This weekend’s hiking trip to Petra really let me know that my body has missed out 4 months of bicycling. I won’t say that I was exhausted after the trip, but my thighs felt like rubber bands by the time we were finished. Located slightly southwest of the main body of Petra, Jebel Haroun (or, in English, Aaron’s Mountain, or Mount Hor) is not a cakewalk to climb to. If I hadn’t had Pat and his son Marshall to help me out in some places, I might never have made it out of there alive!

As I’m starting to learn is customary for trips to the south, we left at 5 in the morning when Pat’s friend and colleague, Andrew, drove down from Irbid to pick us up. The two of them are Boy Scouts scoutmasters, and besides it being a good trip for the four of us, they’re always looking for new parts of Jordan to take their scouts. I was shocked when Pat confessed to me that he and his family had never been to Petra before, even though they’ve lived in the country for 6 years. “We lived in Egypt for years beforehand” he scoffed jovially. “I mean, can Jordan’s piles of rocks really compete against the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings?” Although I should have known better, I still am in the “Wisconsin mindset” and it’s in December mode. I brought 3 layers of clothes and a light jacket as well. I should have paid more attention to Marshall, who was wearing shorts and polo.

The trip down flew by (obviously, I was asleep for almost all of it) and soon we were in Little Petra, the workers’ village that is near the main tourist village of Wadi Musa. Because we were really going into Petra itself, we skipped the main entrance and the walk down the Great Siq, and instead used the employee entrance, sliding and slipping down the slopes of the mountain to reach the little track that the trucks, camels, and donkeys of the Bedouin use every morning and evening. Even though by this point it was 9AM, I was surprised when we reached the intersection with the main path through Petra and saw that there were almost no tourists. At this same hour, same time last month, the place was already packed with shuffling people in khakis. This time though, the place was deserted, and the four us had to constantly fend off Bedouins, wheedling with us to rent donkeys from them to carry us to wherever we wanted. “But what if we want to walk?” I queried, summing up my general feelings towards transportation in Jordan. I mean, we were clearly wearing hiking boots, wearing backpacks weighed down with water bottles, and all of us had akamma, or residency papers, with us. My question was met with baffled stares and eye rolls, as well as some laments about the fact that we were sure to die of exhaustion.

After we crossed over the central path, the road quickly narrowed, then vanished, leaving us with only a compressed, sandy pair of tire skids to mark the trail. An ominous sign in remarkably well-written English loomed over us as we climbed the first hill, leaving Petra behind us: “Venturing from the regular route on your own is not advisable, it is highly recommended that should you wish to do so beyond this point we strongly advise either a local guide or at least one companion.” Great! We were four, so…onward!

The trail, such as it was, wound around the dunes, climbing gradually in some places and sharply in others. We usually kept the Nabatean mountain range to our right, and it was still possible to see some misshapen and badly eroded Nabatean tombs lumped into the red stone, all with the same stair step-shaped crown over all of them that delineated it as a tomb. The sand under our feet was thankfully pressed down enough that it wasn’t too difficult to walk in most places, but it was only a matter of time before I found myself sweating and pulling off all of my exterior layers, leaving me in just my jeans, boots, and t-shirt. Sweating in mid December! Who would have imagined such a novel concept! Well, I’ve learned my lesson after that day.

We followed a worn steel pipe that was haphazardly draped over dunes and rocks. We saw little Bedouin camps, literally no more than holes in the rock walls, with shreds of fabric and and cooking fires in front of them. Herders watched us disinterestedly from the cliffs above us, and the air was silent except for the sound of our feet in the sand, or clicking over occasional gravel.

