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.
1 comment:
When I first scanned this post, I saw the picture of the little boy with the gun, but it did not register that he was in fact holding a gun. I just finished reading a book about a woman who is from Jordan and her father's family was Bedouin. It's called the Language of Baklava. It's not very good, but it's one of the buckeye books for incoming freshman. Also, I really liked your pictures! And sorry this comment is late. I'm just now catching up on all of your posts.
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