Jerusalem

I am writing this one after having been back for five days, at Miami doing RA training which keeps us busy from 8 AM to 9 PM. But, Jerusalem is fresh enough in my mind still that I think I can do it justice. But a fair warning, I also plan to include an account of flying home on this one, so this one will end on a sour note, unless you stop reading once I mention leaving Jerusalem.

This adventure only included Alex, Mary, and I; no Aaron, as he proved quite frustrating to travel with during the Damascus trip. Our first hurdle was that our taxi had been booked to take us across Sheik Hussein Bridge, way to the north of Jordan, which was not what we wanted to do. But adjusting our route to King Hussein Bridge proved easy, as it is a shorter faster trip and we agreed that we would pay the same amount, rather than less, and no change-of-plans fee. The driver was one of the nicer ones I have had this summer.

On reaching the border, our bus took an hour and a half to cross the bridge to Israeli territory, as Israel wanted to triple check that there were no explosives on or under the bus. We assumed waiting for our visa into Israel would take as much as six hours, as Janine the weekend before had a long wait because she is of Arab decent and had been to Lebanon. We were not of Arab descent (except Mary) but had been to Syria, so when the wait only took 45 minutes it was a very pleasant surprise.

Upon arriving in Jerusalem we put our bags down at our hostel and immediately headed into the old city towards the Western Wall. The Western Wall is the most important site in the Jewish faith, so read more about it here. We covered our heads and approached the wall to offer prayers at its base, which was a very cool experience. While it is a Jewish holyplace, I liked knowing that Jesus had looked upon and prayed within the temple that this wall used to retain.

That evening we walked out of the Old City to a district of the city where all of the young people hang out at night. There were a fairly large number of Americans, young people who were perhaps on their birth rights trips, but overall just a fun scene that was a nice break from the tighter Arab culture that we'd grown used to.

The next morning we started at the Holocaust museum. You can't ever really ask people if they enjoy a Holocaust museum, but the main reason we went was so that Alex could see it, and he found it to be tremendous, as did I, so while enjoyment may not be the right word, we did like it. Next we went to the Israel Museum, which houses among other things, the Dead Sea Scrolls, explained here. The museum also had a model of Jerusalem (the Old City) at the time when Jesus would have been there. Last, the museum had a gallary of contemporary art from Israeli artists, which I was unable to take pictures of, but which was my favorite thing we saw while in Jerusalem.

Afterwards we went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and please on this one do click here. We were able to visit each of the significant places housed within the Church, including the spots where Jesus is believed to have been crucified and where he was laid afterwards. Very neat.

Following this we walked the way of the cross, or via dolorosa, in reverse, eventually leaving the old city and proceeding onwards to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed before the mob with Judas arrived to arrest and eventually crucify him.

Afterwards we walked to the outside of a lot of important churches and places, but not much in Jerusalem stays open past five, so we only saw the outside of a lot of things. At one point we found some grass (rare in the Middle East), took our shoes off and sat down in it for a little while, which ended up being one of my favorite things we did in Jerusalem. After this it got dark so we ate a slow dinner and did some shopping. Sorry, but I bought all of you nothing. Nothing there was very nice or cheap, in fact, the only thing it had going for it was that it was from Jerusalem, but most of that stuff was made in China or Turkey or Indonesia anyways.

That night was difficult for Alex, click his blog if you want to find out why! The next morning I woke up at 6 am, as did Alex, so that we could give seeing the Dome of the Rock up close a try. Unfortunately we were in Jerusalem on Friday, the Muslim holyday, and Saturday, the Jewish one, so at no point was there an opportunity for us as non-Muslim to approach the mount. So while that was frustrating, now I have a reason to go back.

At this point I will discuss coming back to America. I will try to be brief, as not to over emphasize what was a miserable process. After being turned away from the Dome of the Rock, we returned to the hostel, woke Mary, and left for Jordan, which proved to be a very smooth and easy process. The best part is that we did all of this without ever getting an Isreali stamp on our passport, necessary if we ever planned to return to Syria again. My last day in Amman was uneventful, and so I packed up and left at midnight for my 7 AM flight, necessary because I wanted to be at the airport two hours before my flight and because I doubted my ability to hail a taxi at a reasonable price at four in the morning. The taxi is where I encountered my first hardship; the driver told me it would cost 15JD to the airport, a fair price, so I agreed and he drove me to the airport where, as I went to pay, he began demanding 30JD. We argued in arabic for ten minutes until I just walked away, a minor defeat because I had already handed him a 20JD bill for which I recieved no change. So, I sat awake at the airport for 5 hours until it came time to board my flight to London. This flight was bad because I was stuck between two very loud, rude, racist, smelly, and unabashed British men, who mostly drank and complained loudly about all of the Arabs on the flight, intentionally loud so that the 80% of the flight that was Arab might hear. But London-Heathrow proved to be a lovely airport.

