Quote of the Week

"The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home."
-Theodor Adorno

Petra and Wadi Rum

(Wadi Rum. A favorite haunt of T.E. Lawrence and where some of "Lawrence of Arabia" was filmed).

(Wasef in Petra with a coliseum in the background).

Aqaba and The Red Sea

(A family on the Jordan side. Across the bay is Israel. Jordan and Israeli ships (or Italian rentals) enter/exit their two adjacent ports and Jordan constantly has a battleship anchored on the sea border. Egypt-bound ferries also leave this port frequently)

I visited Aqaba and the Red Sea this past weekend in the south. Jordan only has 24 km of coastal land (it once was only 8) and Aqaba is its only seaport. It was a friendly, developing place that should be booming in 10-15 years, but was rather lacking in night life when we visited for the weekend. I'm sure it picks up during national holidays. Or maybe the party was somewhere else. I did see Levant and Gulf tourists and several U.S. Iraqi contractors on R&L, but their was no mass weekend influx like I was expecting.

On snorkeling. We rented equipment from the ritzy Royal Diving Institute and spent several hours exploring their great reefs. As advertised, the flora and fauna in the Red Sea is beautiful and this itself deserves a repeat trip to the area if I have time. All colors and sizes of fish and coral. It was breathtaking at times and if I had another month here and was $400 richer, I would happily spend the 3 days it takes to get scuba certified. But maybe next time. Or maybe in the better known Sharm el Sheikh that everyone talks about.

Reem's Cafeteria: The Best Shawarma in Town

This is advertised as the best shawarma in Amman (even in the NY Times) and this is no joke. Reem's doesn't mess around or even offer the staple chicken shawarma, just lamb. And although of course the BBC tells me it has only 140% of my daily saturated fat content, I talked the experience up at work the next day and we made a repeat trip for lunch.

Quote of the Week

"The women have been a very dominant factor in Iran throughout the ages. It sounds counterintuitive because in some instances, in the court of law, no matter what law we’re talking about – criminal, divorce, inheritance, child custody, etc. – women count for only half of a man. But in society women have been very strong, and women have had a much more vibrant, participatory role in Iran than in any other of the countries around that region, including so many of the countries the United States calls friends and allies. And ever since the beginning, 30 years ago during the revolution, women were out on the streets en masse. Because it then became an Islamic society, traditional men could not keep the women out of the public sphere anymore, couldn’t keep their girls from going to school, because now it was an Islamic society and there was no reason to do that. So now 65 percent of university students are women. Women are in all sorts of spheres of professional endeavor. Women drive, they vote, they can hold a public position. Now, 34 million women are in Iran right now, out of a population of 70 million."

This from the excellent Christiane Amanpour in a worthy interview. The green shoots of a revolution in Iran have been captivating from Amman (although developments, public rallies, and the international reporting on such events has subsided in the last week) and the reports of women leading street protests in many instances have been moving, although few are talking about the situation here. One explanation "The Palestinian issue takes up all our time."

Summer Travel Plans

My weekend travel and short vacation schedule for the rest of the summer are now materializing as I've made plans with some new friends and agreed upon dates with others. June went by so fast, but I found time to hike the Wadi Mujib Nature Reserve for 7 hours with a group, which is adjacent to and whose river flows into the Dead Sea. The hike was literally 1 hour marching over an arid landscape and 6 hours navigating the river and repelling down a waterfall. Highly recommended. Here's the tentative schedule for the coming months with dates marking Fri-Sat weekends.

July
2 Aqaba (Jordan’s only port, acclaimed for its coral reefs)
9 Petra (UNESCO site, Ancient city carved into rock)
16 Damascus (historical capital city, rich culture)
23 Damascus (meeting friends)
August
1-5 Beirut (beach, friends, and Mediterranean life)
13 Ramallah (capital city, rich culture, friends)
21 Depart for France
September
7 Return to New York

Missing Gafait

In Jordan now a week, I miss Gafait and the place I called home for two years. Urban environments are quite different, but the people, regular schedule, work, and quiet evenings are what I miss right now. To all my friends in the Orient and throughout Morocco- I hope all is well and look for me in summer 2010.

