On the second day of my time in Tajikistan, I was taken out of the city to see some of the sites around it, like the lower mountains over the roaring Varzob River and its teahouses, and the ancient earthen castle in the village of Hissor, Malik’s hometown. However, our main plan was to take me to the far eastern reaches of Tajikistan, into the Pamir Mountains. On Friday evening, I was introduced to Malik’s friend Saeed, who would be joining us in our trip with his all-terrain, Russian-made Lada Niva truck. Saeed was a tough-looking Tajik with a steely eye and crew cut, but he was quick to laugh and was always interested to have Malik or Farahnush translate what I was saying, or have me try to teach him a few words in English. After a delicious dinner of homemade Osh (pilaf) from Rayhon, we went to bed early, with Saeed sleeping on the floor in the living room on a mattress which looked a lot like an Arab farsha.

We left early on Saturday morning in Saeed’s truck, and headed for the mountains in the south, a series of beautiful green rolling foothills that went on for kilometers, vibrantly green and with almost no trees on them. Surprisingly, they lack any trees, which made the morning sunlight catch every fold and curve in the earth in a pattern of shadows, making these low mountains a sun-warmed blanket of gently waving grass, thrown over giants sleeping below.

I can't help being this poetic. Just call me Rudaki.

One thing you definitely have to look out for in Tajikistan is potholes in the road. And lots of them, some of the size that could break a sedan’s axle in half if you’re traveling at the right speeds. We weren’t worried about that in the Niva, but for everyone’s health and well-being, Saeed did some pretty amazing maneuvers to avoid the worse of them. Clearly a man who knows his way around Tajik highways. The other thing to look out for is the Tajikistan “БДА” – which is pronounced “Bee Dee Ah” and is the spectacularly corrupt road police force, stationed every dozen kilometers on major highways, which checks documents, passports, registrations, and anything else that could possibly not be 100% perfect, so they can extract a bribe from you to ignore it. The combination of potholes and police made the trip a little slower than it would have been otherwise, but I didn’t mind that much as the fantastic scenery more than made up for it.

Our party stopped briefly in the city of Kulob for lunch, meeting up with one of Malik’s friends in the area and visiting the tomb of one of the famous Iranian Sufi intellectuals. Farahnush and I checked out a mysterious golden monument in the center of the city, which thanks to her translation for me from a gardener, we learned that it was dedicated to the Kulob’s 2,700th birthday from a few years ago. Fairly amazing when you compare the age of a city like that to anything we have in America, or even in the most of Europe. On the way out of town, I asked Malik if we could pick up a map of the area – like the majority of foreigners, I had absolutely no idea how the country was laid out or where we were going. The only map we could find on short notice was a large, laminated wall map, but the advantage of this was that I could mark it up with a sharpie to keep track of our route. This would be our last major city for several days as we traversed the wilderness between Kulob and Khorog, our final destination, so we filled an extra gas tank to put in the trunk; better to be safe than sorry. For the first time, I saw a less modern way to fill a car’s tank – attendants dragged buckets of gasoline over to the car, and poured it through a funnel directly into the tank. It seemed pretty large risk of flammable danger to me, and the smell of raw gasoline fumes exposed to the air were quite potent, causing Farahnush to wrap her head with her new red keffiyeh until we were done outside. “Don’t worry, we use fuel pumps like everyone else in Dushanbe,” she pointed out.

Well, I suppose it was done like this for decades in America...

We left Kulob behind and the road went from “usable by your average car” to “possibly dangerous” within a matter of minutes, and the amount of traffic dropped to a trickle. The brilliant afternoon sun shone into the car brightly and the snow-covered mountains in the distance grew ever closer as we bounced along over the boulders in the road, finally coming to a roadblock and sign telling us we were entering the risk zone along the Panj river, the border and only separation between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. I was required to give up my passport for a few minutes so they could register me in an archaic, dusty green book that looked like it had been used by the Soviets (and in fact, it probably had been). The others had their passports glanced at briefly as well, but mine was the main interest – the bored guards flipped through it curiously, as American tourists in this part of the country are extremely rare.