About thirty minutes into the walk, we were approached by a Bedouin woman who, to judge by Western appearances, looked positively ancient with a wrinkled, leathery face and hands, but the dark straw color of the hair under her hijab betrayed the fact that it was only the hard life of the Bedouin among the rocks that aged her appearance like this. She spoke a little English, and Pat and Andrew conversed with her and her little daughters that crowded around us. She invited us for tea (which we politely declined, gesturing to our full water bottles), and spread a little bag of worn bits of metal in front of us. Marshall and I inspected them closely at her encouragement, and saw that they were actually Roman and Arab coins, all centuries old – tiny monuments to the massive trade empire the Nabateans had established between the entire Arabic peninsula, and civilizations of the northern Mediterranean. The price was right, and both of us bought a few from her. Marshall knew a bit of Latin and was able to translate a bit of the script around some of the coins, but all they seemed to say was “Hail to the Emperor.”

After another hour on the trail, the tire marks vanished entirely and we found the mountain’s grade beginning to increase. Pat pointed ahead, and I saw a tiny, faraway white dot on one of the mountains in the distance, glittering and blinking like a mirage in the morning sun. “There’s the shrine to Aaron,” Pat informed me. “They say that he was buried up here.” Aaron/Haroun is the brother of Moses/Musa, and because he is mentioned in the Qur’an as a prophet, is very important to Islam. The tiny dot we were seeing was the glittering minaret of a mosque, built on the peak of the mountain almost a mile above sea level.

It may look close from here, but it's still 2 hours away. You can see click the picture and see the tiny white dot of the Mosque.

A Wadi (valley) split the stone in front of us, and we skirted its edge for another half hour before we could find a tiny path, no more than a slightly more cleared area of the fist-sized rocks that were now the footpath, and also with small stacks of flat stones set every 50 yards. Someone had put them there, strategically, so we figured that were in the right place and at least probably weren’t going to wander into the desert and die. The ground here seemed to be made to break ankles, so conversation was limited as we kept our eyes to the ground, picking our own paths in an unspoken competition to see which one of us could get to an unspoken point the fastest without looking like we were having a competition. The shimmering dot swam in and out of our vision, crossing behind the peaks of other mountains.

Continue reading this post…

I can’t believe that it’s already drawing near the end of my first four months in Jordan. Time has really flown; it still seems like yesterday that I was meeting Ahmad at the airport, awkwardly shaking hands with him while carrying what seemed like a dozen bags, and taking my first sleep-stupored bus ride into Amman. These days, Amman seems so familiar to me that it’s almost second nature, and all of the neighbors (who were already used to Philip) don’t even give the tall, skinny white guy a second glance. It’s only on rare occasions, when I’m getting lunch at a small cafe in Ayn Al Basha or other villages and a small child stares at me opened mouthed, or I’m interrogated as to my background by a curious adolescent, that I remember that I haven’t always been here, teaching and working in a busy but comfortable routine.

When last I wrote, it was right after the choir concert and the 4-day long festival of Eid ul-Adha was about to start, marking a long, glorious week of lazing about (primarily), visiting with Haitham in Zarqa, a Christmas party with my coworkers at the Christian school, writing all the old postcards I meant to write before, and trying to catch up with my books. I’ve begun to read the Bible again, for the first time in 8 years, and I have an English translation of the Qur’an as well that I’m attempting to muddle through. Haitham warned me when I got it that even though it’s in English, it’s a literal translation and therefore, most of the metaphors are so flowery that I have no idea what I’m actually reading. I’m only on the 4th chapter so far (barely scratched the surface) but it’s the chapter on the treatment of women and sexuality, so it’s particularly interesting.

Of course, the vacation couldn’t last forever, and for the past few days I’ve been teaching again. Since we got the internet hooked up at the school, it seems like my job has simultaneously gotten easier and harder at the same time. It’s nice to be reconnected to information again, but of course it means that since I’m the IT guy, I have to be in a dozen places at once, trying to put out small fires here and there (usually not literally, hah!) – it’ll be nice when I have the proxy server finished, which should allow me to monitor and lock out file downloading, and inappropriate websites. We’ve gone through 7GB of data downloads in 3 weeks, and the service provider has dropped us to dial-up speed.

Qayssar continues to be extremely helpful to me, both in verbal translation and also now in written work as well. Because the class will need to continue during my two week absence in America, I’m trying to write out as many documents as I can, so Qayssar can take over as teacher in my place and have them to hand out as worksheets. Have you ever wanted to learn about computer RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)? Of course you have! Now available in either English or Arabic, for your reading pleasure!