On my flight from London to Atlanta a woman asked me to trade my prized window seat for her aisle seat so that she might sit next to her business associate. I acquiesed. Then a man asked me to trade my aisle seat for his middle seat, so that he might sit next to his cousin. I acquiesed. The kid I was now sitting next to drank a handle of vodka before boarding the plane and so, as we rolled towards the runway, he threw up on himself and passed out. So the plane was turned around, his bags unloaded, himself kicked off the plane, a process which slowed us down two hours, guranteeing I would miss my next transfer from Atlanta to Dayton. But missing the plane to Dayton wasn't as bad as my luggage being lost. Delta assured me they would find it and then booked me a ticket on a plane to Dayton, which was subsequently delayed an hour, but I eventually landed in Dayton. Here my parents met me to give me my car, and I drove to Miami, arriving around 1 30 am. In all I was awake for about 48 hours, pacified by three 1 hour naps throughout the process. The good news is that I got my luggage back three days later, and the bad is that it was pretty well beaten up with some of its contents damaged.

So, in conclusion, Jerusalem was good, flying home was not.

Hooray America.

Almost Done

Alright, I just got back to Amman after spending 40 hours in Jerusalem, only 7 of which I wasted sleeping over the two nights there. No pictures or stories for now, as I am leaving for America in 15 hours, so look for a big post about the Holy Land and perhaps a big wrap up on the overall summer sometime in the next week. Maybe even video too, as I will have faster internet back on campus. In the meantime I will be leaving for the airport around midnight and sitting at the airport all night, as I don't trust my ability to hail a cab at 4:30 in the morning (at least for a reasonable price) for my 7:30 flight time. Stopovers in London and Atlanta, then on to Dayton where my parents will meet me with a car, and then straight to Miami, where I will check in before midnight (ideally) and immediately begin doing laundry, showering, and perhaps ordering a pizza.

Cutting Class

Alright, this is going to span from Saturday all the way to Sunday, so here goes…

Saturday we saw Batman: The Dark Night. It was pretty incredible; I definitely recommend it. Heath Ledger playing the Joker was tremendous.

Sunday had one particularly noteworthy happening, which occurred during mass. While giving the homily the priest stopped mid sentence and gave a stern, angry look to someone to his left, standing frozen for almost a minute. Eventually a woman with a crying baby got the message and got up and left the church for a closed room with a speaker where her child’s screaming wouldn’t be so obnoxious for the priest. But as she left the Priest saw two young people filing in. Although Arabs are notoriously late for everything, this did not go over well, and he proceeded to scold the congregation for their lack of decorum in this house of God. He cut his homily of there (a minute and a half in to it) and proceeded to skip several parts of the mass to hurry us on through Communion. After the closing prayer, before ending the mass, he returned again to scolding the congregation, expressing his disgust with un-muted cell phones, woman wearing sleeveless shirts and men wearing shorts, crying babies, and late arrivals. This all made for a very awkward mood as we filed out of the church.

Monday nothing interesting happened.

Alex and I booked a taxi to take ourselves plus Mary and Aaron (a guy from my class) to Damascus after class on Tuesday. We’d been told that Wednesday was a holiday, so by leaving after class Tuesday we had five days to work with where we would only be missing one class, so we decided to try our luck traveling to Syria. If we got turned away at the border Tuesday, then that would still give us two days to travel on to Jerusalem instead. So our taxi was supposed to pick us up at one o’clock, but he didn’t actually arrive until 1:40, at which point he drove us first back to Abdali station to check how much our taxi had been booked for with the owner. When he learned that we didn’t have passports, meaning that as Americans there would be a very long wait at the Syrian border, he refused to take us unless we would pay him more money. But we had already made an agreement with the manager of the company, who knew we had no visas. At an impasse, we agreed to pay him five Dinar for every extra hour past two that he would have to wait for us at the border, assuming we would get through.