Within fifteen minutes we came in sight of the mighty Panj – a roaring muddy brown torrent that rages for a thousand kilometers before emptying into the Aral Sea far behind us. At this particular point, the river looked quite wide, and very dangerous as well – about 20 meters of rapids crashing against huge rocks below us. Cows grazed unconcernedly in the road as our white truck barreling past them, and farmers wearing the traditional toqi hat casually flicked long sticks at them to move them higher into the rocks. I squinted over the river towards the sunny cliffs, realizing that I was looking into the infamous country that was the site of the original “War on Terror” started almost a decade ago. In the media, we hear of the death and destruction in the south, around the capitol of Kabul – but nothing could be further from what we saw here. Nothing but cows, grassy fields, and broken cliff-side, stretching away in all directions. If you didn’t mind the distance and lack of more westernized amenities, you couldn’t ask for a more picturesque place to live.

Except for the landmines. I was drinking from my seltzer water bottle (which is the norm in Russia/Central Asia instead of the regular uncarbonated variety in America and Jordan) and almost choked on it when we passed an angry-looking yellow sign with a descriptive drawing of someone’s leg being blown off at the knee. I couldn’t read the Russian lettering on it but the meaning was clear – don’t get off this road, and don’t go down to the water. Malik explained to me that during the slow collapse of the Soviet Union, the area was seeded with landmines along the border to prevent migration between the countries. The area of land is just too large to cover with a fence or with guards – although we did occasionally see border guards, groups of three with machine guns patrolling the road every few dozen kilometers. Instead, the threat of death or maiming by mines had to serve the intended purpose of warning civilians that to go to the river is to gamble with their lives.

Uh...I'll keep my knees intact, thanks.

We continued to see the signs, placed every couple of kilometers, for about 30 kilometers. I would occasionally see gaping holes in the road, 5 meters deep at least, surrounded with crude rock barriers to prevent cars from nosediving into them during late night drives. I joked that they were landmine blasts, but it was more likely that it was the result of landslides or sections of the mountain collapsing. The river roared hungrily below us, sometimes 2 meters away, sometimes 40. No guardrails here besides distantly-spaced concrete blocks with faded Cyrillic on them: there would be no AAA, no quick response; nothing to save you here if you suddenly slid from the road into the mighty Panj.

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The plane arrived at the silent, tree-lined Dushanbe runway at approximately ten past three in the morning, spilling its tired passengers out onto the tarmac where a bus quietly transported us to the small airport main building. Although all flights into Dushanbe from the west come in at this hour, the airport had only posted two officers to handle passports and visas. I waited in line with everyone else for about half an hour, wondering if I had everything I needed in order to get into the country. Besides the dozen Tajiks in the group who were quickly processed and entered, the rest of the passengers mainly looked to be made up of American and British business contractors who talked quietly with each other with the bored air of those who have been in airports far smaller at far earlier hours.

Suddenly, through the crowds, I spotted Malik, my host and father of my exchange “sister,” Farahnush. He waved to me eagerly from the other side of the turnstiles and I left the line to embrace him. “Did you pick up your visa yet?” he asked expectantly, seeing that I was waiting in the passport-check line. “Uh,” I replied helpfully, to which Malik produced a stack of papers and told me to go through a rough wooden door on the far wall, which I had actually thought was a bathroom or a closet.

For the next hour, I was shuffled between various desks of tired-looking officials, who glanced at my paperwork, made some marks on it, and then dropped it into another pile. Malik came in to join me at some point in my vigil, and his fast, musical-sounding Tajik conversation with the clerks sped things up. He and I were surprised to learn that my entry visa would cost me $57, instead of $15 which we had originally thought. It wouldn’t be until the next day that we would discover that they had charged us for a Commercial-level visa, as opposed to the Tourism-level visa which I was supposed to receive. We should have paid closer attention to what the crafty airport officials were sticking into my passport.

At long last, we were free of the airport and Malik and I drove to his home through the darkened streets of Dushanbe. The sun was just starting to rise, dimly illuminating the wide streets and the huge hanging willows and Chinnar trees over them. I noted that people, dressed conservatively in long, flowing clothing, were sweeping out the gutters on each street with brooms made of branches and twigs. As the first light of the sun broke over the mountains surrounding the city, the Russian/Tajik billboards along the sides of the road became readable (but not translatable for me) as we pulled up to the apartment.