I should be able to write one more entry that’s actually interesting before returning to the snowy fields of southern Wisconsin; I’m going south to Aaron’s Tomb with Pat this weekend (or Lot’s Tomb, I can’t remember which one) and of course I’ll have my camera with me. Pat told me we’re going caving, which sounds fun, because last time I went caving back in high school it wasn’t as much fun because all of those American “safety rules” and “warning signs” that kept us from having fun – here in Jordan, they tend to follow a Darwin Awards mindset towards safety and security – “if you die, you probably shouldn’t have done that.” Should be a blast!

In other news…I got some pictures from Lauren from Thanksgiving in Wadi Rum. This one is by far my all-time favorite.

I have photographic evidence that I really did look as silly as I thought.

I mentioned several months ago after first arriving in Jordan that I had joined a Christian choir group that practiced nearby, thanks to Silas’s invitation and urging, and for the last two nights the choir had the chance to show off the fruits of our labor to the Christian population of Amman.

I was surprised but pleased by the turnout to both of the concerts; the church it was held it had about 300 seats in it and both nights it was standing-room only, with people packing both the lower level and the baloney level as well. The Sacred Heart of Jesus church is a huge, ornate affair with hanging chandeliers with dozens of tiny lights, and the transept is done up with huge statues of Jesus and the saints (very unusual and intriguing to a Lutheran such as myself) and rosaries everywhere. The acoustics were amazing though, and especially during the rehearsals we had in the preceding nights, our group of 55 singers made the place echo spectacularly for a good four to five seconds when we released a note. The makeup of the choir was evenly mixed between visiting foreigners like myself, long-time expatriates from across the English-speaking world, and college-age Jordanians. The choir’s rehearsals were always conducted in English, which every member spoke (and sang in) easily and fluently.

The length of the concert was a little over an hour and a half, which included the children’s choir (pictured below), who performed a couple songs by themselves, and four in conjunction with the adult choir. As you can also see in this picture, we were recorded by a Jordanian television channel, too. Our director, Ms. Shireen Abu-Khader, informed us that our little choir was known throughout the country as the largest and most talented, which made me feel really awkward that I couldn’t sing the Arabic hymns with more skill! But the audience which, like the choir, was combination of Arabs and Westerners, enthusiastically sang along with our songs whenever they could (several of the more well-known ones were printed in both languages in the programs for that very purpose). Thankfully, that took some of the heat off of those of us less-skilled in the Arabic language!

It was a beautiful, wonderful experience, and I’m looking forward to working with my fellow singers and the amazingly talented Ms. Shireen throughout the spring, when we put on our next concert for Easter.

In other news – remember how I mentioned a couple weeks ago that my class had joked with me about putting videos of me teaching up on Youtube? Turns out that Ahmed wasn’t kidding about it!

The children's choir sings 'Blessings to Mary' as the TV cameras roll around them

As promised in the previous blog entry, I now find myself caught up with enough of my coursework and lesson planning that I can put a few hours aside to talk about this past weekend’s trip to Wadi Rum, my second one in two weeks. My backbone is slowly shifting into alignment again, and I’m finding less sand in my ears than yesterday. All and all, with the exception of the sore throat, I’m feeling very good!

We left Amman at about 8 in the morning, a caravan of two cars heading south down the Desert Highway. I was with Aaron and his girlfriend Laura, while Jeff and two other friends, Amir and Lillie, came along behind in the second car. We made fairly good time through the light rain in Amman, and the ride was smooth thanks to Laura’s car, a Mitsubishi that to be perfectly honest was the nicest car I’ve been in since arriving in Jordan. The one fault it had, as we three soon found out, that after passing 120 kilometers per hour (around 70 mph) that the car makes an urgent, constant beeping noise. “Warning!” it seems to tell you, helpfully. “This car is traveling quickly! You must be on a highway, where you may hit a goat at any moment! Warning!” Thankfully, the sound of our teeth grinding together drowned out the beeping after half an hour. That – plus the combination of horrible, 1980’s pop-crooner music that the Jordanians must think that Americans love (and rap, of course) and play on the few English stations – was enough to make me happy that I was still so tired from the previous night that I could easily fall asleep in the back seat.