I want to insert here that most people in the Middle East are very nice and friendly towards us, regardless of whether or not they know us to be American. However all taxi drivers are impossibly frustrating to deal with. All of them wish to hustle you for extra money, regardless of what the running meter might say. The other difficult thing is that for trips over an hour in time, they always stop to sit down for fifteen minutes and sip tea, usually at a tourist trap where they know the owners and get their tea for free in exchange for bringing in foreigners to spend money.

So resuming then with the story, we were aware that as many as fourteen other students from the language center would be trying to reach Damascus that same day we were. Knowing this, our driver’s late arrival and demands for money were especially frustrating because we knew that if that group of fourteen beat us to the border our wait would be elongated greatly. Thus, when at one of our stops for the driver to sit and sip tea for fifteen minutes the other taxis of University students arrived, we rushed our driver and urged him to get in the taxi and beat the other group. My Arabic held up and we got on the road. At the Jordan border we secured our exit stamps right as the other group was entering the building. We get in the taxi, leave Jordan for the Syrian side of the border, and then our taxi driver stopped in the middle at a little store. As we waited for him, one taxi after another carrying university students passed us by to get in line for their Syrian visas. We were livid.

So we arrived and began the process, which involves giving all of our information to a government worker who sends it off to Damascus where they verify we are not spies and have no affiliation or have ever traveled in Israel. Two students had traveled there previously and were stopped and sent back to Amman. One Damascus approves us, the approval is sent back to the border, at which time we pay the country’s entrance fee ($16 USD), get stamps, and continue on into Syria. It is a simple process, but we had to wait for its completion for six hours. By the time we got through our taxi driver was completely upset with us, even though he knew it would take a while, was being compensated, and made no effort to lobby for our visas to be expedited (most bureaucracy is open to people lobbying for favors). In fact, he was so unhappy that we were doing ninety mph on the way north to Damascus. Twice he nearly hit cars who didn’t move out of the left lane quickly enough. Then at some point he pulled off on the side of the road and got out of the car. Then another guy got in and said in Arabic he would take us to Damascus. On the outskirts of the city he stopped by a taxi and told us to take a taxi the rest of the way, which is frustrating because taking taxis is all about having leverage to avoid being taken advantage of, and he just handed our bags to this new driver and left. So we are stuck with this one driver who now has our bags in the trunk of his car, and no real position to haggle for a fair price. But we made it to the hotel (using the word loosely) with him, which is what really is most important. We thought it might be a problem to have a girl and three guys, but it thankfully was a non-issue. Following are some pictures of that place.

There are two musts in Syria, both of which were within walking distance of our hotel, adjacent to each other. The first is Hamiydeh Souk, the second is the Umayyad Mosque. The souk is one of the biggest in the world, with two long roads of innumerable shops, separated by a half mile of another myriad of shops. Things being sold here include gold and silver anything, western and traditional clothing, woodwork, spices, Qur’ans, and fruits. Truthfully, shopping in Amman compared to the souk in Damascus is like trying to stop at a dollar store to finish all of your Christmas shopping. I bought a few things for my family, which I will not list here as they may read this, while Alex bought a nice backgammon set and Aaron picked up some prayer beads. Again, the prices are meant to be negotiated, exemplified by Alex’s backgammon set asking price of $4800 Syrian Lira and final negotiated price of $2000 Lira (like $96 usd to $40 usd).

Before we visited the old Mosque, we stopped at a Shi’a pilgrimage shrine. If we were in Iraq this place would have been bombed already, but we weren’t there and the place remains intact (If anyone wants an explanation of Sunni vs. Shi’a, just leave a comment saying so). To put it simply, this small, adorned mosque houses the grave of the daughter of Hussein, who is the son of Ali, the cousin of the Prophet Mohammad. The place was the shiniest place I have ever seen in my life, everything shimmered and glistened. There was recitation, prayer, and crying all going on (Hussein was beheaded, and part of the Shi’a tradition is retelling the story well enough to bring the audience to tears). I took some videos and pictures here, but I am not sure if the video will take on the website from Amman, but I can post it from Oxford in a week.

Next we wandered the Umayyad Mosque, which was one of the first big Mosques ever constructed, built on/made of the church in Damascus that the Muslims successfully took around 660 AD. There was an expansive courtyard.

Currently housed there is a shrine to Hussein, which we were told contains his head. Here are the pictures.

A well that Ibrahim is said to have drawn water from and the wall that Saint George prayed to.