Although it was almost 5 in the morning, I was greeted affectionately at the door by Farahnush and her mother, Reihan, who although having never met me before, embraced me warmly and welcomed me to their home. Farahnush, who has no biological brothers but three sisters, was very happy to see me as well, although she was worried about why we had taken so long at the airport! Although Farahnush and Malik are the only ones in the family that speak English fluently, they had no difficulty translating our passport troubles to Reihan, who shook her head and tsk’d disapprovingly. I was escorted into their warm kitchen and was fed baklava with honey, juice, and candy, then directed towards my bedroom, where I collapsed instantly, practically on top of my luggage, and slept deeply until 11.

When I awoke, I began the day properly by touring Dushanbe with Farahnush and Malik. Our first stop was lunch at a Choykhona, which is Tajik for “Teahouse,” the standard café which forms a central part of Tajik community, business, and life. Every city or village in the country, no matter how small, has a teahouse, and so it made sense that Dushanbe chose to send their sister city of Boulder, Colorado, an elaborate and ornately-decorated teahouse. My family visited this teahouse last summer while Farahnush was still with us, and it was interesting to see how closely the food, drink, and culture differed from its American descendant. One thing I find particularly interesting about the teahouse culture is its close connection with flowing water, which can almost always be found near a teahouse in some form. In the case of this teahouse, our tables were suspended over a stream which trickled by musically underneath us as we ate kebabs, mulberries and round loaves of bread while drinking the traditional choy seeoh; black tea.

Wisconsin has a lot of trees, but during my time in Jordan I had almost forgotten what it was like to walk down a cool, shady-green street with hundreds of ancient trees hanging over you. Another characteristic of all Tajik towns is the wide, deep gutters on either side of each road, which you can usually count on being filled with rushing water from somewhere in the town, which in turn allows the trees along the curbs to flourish. The three of us next visited a history museum, containing artifacts, clothing, and armor from thousands of years of Tajik culture. Most impressive was the massive 10-meter long statue of a reclining Buddha that was discovered only recently in northern Tajikistan; a stone figure so large that he had to be sliced into pieces in order to get him into the museum where he could be reassembled.

The proportion in this picture is kind of off, but I'm about the size of one of his fingers

Farahnush, Malik and myself stopped by a garden to pose with Rudaki, a famous Persian/Tajiki poet

Back at home, I met the rest of the family; Farahnush’s elder sisters Sayora and Shazoda, and her little sister Tahmina. After dinner, I presented my adopted family with gifts I had brought for them from Jordan – red Jordanian and black Palestinian keffiyehs, and Jordanian baklava from downtown Amman. Like me, 24-year-old Sayora apparently has a political streak in her, and her eyes lit up when Malik translated to them that the keffiyehs had Palestinian connections and she pounced on one happily, while I told her that wearing that in Jordan will automatically put you on the side of the Palestinians, which she seemed very pleased about.

Black and red keffiyehs from Palestine and Jordan, and baklava too

The final event of the evening was a party at the American Embassy of Tajikistan, at which Malik is an employee. Malik brought Shazoda (clad in the other black keffiyeh) and me to the gates, where we were led through a pink rose garden and to the Marine guards’ barracks. As in all embassies (of the American variety at least), cameras were confiscated at the front desk for security reasons, or else I would have pictures to show you. The American and British football teams were having a match that evening, as well as live music provided by a British band (who also kindly picked up everyone’s bar tab). I sampled Russian beer for the first time and met several interesting international businessmen and world travelers. I was in such a rush of meeting everyone that Malik led me towards that I didn’t even catch the name of the energetic, slender woman who bounded about greeting people as they arrived and shouting words of encouragement to the competing sports teams. She was pleased to hear that I was a teacher in Jordan, working with refugees, and she strongly encouraged me to look into the Foreign Service if I was interested in continuing my work overseas. It wasn’t until later when someone else mentioned, “So you met the Madame Ambassador?” that I realized that I had been talking with Tracey Jacobson, the American ambassador herself!

NOTE: This post is now deprecated by the one following it. Thanks!