About halfway down the country, a change in velocity (and the sudden lack of beeping) woke me up suddenly and I saw that we were being waved down to the side of the road by a mustachioed, slightly comical-looking police officer (think Mario, with a badge). As cars were clearly still zooming past at almost identical speeds, the guy clearly was noting the nice car and the Americans inside and thinking “easy pickings.” He greeted Aaron in passable English, and after the usual license-and-registration check (some things are always the same in every country, I guess), consulted briefly with a fellow officer and then gazed off into space, stroked his mustache, and said, “you must pay…errrrm….twenty dinars.” Laura muttered, “I’d like to see them give us a ticket.” All three of us clearly suspected that this wasn’t an “official” request for money, but instead a “please bribe me now” request. Aaron spoke loudly in his friendly, I-Am-A-Tourist voice, “No Money! Don’t Have Any! We Are Sorry!” The officers clicked their tongues at us, tsk’ing in reproach, and stepped away to consult again. The tongue-click, or “tsk” is the primary method of showing disapproval here, which took me by surprise because I’ve never seen anyone under 60 do that consistently in the States. Meanwhile, as we watched, the officers tried to flag down another car that was zipping past us. As we watched, the young women inside waved back at them cheerfully, and then sped up again and continued down again. Apparently, that’s what we  should have done. Finally, the two officers returned, and Mario poked his head back into the window, returning Aaron’s license-and-registration again and said, “Well, be more careful next time.”

The sun rose into the sky, racing the now-familiar reddish mountain crags for height before dropping off suddenly into sloping dunes and desert for miles in the distance, broken only by chains of massive power pylons like sentinels, shifting and looking almost animated as the heat-haze drifted over the sand. I wondered if the pylons were carrying power from north to south or vice versa, and why so many of them were needed for the tiny concrete villages that seemed to be the only sign of life besides the hiss of the cars on asphalt. At about 11:30, we pulled off the highway into the entrance to the Wadi Rum Protected Area, the same driveway that my tour bus had gone up two weeks before.

We stopped off at Beit Ali, or “Ali’s House,” a small compound at the edge of the reserve that was the last place to get drinks before heading off into the dunes, or rent ATV’s for desert use at exorbitant prices. We tsk’ed in amazement and disbelief at the cost of a can of crappy Amstel beer (4 dinars per can? 20 dinars for a bottle of wine?) but had little choice but to pay the robber’s fee; “like being in New York, without the civilization,” I commented wryly as we climbed back into our cars.

A few more kilometers into the desert along the small and winding, but well-kept road, and we had reached the end of the track for our own vehicles; further travel inwards was restricted to registered guides to prevent damage to the ecosystem and the whole death/dehydration thing that unfortunately comes from being inexperienced and lost in the desert. We didn’t mind; Laura and Lillie, the trip’s masterminds, had already contacted their favorite guide, Suleiman the Bedouin, and he would be meeting up with us shortly. Sure enough, after only a few minutes of casually tossing a football around the parking lot, the man himself rattled up to us in a sage-colored Toyota pickup with an open bed. He hailed us with a gleaming smile, which matched his gleaming white robe, as he stepped from the truck to help us lift our bags into the bed. He greeted everyone warmly; apparently this group had been using his camp for quite awhile now. I was struck by his height, smooth English, and especially by his very Westernized sense of humor – which made sense, since his job was to be a companion to mostly-Western tourists!

About to make a successful football catch in the Rum parking lot

After we had piled the truck full with our coolers, packs, and selves, the engine grumbled to life, and we lurched out into the Bedouin village, passing by goats, camels, and cavorting children who flashed by us in bouncing blur as we left the low buildings behind and entered the actual desert. I saw a vague blur of a ubiquitous Orange Telecom building (even HERE?), and had enough time to shake my fist and tsk a couple times before it too vanished in a cloud of dust behind us.

