lung will be able to press up against the pleura again – and then hopefully reseal itself there permanently.

I checked myself back in later that evening, and was escorted up to my room by an admittance nurse. Over the course of the next hour, three different women visited – two with badges that said CNA, and one RN. No oxygen during that entire time, so I just read my book and snacked on my jug of peanuts I’d brought with me. But eventually someone came in with a mask in a sealed plastic bag and a long tube, which was plugged into a green faucet-looking device that came out of the wall. Gone are the days of individual oxygen tanks, apparently. They plugged it in, plugged me into it, and cranked up the output to 15 liters per minute. Considering that the normal flow rate for senior citizens on oxygen is about 2 LPM, the attendent CNAs must have wondered what on earth could be wrong with me that I would need that much oxygen.

I amused myself for a few minutes watching little rubber output gasket on the side flutter as I exhaled, but the constant hissing noise of the system got tiresome quickly (I wish that I had bothered to check for earplugs sooner; I found some on the nightstand in a little bag the next morning). The nurses cycled around through shifts, each time coming in and checking my pulse and oxygen count with a little device that clipped onto my index finger, which without making any sort of cut in me, was able to measure oxygen percentages in my blood. I had been at 96 that morning, but after being on pure oxygen for a few hours, I hit 100 each time.

The oxygen mask had a strange little bag under it, like a wattle on a goat, that didn’t seem to do anything except be filled with air at all times. It’s not like it was needed, though – the hose kept an unceasing supply of air roaring at my nose and mouth at all times. The bag constantly got in the way though as I shifted and tried to get comfortable in the bed as midnight drew near; it’s difficult to lie on your side with a tube coming off of your mouth and an air-filled bag trying to sit under your chin. I licked my lips occasionally; I could feel them getting chapped with the gale-force winds blowing at them.

I woke up somewhere around 4 in the morning when a nurse named Walter with a Russian sounding accent came in to check my vitals yet again, and he rolled down the shade facing the east (I could see the capital rotunda from my window, twinkling cheerfully at me in the darkness) and whispered to me that otherwise, I would be blinded by the morning sunlight in a few hours. The next thing I remember is my alarm waking me for work at 6:45, causing me to snap my head upright and the airbag to pop up and bap me playfully in the eye. It looks like you can sleep through anything if you get accustomed to it, even a hissing, oddly-constructed air mask.

My morning x-rays followed some hours later as the sun rose. It was time for the doctors to see if the pneumothorax had indeed withdrawn into the comforting fold of my lungs yet again. I wasn’t willing to bet anything, yet – my back always hurts on strange new (hard) beds like this one, so I couldn’t tell if I felt any different yet. And the nurses certainly weren’t assisting in my wish to see if I was still in pain – I was carefully bundled out of bed into a wheelchair, with a blanket wrapped around me, as nurse Ginny soothingly told me that she would disconnect my air just for a second and then she quickly attached it to a portable air tank on the wheelchair. None of the nurses seemed to understand that I wasn’t suffering from oxygen deprivation and that I wouldn’t turn blue and die if I was off the feed for a minute – they just saw the high flow rate and assumed that I should be treated like delicate glass.

I was carefully wheeled down the hall a “transport” nurse, to the elevator, and down to the x-ray room, where the x-ray technician told me I didn’t need to remove my nightshirt or my oxygen mask; a far cry from the torso disrobing that was ordered the previous morning. Once again, it seemed like I was being treated very gingerly. I wasn’t sure if he knew that the only way to see my small pneumothorax was to take the x-ray while exhaling fully; after all, the previous technician hadn’t apparently known it on the first try yesterday. So I did so without telling him (even though he told me to inhale, like most x-ray techs do) as I hoped it would be helpful to Dr Cole or whomever would look at the scans. Then I was carefully eased backwards into my chair again (the whole process had required me moving all of a foot) and a second transport nurse took me back to the room. She asked me in a slow, over-annuniciated voice if I was a student at the UW. With some amusement, I told her that I was a computer consultant and technician for the UW. “Oh!” she replied with a note of some surprise. “Well that must be a very good job for a smart young man like you!”

It’s interesting how one’s attitude towards people change if they seem helpless, ill, and needy. To the eyes of the many nurses who had been attending to me for hours, I was a skinny, frail looking guy with glasses in pajamas who had been wearing an oxygen mask all night and needed chest x-rays. They spoke in a very cheerful, evenly-paced upbeat tone without fail. Once I asked about whether their computers were running Epic’s medical software, or mentioned my work as a consultant for another UW department, the tone changed a bit and then they would talk to me normally – or at least, until they cycled out again and a new nurse arrived and I needed to repeat the process over again. I felt silly being babied and assisted about. I had gone 9 days with a partially collapsed lung and I knew I could handle it – so I didn’t feel like I should be accepting their professional kindness. I didn’t want to be a burden.

After returning to my bed and my wall-based oxygen source for another half an hour, Dr Cole came in with the good news – the pneumothorax had disappeared, and my x-ray looked normal – his plan had worked. My back was still stiff enough (probably in part from the lack of my own personal locomotion!) that I couldn’t tell if I felt better or not, but I was greatly cheered that things looked normal from his perspective. He confirmed his guess with a quick listen to my lungs again with his stethescope, and I could feel the tension and relief ebb out of me – I could go back to normal.