It’s been a whirlwind of exciting activities the past few days, more than I could ever hope to write at the moment while I’m experiencing it. My journeys through Istanbul yesterday, and Tajikistan today, have been very informative on both a cultural and linguistic sense. I saw the Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque, Sultanahmet, as well as the Grand Bazaar, named Kapliçarşi – or as we would say it, Kaplicharshi. I even had a few minutes to dangle my feet in the Mediterranean Sea before going back to the airport to catch my night flight to Tajikistan.

When I arrived at 3:20 in the morning, there were some difficulties with figuring out what do or where to go in the small airport (in which their was a severe derth in English-speaking employees, but no matter) but my host, Malik, showed up just in time to present the official invitation paper to me. After my late nap into this morning (I didn’t go to bed until 5 or so), Farah, Malik, and I drove around Dushanbe and they showed me the sites and museums in the city, and I went to a party at the American embassy for a concert. Malik works there as an NGO contract supervisor, and I enjoyed meeting his colleagues.

I don’t know what the entire plan is for tomorrow, but I know it will involve checking out one of the forest parks in the lower mountains outside of the city, and Malik is having me get up early. The extra +2 time zone change here puts me 10 hours ahead of Wisconsin, and hopefully it won’t take more than today for my internal clock to adjust to the change.

I can’t believe it’s already been almost two weeks since I arrived in Central Asia, and I haven’t had the time to even post one good-sized blog entry about the trip. I’ll remedy that with a couple now, but in order to prevent confusion on the dates of my experiences, I’ll be backdating entries to their original occurrence date. I’ll post the rest, and update these entries with photographs, when I get back to Jordan. For now though, let’s start with my day in Istanbul, Turkey.

The plane ride went smoothly and was very short, navigating neatly around Palestine to avoid having to deal with Israel and “their” airspace. I was surrounded by Italian tourists in the small plane; most likely the religious faithful on their way back to Rome after following Pope Benedict to Jordan the previous weekend. Because of the time of day, I spent most of the time napping, and awoke with a jolt as the plane started its steep decent over southern Turkey. My knowledge of Turkish geography was very limited, and continues to be so – until looking it up the night before, I had thought that Istanbul was the city in the middle of Turkey, which I now know is actually the capitol, Ankara.

In the airport, I was dismayed to discover that my Jordanian dinars were entirely useless. My limited vocabulary of Turkish phrases consisted of me pointing helplessly at the JD50 note in my hand and pointing towards the sign that said “exchange” in multiple languages. I tried 5 different exchange offices in the airport, at which every official took one look at the unfamiliar currency and shook their heads silently. I was just about to head towards the bright exit sign, with the most familiar Turkish word, Çıkış, or “Chukush” as we would pronounce it. Suddenly, I was poked from behind by a guy in a uniform, who grandly asked me in passable English where I was planning on going. It seemed like he worked for the airport, so I told him helplessly that I just wanted to find a way from the airport to Hagia Sofia and the Sultanahmet “Blue Mosque.” He officiously steered me through the luggage-bearing crowd to a rental car window and suddenly I realized his game. The rental car man also spoke English, of course, and told me that it would be 100 Turkish Lira, or about 63 USD, to take me to the sites included picking up me at…(here he inspected my plane ticket) 6:30 PM so that I could catch my flight to Dushanbe at 8:30. I balked at this, but he was more than insistent; he was downright pushy. He rang up the fee without even asking for my confirmation and extended his hand for my credit card. I weighed my options: I had no guidebook and no idea about what was normal in this country, but everyone knows that tourist locations love to gouge people, especially ones “fresh off the boat” such as myself. What choice did I have that wouldn’t take an hour of me hunting around looking for a better option? I paid the money and was escorted to the parking lot to meet my driver, Murod.

Murod was a shifty fellow who laughed a little too much and spoke only a half dozen words in English, three of which were “tip” and “give me?” I raised my eyebrow and communicated with him well enough to tell him that I didn’t have any smaller lira denominations now; I had just arrived. He laughed for several minutes at this, told me “later” and “6:30” and I was dumped from the car in the parking lot between the Hagia Sofia museum and the extraordinary Sultanahmet Mosque. Backpack in hand, I started for the latter, joining the throng of camera-toting tourists maneuvering through the gardens towards its massive wooden gates.