All of us except poor Jeff had sunglasses on, which we quickly adjusted tightly across our face because the combination of sun, sand, windblasts, and insane bouncing did not let up for the next 15 minutes of roaring across the dunes. Suleiman was definitely getting a kick from treating his truck like a four-wheeler ATV. As our hair whipped around our faces and we struggled to hold onto our pots, pans, and coolers, the mountains got increasingly larger and even more impressive. I tried to photograph, video, and hold onto things at the same time, but I don’t believe I was too successful and therefore that particular photography won’t grace the website. Laura mentioned that when they needed to travel at night, the Bedouins guided themselves with the lights of their trucks turned off, using the ridges and spires of the mountains as navigational tools. Looking around me at the distinctive crests that surrounded us, I understood that to a Bedouin, born and raised in the desert, they would be as clear as painted signposts.

All right, just one picture. Because you asked nicely.

Continue reading this post…

Perhaps it’s just the fact that I spent the weekend sleeping outside under the stars in the desert, without a hat, and when I woke up I was covered in cold dew droplets, but I’m not feeling particularly healthy this morning. Thanksgiving was excellent; in fact, I had two of them – one with my colleague Shawn at his house the actual night of, and then I was back down in Wadi Rum with Jeff and Aaron and some other friends to celebrate a more traditional turkey-centric Thanksgiving.

Shawn’s dinner was completely wild; he has this tiny little apartment up near 3rd circle that he just packed with friends and coworkers, and when I arrived, the place already smelled strongly of garlic, hot sauce, and cooking meat. Shawn was one of my first friends here, and now he’s leaving the country for good in a week so I didn’t want to miss one of the last times that I would have to hang out with him. He and his roommates and friends whipped up about 6 different dishes in the span of an hour, and then we all crowded out onto his porch to have what was perhaps the most Mexican food-filled Thanksgiving I’ve ever had. No one spoke for about 15 minutes because we were all so busy just shoveling it down. It was cold outside in the night air, but trust me, after that garlic and sauce did its job, none of us were feeling it. It was a great party, followed by a couple hours of dancing, which left me wondering how I was going to be able to get myself up in time to meet up with Aaron to get to Wadi Rum the next morning. I’ll try to write about that soon, within the next few days – it’ll probably be another longer post, so I need to get all the photos ready!

December starts tomorrow; I don’t have a lot of work with my Iraqi students lined up for this month because it’s going to be filled with so many breaks. The Islamic holiday Eid ul-Adha is next week, which means we’ll have most of it off, and then of course Christmas. I leave for home two days before the 25th, which means I’ll get to experience the joys of pre-Christmas flying by myself, for the first time.

I don’t have time to write much more; Jeff and Aaron will be here in a few minutes to pick me up to take me to Ayn Al Basha for class. Because of the cold and sore throat that I’m now sporting thanks to the weather, I’m glad that Sunday is a half day for my students. Here’s a picture of my friend and translator (or, mutarjeem) Qayssar, leading the class a few weeks ago. As you can tell, everyone loves taking pictures of the action, and several of the students have joked about putting it on Youtube (at least, I think they’re joking!)

So, I figure that if people are actually going to call me a teacher, I’d better actually give out some testing material at some point to prove that my guys are learning what I say they are. With that in mind, I decided that I would give a test or quiz every Sunday morning; the first day of classes for the week.

I knew that my lack of a dedicated translator of the written word would be an impediment to my ability to write a real test, so I settled on a picture-matching quiz that I gave them on Sunday (after I only caught a few hours of sleep from getting back from Petra!). Nothing complex, just matching between English names and pictures of the components that we’d learned about in class. Jeff told me that he could see them frantically studying, outside my classroom, an hour before classes began. Of course, 3 of them were still late and 2 didn’t show, but that’s to be expected here.

I’ve saved a copy here, if you’d like to see it. It’s in PDF form. Give it a try, let me know how you think you did!

Continue reading this post…