Also there is a shrine containing the head of John the Baptist, who was also beheaded. More pictures:

And finally the minaret that Muslims believe Jesus will return from when he returns on the last day (they believe he never died on the cross, but rather that he was taken directly up to heaven)

There are an equal number of stories about the difficulty of getting back to Amman that I may post at a later date, but this post is already quite long so I’ll stop here for now. Also to come is a good story about ignoring signs.

Rogue State

Sorry, I've been very busy the last six days as we visited Syria, which our government has deemed a "Rogue State" because we suspect they have pursued nuclear technology and act as a conduit for Iranian influence in the region by disseminating guns, weapons, and money to Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Alex is posting an entry about our trip as I type this, and I promise to have a big long descripition up in the morning (ie 3AM Cincinnati time). With pictures.

Some more week days

Okay I forget a lot of what I have been up to for the last few days, except for yesterday, so I'll do my best to piece it together. Sunday I was 1.5 movies; Alex's birthday wish, to see WALL-E, came together partially, as we went to see it but a large portion of the middle of the movie was missing. So we did our best to convey to the theatre manager what had happened and we ended up getting passes to see another movie later on. I am happy to report though that the parts we did see were quite good. Afterwards I met my language partner to watch a movie in Arabic, Captain Hemo (translation, hemo is a name). I did not understand a lot of the dialogue, and it wasn't a particullarly good movie, but I still enjoyed it. The strangest thing was that, as with a lot of Arabic movies, there are what amount to music videos inserted into the film featuring the actors, during one of which the entire theatre began clapping along to the music. I have never seen anything like that before.

Monday was boring, with no interesting stories to relate.
Tuesday was similar to Monday.
Wednesday too.

Oh but Barack Obama came and left over those few days. Thursday we went to Petra, which is one of the new seven wonders of the world. The older ancient world wonders list is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Wonders_of_the_Ancient_World and then the new list is here: http://www.new7wonders.com/classic/en/n7w/results/. We took a bus right after class down to Petra where there wasn't a whole lot to do besides walking around and looking at everything, and also climbing up some big rocks like we did at Wadi Rum. That said, I have pictures! It was a challenge with a broken zoom, but what makes this place so amazing is that everything there is huge. Oh and also the third Indiana Jones (and the Last Crusade) was filmed here. For the history of Petra, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra. We did a night program there too before heading back to Amman, pictures/video of which I might be able to apprehend from some of the other people here.

Big Post

This one is going to span what has been a fairly busy four days, so please forgive my brevity in describing a few of the details. Wednesday was Alex’s birthday, and for his birthday he wanted to see WALL-E (spelling?), that new pixar film, and also to get a big cake. So, we went to the mall which has a cinema on the top floor, but discovered that all showings of the movie had taken place in the early afternoon, so no movie. We’ll probably go today (Sunday). So then we went to buy a cake, and upon inspecting all of the enormous chocolate cakes Alex settled on buying an enormous Ice Cream cake instead. The cake had three flavors of ice cream, mango, chocolate, and raspberry, then a thing layer of actual cake, and was covered with a syrup that had a faint taste of cherry, and then lots of pieces of milk and white chocolate.

That evening we got a mild spook, as Saleh received a call saying there had been a shooting downtown where several of our kids had been earlier. So he was quite frantic, and somewhere along the line of communication it got back to us (all of whom were safely at the apartment) that five Americans had been shot. In actuality, a man hoping to incur his own death had shot at a Syrian/Lebanese tour bus, causing minor injuries to four people (If getting shot in the leg can be considered minor), and failing his own suicide as police non-fatally wounded and arrested the man.

Thursday Alex left early with some kids from his class for Petra, Jordan’s top tourist attraction, and in the next day or two I expect him to have a lengthy blog post about it. If not, then you can read about it later as I plan to go there this coming weekend. For the rest of our group, we went to a wedding. The family is Bedouin (this means the clan lives/used to live out in the desert, so Bedouin=desert society), so although Jordan is modernizing the old wedding traditions are still all practiced. So first our group was divided into men and women, as with this three day wedding the stage we took part in has the sexes divided in two separate celebrations. Hopefully one of the girls will post about what they did, but for the guys it was a lot of handshaking and coffee. I must have had six small glasses of coffee, and a lot of overly sweetened tea. We met the groom, who that night would be entering his new home with his new wife for the first time, and the next morning everyone would come together for a giant feast. Now at some point they began to play music, and a line of men standing shoulder to shoulder formed, which we were whisked off into. The dance is uninspiring, involving simply rocking side to side and maintaining a slow clap for what must have been an hour. In the old days it was more complex, with complicated steps and choreography involved, but for whatever reason it had devolved into just rocking with a slow clap that never ever sped up. While in line we heard some guns being fired right behind us, but it is a new addition to this old tradition to fire guns into the air at weddings, so we were all doing our best to not jump or be intimidated as people were shooting off there weapons. That ended when we turned around and noticed one of the shooters was a five year-old. We were assured that his 9mm only had blanks, and Joe snapped what might be the best picture of the whole trip. An army officer at the celebration decided then to show off and was shooting off rounds of his AK47 (I think, was dark so while it was an automatic rifle I’m not sure of the model). Around then is when we decided to go home. That evening Saleh decided it was guy’s night, so we went to a coffee shop that his cousin owns, where another cousin wanted to show off his new red Mitsubishi, and proceeded to shoot flames out of the car’s tailpipe as he gunned it down a side street, avoiding the three pedestrians who may have damaged the hood of his car with their persons.