An amazing combination of Asia, Europe, and somehow, Disney World (that last one is just a gut feeling)

The mosque is one of those locations that neither words nor pictures can describe; you just have to see it for yourself. The outside of the building looks like they took a regular domed mosque with a few minarets and stretched the entire place into a cavernous interpretation of the Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. The line was long but moved quickly, and as far as I could tell there was no fee or gate guard – people just walked in line, saw the huge interior chamber, and left. As I expected, we were stopped outside the door and asked to remove our shoes, and even provided little plastic bags for us to put them into. Of course, they weren’t designed for size 13 hiking boots and even with one boot in each bag, the weight tore the straps off within minutes and I was left to pathetically stuff my baggies under each armpit, where they hung like bizarre waterwings.

Glowing fairy-globes and intricately-cut stained glass windows crown the masterpiece that is the Sultanahmet

The first thing thing you see after crossing the threshold are the walls on the opposite side of the chamber, which pull your gaze upwards to see the ceiling – and what a ceiling it is! Countless thousands of intricate mosaics and patterns of leaves, flowers, and Arabic lettering cover the interior of the domes and minarets above you. The sheer amount of effort that it took to paint that room, which looks about a cubic kilometer in size, must have been staggering. Like the Kaneeseh al-Zeitoon in Damascus, the mosque is supported by four huge stone pillars, two of which are accessible to us tourists, and the other two on the far side of the room overlooking the Mediterranean Sea are separated by a gate to divide the faithful and the khafereen (infidels). The infidels far outnumbered today’s faithful, though – I could only see maybe a dozen Muslims kneeling near the glass, compared with at least 200 of us on the other side. A hundred small porthole-like windows ring the main dome, providing the majority of the limited light in the room, as well as a large and particularly ancient-looking series of low-hanging chandeliers suspended just above our heads, which seemed to be made of cast iron and were filled with incandescent bulbs that looked like they were probably about as old as the mosque was. And the place was almost entirely silent. Besides the swishing of our socked feet and the hushed murmurs in a half-dozen languages of tour guides leading their charges about, any uttered sound was quickly swallowed up by the thick red carpet that covered the floor.

Using my amazing solo camera skills that I picked up in Britain two years ago, I was in the process of attempting to balance my camera against my shoe on an alcove to take a picture of myself and the ceiling in the mosque when two young Asian women took pity on me and asked me if I needed any help with my act of vanity, and whether I could take their picture for them as well. The three of us spent the next few minutes figuring out light settings for the room and how to use the exposure and autofocus properly – it helped that one of them had almost the exact same model of camera as me, too. They introduced themselves as Satomi and Ayumi, Japanese flight attendants who had just came into Turkey the previous night on a flight that had some extra seats. They were surprised to learn that I was working in Jordan, and Ayumi exclaimed that she had just been there with her airline, Dubai Air, last month. The three of us agreed that it would be better to sightsee together, and of course our obvious next destination was the Hagia Sofia, which was only a few minutes walking distance away from us.

The Hagia Sofia, while not nearly as impressive on the outside as the Sultanahmet, is nevertheless just as lovely on the inside, if not more so. The three of us acquired a guide, Barish, at the gate, who repeatedly insisted that he was licensed. My Japanese companions only had euros with them, and Barish reminded them that the ticket gate would only take lira, but that he would buy their tickets for them if he was hired, a fact that played a definite role in our taking him on. After passing through the requisite metal detectors, we found ourselves on a sunny sidewalk outside of the gray stone building of the museum. Bashir explained that this site was the home of the first true Christian church in the world, built by Saint Paul in the decades following Christ’s ascension, but that original wooden church had been burnt to the ground after only a short time. Over the centuries, the church was rebuilt in stone several times, and after the Muslim conquest it was converted into a mosque, the minarets were added, and it existed this way for centuries until the past few decades, when it was more recently turned into a museum and tourist attraction.