About Work: The JCEF

Here's a short, locally produced video that encapsulates the organization I'm working for this summer. The same video can be viewed here. It seems to be an excellent organization that is combating a difficult problem in the MENA region- youth unemployment, which is the highest of any region in the world at around 25% with 2/3 of the overall population being under 24 years of age.

The Dead Sea

The Nokia Flashlight: The Ultimate Amenity

Recently reunited with my cellphone from Morocco, I instantly fell back on old habits: playing "snake" on the bus (yes, the Nokia default), programming my alarm, and using my flashlight excessively.

For service, I'm using the well-named, but dead-zone champion Umniah. After 2 days recently of being able to take calls, but unable to be heard, I was ready to switch over to the more expensive Zain network, but alas found the problem was with my phone's mic. Now the solution is to 'pack' it on the palm of my hand like one would cigarettes before every call to get a good connection.

And no Mom, I'm not smoking here. The coffee culture- an espresso and a smoke is just not what it is in francophone countries. However, the sheesha (aka hookah, arghila) fills that void and almost everyone, including conserative women, smoke.

From the Apartment Window: Amman, Jordan

Looking out the 4th floor kitchen window at the apartment of Nuri and I. Profile Nuri: a 26 year old Turkish PhD student in Amman for the summer to do research on stability in small Arab states. He'll later be settling in Tunis and Kuwait City to round out his research. I was fortunate to find Nuri like I've been fortunate to have a great roommate in NY. Low maintenance (besides an early morning cleaning twitch), a jovial personality, strong character, and bright ideas, it so far has worked out brilliantly and I look forward to a great relationship.

Arriving in Amman

I just arrived last night in the city and found a nice, cheap hotel room downtown near this mosque, Jmea Hussein. I find the green glow sticks on the minaret in the evening a nice touch. From shuffling by taxi around the city a bit today, I think I'll end up preferential to this area. It's the authentic heart of the city with all the good shops and is where the working class congregates.

After a 10 PM arrival yesterday, it took me an hour to find the office at the Jordan National Employment Center, but the reception was very nice and the staff and environment I'll be working in this summer seems to be great.

UPDATE: Days later, I saw this same mosque and a reporter roaming the surrounding streets on Al-Jazeera TV as they ran a report on Iraqi refugees not able to find work in Jordan (500k people), Syria (1.5 mill), and other neighboring countries. What a sad situation.

Hmm..Places That Deserve An Extended Stay: Istanbul

Or any stay at all. Unfortunately, I only saw the city from the air and my terminal (which is probably negligible) as Istanbul was a transfer for me between Paris and Amman, but the view flying in looked oh so nice and the sea ever so tempting last Sunday afternoon. Perhaps I should have stayed a week before continuing to Amman (I seriously thought about it after leaving behind a week on the French coast, but Turkey is a country that most likely deserves several months to explore.

Quote of the Week

"..this is why I value that little phrase 'I don't know' so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended."

Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel Lecture 1996

I'd like to think I could live off that idea- "I don't know" for the rest of my days. I find it immeasurably motivating and a better ailment (if you want to call it that) to obsess over then vanity, power, material wealth, etc. Hedging, pacing, and second guessing is one thing, but an overly generous level of curiosity, humility, and dialectical thought is one way by which to achieve a life well lived.

Symborska is not the first to talk about the idea of not knowing. Socrates, Kierkegaard, and others have discussed it in the context of strengthening an argument.

Summer Begins in Les Sables

Rasheed at the Louvre

Rasheed, passed on by Sumona in Morocco, survived several trips, but was finally put to rest somewhere outside the Louvre last December.

Catching Up on the Last Year

Peace Corps Redux I: School Tree Planting & Country/World Mural