But wait, he cautioned – I still want you to come back next week for a followup. Oh. Well, of course that makes sense. “And,” he continued, “we’ll need to keep an eye on your lungs. No lifting anything over 20 pounds for 2-4 weeks. Also, you have a 33% chance of developing a second pneumothorax, now that you’ve had one.” I asked him what the odds were for the general population. 18 in 100,000 he replied. So my odds of a relapse have increased significantly. And if I were to get a second one, my odds of a third one would increase to 80%. “At that point, there is a surgery that we would recommend after the second to irritate the pleura of the lungs with some powder, which would then develop a sticky blood clot along the edges which has a 98% success rate at making your lung stick in place, permanently.”

I took off the breath mask and shut off the oxygen myself after Dr Cole left. The room felt very quiet without the constant hissing sound I’d grown accustomed to for the past 15 hours, and it took me an hour to become re-acclimated to working hard to breath again in the regular air. I packed my things and prepared to walk back to work, but the nurse told me that walking a mile seemed like too much stress for me because it was “very hot outside.” She wanted me to take a taxi but in the end we compromised with the bus system.

It feels really good to be free of that twinging lung pain (and have it replaced with good old familiar vertebral back pain again) but I guess it was a wake up call for me – they never tell thin young people to be on the lookout for collapsed lungs. In comparison with heart disease and diabetes, I guess I’ll be thankful that there’s comparably less things that affect people with my body type. Except, as I told my boss, the fact that people like me will be the first ones to succumb after the next ice age due to the lack of fat storage!

I contacted this website’s host to see if they could migrate my 4.0.2 SQL database to 5 for me, dryly reminding them that when I built the blog back in 2007, it was on their own pages that they recommended choosing 4 instead of 5 because it was “well-tested and stable” instead of version 5 which was apparently scary and new for everyone back then. My host refused, telling me that I’d need to use phpMyAdmin to manually back up everything in my blog (a rather large 16 MB pile of text in SQL format; it takes Notepad 3 minutes to open it) and then reimport it into a new version 5 MySQL database.

That was back in February 2010, and thanks to lots of other irate users suffering from the same issue, there was no shortage on instructions for doing some SQL database tweaking. However, no one else seemed to have my problem, which was that re-importing into MySQL 5 destroyed all of my Arabic characters and replaced them with garbage text. Stymied, irritated, and in the process of getting ready for my trip to Egypt the following month, I decided just to stick with WordPress 2.8.6 until I got around to figuring out how to fix the problem.

Fast-forward to now. Sony, Sega, Nintendo, CIA.gov, Bank of America, and dozens of other big-ticket websites are being hacked on a regular basis, and script kiddies (talentless hackers who use pre-made scripts to hunt for websites with vulnerabilities, instead of doing the research/attack on their own) are coming out of the woodwork to infest any website they can with Trojan downloaders to ensnare people using Google and Google Image Search.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve winced as I’ve read these articles and thought of my own poor, dust-collecting HeiseHeise.com. I’m not so vain that I think that any hacker would actually target my site directly (if I was that shallow and self-centered/boring, I’d just use Twitter and tell you what I was eating for lunch and how cute my nonexistent cats are), but it would be simple for a coder to just use scripts to scan the internet for websites using outdated versions of WordPress. WordPress is, you have to remember, the most famous and widely used Content Management System in the world, and just like the Windows operating system, is a fat and juicy target for the sharks out there. If my site was discovered in an automated search like that, I didn’t want to be the unlucky discoverer of a remote takeover security hole, and own up to the embarrassment of not practicing what I’ve preached for years to friends, family, and students: I haven’t kept my blog software up to date.

That was this morning. I’m pleased to say I’m writing this to you from a brand-new database on a freshly upgraded copy of WordPress 3.1.3. It probably doesn’t – and shouldn’t – look any different to you. All of the improvements have been made on the administrative side of things, or deep within the system code to hopefully batten down the hatches. What was the fix I finally discovered? This lengthy page on the WordPress Codex* explained that before WordPress 3.0, there was no function in the configuration files to ensure that the blog’s database was being stored in the universal internet character set, UTF-8, so things were probably being written as ASCII, the outdated Latin-text-only character set which no one on the internet should be using anymore (it’s 2011; global village; internet should be in all languages, etc etc). So I ran the SQL command to convert all my posts to ASCII, then into binary, and then into UTF-8 and bam…it was solved. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I backed up the fresh MySQL 5 database and the WordPress 2.8.6 files, and while holding my breath, clicked the update button that I hadn’t clicked in over a year. No halt this time…”Update has completed successfully” greeted me within 30 seconds.

So there’s a bit of a load off my shoulders. It’s past midnight now, and I’m writing this entry after spending a couple hours going through some of my favorite old entries from Jordan, like biking in the Dead 2 Red, visiting Sheikh Suliman in Ghor Safi, and of course hiking the amazing wadis with my friends. Heck, I even read through the entry I wrote right after I had reformatted this computer and put Windows 7 on it after getting infected by the W32/Sality malware. It was a well-written article.

As a final note, I did notice that although the Arabic in my posts themselves was spared – thank goodness – after updating from 2.8.6 to 3.1.3 the non-Latin characters in comments vanished, and I had to go through and correct them by hand. Thankfully there hasn’t been many, but if you happen to see anything on the site that looks like ???? ???? please let me know – that probably used to be العربية – Arabic text.

*Why didn’t I use that page back in February 2010? If you scroll down on that page, you’ll notice an author comments that the page was completely revamped in October 2010 because it had gotten so out of date. The information that could have helped me probably did not exist when I was searching right after 2.9 was released.