Four huge shields with important Islamic names on them...this one says حسن, or Hassan

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At 5 in the morning, I sit in a little restaurant booth in the Queen Alia airport, waiting for my boarding call at 6 to summon me to my airplane. It’s time for my two-week vacation from Jordan to the little country of Tajikistan, where my AFS (American Foreign Service, a student exchange program) sister Farah and her family are waiting to receive and give me a tour of the part of the world which few people know much about. When I first scheduled my trip six months ago, my friends (both Arab and Western) were very curious about Tajikistan, and several of them wanted to know “where the city named Tajikistan was.” Farah and I have agreed that it just hasn’t received a lot of international recognition at this time, and most people probably view it as “one of the ‘Stans.” Probably the only ‘Stan that the world knows any “information” about is Kazakhstan, thanks to Baron Sasha Cohen. And frankly, the Kazakhs would have preferred a little less recognition.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, welcoming my new class and starting the now-familiar lessons for the 3rd time, with Wamidh continuing on as my excellent and increasingly knowledgeable translator who is taking more and more initiatives to answer questions for me just from memory of previous questions. It’s nice; I’d really like to be able to hand the class off to him when I leave in a year, depending on how confident he feels, or maybe he would like to team teach with one of my talented students – it’s definitely something to consider.

The new students are a quiet group, older than the first and second class and with a larger percentage of the “conservatively dressed” men in robes and hatta (the keffiyehs around the head with the rope to hold it in place). We’re having a little bit of an attendance crisis right now, but this is due to the fact that on the 5th of May (the first day) Aaron and I had agreed that we would give them that one class there as an introduction, then dismiss them until the first of June so that my two week absence would not be “detrimental” to their memory. However, there were some issues with the “higher ups” and this was modified – we were ordered to get the students back immediately, and then find a replacement for the two weeks I was gone. Of course by then it was already too late – the students had heard the fateful words, “come back in a month,” and now they were essentially unreachable by phone, like they were on another planet. We’ve been slowly migrating in another group of students after giving these ones warning calls, telling them they needed to come back in, but I have a sinking feeling that the 15 new students we’ve brought in since the 5th will be joined suddenly in early June by the original group, clamoring to have their spots back. Such is life in the field of humanitarian aid – you can’t really do anything 100% right.

In my absence, the class will be led by a young computer science graduate named Heashem, whom I only met yesterday. I’ve emailed at least 16MB of documents (including photographs and diagrams obviously) to Aaron, Wamidh, and Heashem as well as detailed lists of what to cover each day. Wamidh and I will be continuously communicating via email (if possible) and I’m hoping that he’ll let me know at least every couple days any questions or issues with the class. Heashem seemed enthusiastic about starting, and when he met the students today, they were very polite and well-mannered – just as a teacher would want them to be for a substitute!

Amro, one of my favorite students from my previous class, had great news for me – he’d been accepted by the UN relief group to relocate to America with his family! He let me know only a few days before the graduation ceremony, and he was simply wild with excitement. He’s a little younger than I am at 19, and he and bonded outside of class as well by going to a mutual friend’s wedding in north Amman last month (which was quite different than the story of my travel to Tibna with Haitham for the dual-son wedding). Weddings are pretty popular pastime here, and Amro and I would often talk with Sadi, the owner of a small shop across the street from the training center. Sadi invited us to his son’s wedding, which was a ceremony with much more pomp and a more-Western style reception with cake and punch. There were still no women at this wedding, but they were in the same building this time, a change from the previous one at which they were entirely isolated.

Amro, Sadi, and I at his son's wedding reception

Anyway! Amro speaks English about as well as I speak Arabic, which makes for a good learning experience for both of us. He excitedly requested as much information as possible about “Sant al-Louise, Mizzoorah” which I gladly gave him. He wanted information on schools there, jobs for his family, and how much it cost to find an apartment. I informed him that from St. Louis he’d only be a few hours away from my home in Wisconsin, and that we’d have to get together for a reunion when I returned to the States. He patted me on the back and officiously invited me to his future home for a tour. He’s a great guy and I look forward to hearing more about how he’s settling in via email – not only for my own benefit as his friend, but so that I can provide information on relocation procedures to the rest of the training center. Although several of my other students have also gone to America since leaving my class, Amro is the one that I’m closest friends with.

I was a little bit worried about how I might get to the airport for such an early flight. Tajikistan’s only airport is in their capitol city, Dushanbe, and there are only two flights per week going between Amman and Dushanbe, both of them in the middle of the night, and both of them with 10+ hour layovers in Istanbul (not Constantinople). Yesterday evening was spent pouring over guides to the old city of Istanbul: if I was going to spend that much time there, it definitely was in my best interest to see some of the most famous sites like the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia church. I had (and still have) this nervous feeling in my stomach completely unlike when I went to Syria; the part of me that’s shouting “You’re going to a country in which you don’t speak any of the language! Run!” When I went to Syria I felt completely normal, like I was going to another state – I knew I could understand them (with difficulty) and vice versa, but in this case I’m having worries about me trapped in a street corner in suburban Istanbul staring at signs in Turkish with idea of how to find my way back to the airport for my second flight.