Onto Friday, when early that morning we went to the school to go on the University’s trip to Wadi Rum. This is Jordan’s most striking landscape, similar to the American southwest, where the desert sees giant rocks rising out of the sand. It is the location where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed, so if you youtube that movie you can see what the place looks like. Our tourist company had a camp of tents set up, some nice meals, and bathrooms with toilet paper (!!!). It was a four our drive, and the company doesn’t run tours until the evening, so we decided to climb one of the rocks. They are eroded in such a way that if you find the right route up they are quite scalable, even in flip flops. So, ignoring a fear of heights, we went up one, which wasn’t terrifying unless I stood on/looked over the edge. Included in this post are some pictures from the top. Then that evening we all piled into jeeps, where the drivers took us around to a few good places to take pictures and to watch the sunset. Two good stories come out of this; the first is that the tour company appears to be, like everything else here, a family business, and as such one of our drivers was an eleven year-old kid. The second story is that from the top of one of the sand dunes we (the guys) were encouraged to run down the dune, touch a rock wall past the bottom, and be the first back to the top of the dune. Dumb, right? So of course I participated. Going down the dune I essentially ran as though I was playing broomball, taking huge leaping strides, which was effective because as I neared the bottom of the dune I looked to the side to discover that I had large lead on everyone else. Then I reached the bottom of the Dune, but was going fast enough that the ground leveling off was not compatible to the giant steps I was taking. So I tripped and got a pretty decent mouthful of sand, earful of sand, and a busted lip. Oh and I scratched my glasses up a little bit. I am being told it was quite funny. After that incident we watched the sunset, and that evening they played bad Arabic music loudly. So our Miami group within the larger university group left the dancing and walked up a sand dune to hang out under the stars for a few hours, which was pretty awesome.

We woke up early to board the buses and head to Aqaba, a port/resort town in the south, five hours from Amman but only an hour from Wadi Rum. Aqaba is on the Red Sea (the one that Moses parted) and sits right next to the border with Israel; in fact, an uninformed observer might guess that Aqaba and the Israeli city Eilat right next to it were only one city. From Aqaba you are also close enough to take ferries to either Egypt or Saudi Arabia, but we did not venture into any of these three counties. The Red Sea is very clear, and the small city made for a quite charming afternoon at the Swedish hotel that we spent the day at. I didn’t mention previously that my camera stopped working right before sunset at Wadi Rum, so unfortunately I have no pictures of Aqaba, but I suspect Joe will put some up in the next few days. Aqaba as a city really doesn’t have anything special that you can’t find in any of the larger cities in Jordan, so there is nothing more exciting to report beyond the serene day splashing around the pools and the Red Sea. A few guys went snorkeling, which I’m told was quite neat, but I did not partake, as I was not there when people decided to go. Instead Paula and I had left the resort and went to what is supposed be the Aqaba’s best restaurant, where we had nice pasta dishes. It was frustrating that the one place I would have eaten seafood in Jordan with any confidence was very expensive, unless you got pasta, which was cheap for the quality of the food. Paula and I also ordered a white wine, which I, as a result of being active all day and of not being a connoisseur of wine, proceeded to take two full gulps of, which apparently is not how wine is meant to be consumed. Last, it seems worth mentioning that the taxis in Aqaba are green, not yellow. The bus ride back to Amman was long, made longer by the bus driver’s faking engine problems so that he could take cigarette brakes every hour or so. I’ll do my best to acquire some other peoples’ pictures of Aqaba this week.