I can only speak positively about the Al-Moumayez taxi service from Amman to the airport. Al-Moumayez is a new pickup and ferrying company that only opened 6 months ago in Amman with the goal of “modernizing and standardizing” the industry. There are thousands and thousands of regular, privately owned and contracted taxis here in Amman, but they are unorganized and have no real central management. Al-Moumayez (which means “special” or “unique”) aims to change that with satellite monitored, prompt taxis which have pickup, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: in other words, the perfect thing for a non-Arabic-fluent traveler trying to get to the airport in the middle of the night. And best of all, they will not rip you off or try to get a flat fee like regular taxis to take you to the airport. Those taxis will charge you upwards of JD15, at least, for the service – but Al-Moumayez is 100% metered and therefore from Jebel Amman to the airport, a 45 minute drive, was only JD8.5 – even at the slightly more expensive per-meter rates they charge. The driver, Jafa’, was an Egyptian who made history in my eyes be being the first person to ever find my house without needing to call and ask for directions a second time – those satellite GPS systems might have helped, but he told me he’d been driving for 12 years and he knew the streets of Amman here like the back of his hand. He didn’t speak any English, but we talked about his 6 kids back home in Egypt, and of course, politics. I have a son about your age, he commented, What are you doing here so far from your home and family? He was impressed with my ability to speak to him, saying normally when I drive Americans, it’s a long, boring ride without much talking.

Here at the airport, I got similar service from a caddy named Louai who led me about the airport, shouting orders to the luggage handlers and the baggage check people. He told the checking officer that I was a teacher in Ayn al Basha, and the handler then quizzed me on its location. His colleague in the booth next to him commented, He speaks Arabic better than you do! at which I laughed and said the requisite, “ya rait!” which means “I wish!” Louai and the handlers laughed at this, and they led me to the front of the line for the Turkish flight: if you’re a Westerner, speaking Arabic in Jordan will almost always gain you a little wasta compared with everyone else.

I had a surprise just a moment ago as I sit here typing this – apparently there’s a hole in the roof here because a bird just flew past me and sat on the table next to me, which was rather unexpected. I had just been thinking “Wow, how odd I can hear the birds from outside in here in this cafe,” and suddenly I see the source of the birdsong sitting next to me. Only in Jordan! Insha’allah, I’ll find a way to update the blog with stories about my travels – first to Turkey, the Tajikistan, then Uzbekistan, then the Pamir Mountains, and perhaps even a corner of Afghanistan (the non-blowing-up part). I’d better wrap this up, as it’s now quarter to six and almost loading time – the line is forming next to me, and I’d better join it!

After my usual early morning Friday biking with Cycling Jordan, I ended up staying over at Kamal and his fiance Ruth’s apartment in north Amman, as we were doing some Linux work on Kamal’s laptop. Whiskey was consumed, and I was given the guest room to drag my weary self to, still dressed in my biking spandex and gear. Early the next morning, I was awoken by my mobile beeping on the table next to me – it was a message from Aaron: “YOU’RE DEAD!” It was paintball day.

I had been notified a couple days earlier by Jeff and Aaron that they wanted to have a paintballing get-together, something Aaron had wanted to do for a long time. After catching a taxi home to quickly shower and finally change my clothes, I was picked up by Karen, Jeff and a couple of their friends I hadn’t met before. Somewhat nervous from the graphic stories of paintball bruising and helmet-splitting I had received from Kamal the previous night, I asked the others who had gone paintballing before. Neither Karen nor her friend Christine had gone before, and Jeff had gone once. Although Aaron, Laura, and others were in other vehicles, rapidly forming a convoy as we sped from Amman, Jeff informed me that despite Aaron’s slightly-maniacal enthusiasm, he had never experienced it either.

The one (and only) paintball course in the entire country is located in the picturesque mountains of the Zai National Forest, just slightly north of Salt. As Karen’s tiny Chevy Spark weaved along the rocky mountain slope, we caught glimpses of the now-familiar spread of the Jordan Valley through the olive trees surrounding us. The name of the course is Mountain Breeze, part of a country club in the middle of the wilderness. The site is simply beautiful, with real attention to care and maintenance of the grounds and trees. For one of the first times in Jordan, I didn’t see litter lying in the bushes.

We discussed the layout of the teams as we exited the cars and walked towards the registration table. There would be 16 total people playing, 8 on each team. The 8 members of our team, “EGT” would, of course, be made of EGT members – myself, Laura, Aaron, Jeff, Karen, Galen, and…Khalil and Wajih? I paused and said, “really?” Aaron responded to the affirmative: “He’s planning on using Khalil as a bodyguard. He would have brought Najeeb with him to to use him as a weapons platform.” I had only met a few members of the other team, like Ericka, who had come with us to Wadi Rum for Thanksgiving six months ago. I felt pretty good about our odds, until Aaron commented: “oh yeah, and they have Ali, too.”

This is Ali.

Ali, who is English/Iraqi and pretty much the reason why they had the unofficial name “the Iraqi team,” works in Iraq as a private security contractor. This means that he actually knows how to aim and use a real weapon instead of a paintball gun, which the majority of us also had never operated either. Needless to say, he’s also built like a wall of muscle and as you can see is a good 4 inches taller than me. I felt significantly less confident about our odds.

We suited up quickly, and I suddenly became much more aware of the sun beating down on us through the trees. Basing my reasoning from Kamal’s horror stories once again, I was wearing 4 layers of shirts and 3 layers of pants, including both of my bike shorts, because I had no idea what sort of covering or armor they’d be providing us. As it turned out, it was camouflaged, canvas-like material which made the heat go up a good 10 degrees. The women in the group had to wear, uh, chest protection as well, which Karen and Laura commented added another 5 degrees as well and looked like a housewife’s apron (in camo).

I’d watched my brother put this stuff on many times before, but never had worn it myself. Several people commented that with my tanned, dark face, bulkier looking body (thanks to the clothes instead of anything Mr. Universe-winning), and camo doo-rag, I actually looked quite menacing. I could get used to that. Or, at least I looked menacing when I took off the green hood I was wearing from my sweatshirt.

Right before the first match; the meshed-off course is behind us.

The referees told us that we would have 3 sessions, each one twenty minutes long, and we’d be playing capture the flag in the L-shaped course. One side of the course is up, the other is down – to make matters worse, the down side of the course has almost no cover compared with the other, only a few barrels and sapling pines. EGT won the coin toss, and I suggested to Aaron, our enthusiastic “commander” to take the high ground for the first round. The rules were simple: if you get shot, you go back to your base, touch the flag, and you’re back in to keep shooting. This also worked out well for Mountain Breeze, as they were selling us the paintballs for JD8 per 100, a fairly ridiculous markup. Rory, an American on the Iraqi team, commented that that price would be unheard of in America, but here in Jordan with only one place to rent the equipment, there wasn’t much that could be done about that.

The airhorn sounded as we crouched next to our ragged red flag, peering over the rocks and barrels towards the other corner, where we could catch glimpses of the purple markers attached to the other team’s shoulders. I played conservatively at first, really dreading getting shot for the first time. As I crawled forward to the halfway mark, cursing my 6’1″ frame for my lack of crouching ability, I heard the rhythmic smacksmacksmack of balls exploding on the trees around me. I traded gunfire with unknown assailants, the masks preventing any possible recognition. Only the hulking Ali was recognizable to me, and Ericka and Christine with their chest aprons. I nailed one, maybe two people – they put their guns in the air as a sign of defeat and retreated back to their base. Grunting with victory (and by crawling into a low tree branch which clocked me in the forehead) I suddenly heard a POW and my hand flew backwards, coated in yellow paint. I had been tagged, directly on the knuckles of my left hand, now dripping paint. Thankfully, I was wearing my bicycle glove and the ball did not actually hit my hand itself. I raised my rifle, crawled painfully (paintfully, haw) to my feet and retreated to the base where Laura and Karen were crouched, guns aimed outwards waiting for the Iraqis to attack.

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