There’s obviously something romantic about being abroad and talking about it that doesn’t really translate to having been abroad and still talking about it, or else I would have kept up more with this blog upon returning to America. I’ve retained some Middle Eastern elements in my daily life, but it’s really not the same. No one is appropriately offended when I click my tongue. When I eat American falafel, I have to pretend it’s a different food. My Arabic class and I bumble our way through overly-cased fusHa an hour a day, and there’s a sad lack of “sheen” in everything we say: gone are shu, eish, mish, biddeesh, manaeesh, mishmish, shurta. The residual compulsion to wear a cardigan over everything just makes me look drab and out of place, a WASP who couldn’t find her flatiron.

There’s plenty going on in the Arab world, but once again I’m just some ejnebi reading Al-Jazeera English and the New York Times from her apartment, embarrassed to be from here whenever I read something with the word “Palestine” in it and look at maps of Who Lives Where west of the Jordan river that make the West Bank look like an x-ray of a cancerous lung. I’m aware that the somewhat spontaneous generation of my strong opinions over this while I was off in Jordan probably makes me look suspect for brainwashing, so I try to read everybody’s news, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why they can’t just have their own country. (I mean… they have a flag. So. #eddieizzard)

It’s also a shame that amidst all the UN hullaballoo over Palestine, most of the rest of the Middle Eastern/North African countries are back to being internationally ignored. Sometimes I wish America would at least try to be a little opaque about who counts as “us” and who counts as “them”.

Anyway. The future of this blog remains in limbo. It may remain a predictable forum on which I post nostalgic photographs and news articles and people quit reading because a desert thousands of miles away is only so interesting. I may wearily complain about how hard Arabic is in America once or twice, and how my thesis isn’t writing itself, and then abandon this project altogether. I may use this space document my impending torrid affair with Arab cooking. 

It may be short and sweet, but I’ve gotta try. It’s a criminal thing that nobody here understands my love of musakhan.

Two buildings away from my hostel in Budapest. Jordan: you’re not making this leaving thing easy for me.

Great article about the bias of language. It’s heartening to see that there are other people out there who read the NYT’s initial article about the Norway shootings/bombings and took issue with some of their, uh, analysis. Their current front page article only claims comparisons between Al-Qaeda actions and this one, which is at least better than stating on page 1 that the suspect was vehemently anti-Muslim and spending most of page 2 trying to rationalize the attack as being the work of an Islamist group anyway, but still. Should I start worrying that when I travel abroad with blonde hair, I’ll be stereotyped as a right-wing Christian bomber? The answer is probably not; I just hope that someday, it’s because we don’t attribute responsibility to everyone who happens to look or talk like someone who’s done a bad thing, and not because the western world refuses to acknowledge that yes, unfortunately, white people are also capable of horrific things.

Hahah. Hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo candy, guitar, magazines, cotton, alcohol… assassins are coming.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arabic_loanwords_in_English

As a break from the usual depth-collapsed landscape photography and sappy/intellectual musings: here we are on an organized adventure, in true American form (or in one case, as Canadian as possible under the circumstances). 4 things are wrong with this picture. Can you spot them all?

(Answer: Standing in a river in the 4th most water-poor country in the world; wearing shorts; wearing sleeveless shirts; this is not and never will be “OHIO.”)

Exciting things happen when you leave the city for the countryside! This picture is a little old, but a couple weeks ago we went to Wadi Mujib, near the Dead Sea, and hiked up a river in a canyon. Consequently this photo was snapped to document our triumph over the Great Outdoors. Overall an excellent and refreshing trip, though I was bruised for days from falling in the rapids. (In full disclosure I am posting this partially to prove that I have photographic evidence of myself in Jordan and am not just pretending by uploading a lot of panoramic landscape shots.)

Lately I have been having a strangely polar reaction to being in this country, the kinds of major swings I would have expected more in February than July. Futilely waiting for a taxi for an hour in the 2pm beating sun while the pavement burns my feet through the bottoms of my sneakers and no one will stop for me: I am tired of this country and I want to go home. Sitting at work researching Islamic custody law and the hardships faced by Jordanian single parents, drinking nescafe, listening to people speaking Arabic, and talking about protests and social change: I will miss this.

I was trying to explain the phrase “here you go” yesterday, and the best explanation I could come up with was in Arabic, not English. “Tfadl.” More and more lately my dreams have been bilingual. I’m sure my unconscious mind gets the grammar wrong, but still.

I suppose the point of doing a thing like this, living abroad for six months, is to discover you can feel at home in more than one place. The downside is that nowhere has everything, and after a while anything will begin to feel stagnant. Along with “my mother died in a car accident, God have mercy on her soul,” one of the vocabulary words we learned in first-semester Arabic before practical terms like numbers and colors and “where is the hospital” was a noun that meant “longing for one’s homeland.” “Al-ghurbah.” This is a word I’m kind of pleased to know now. It comes from the same root as “west” and “strange,” so I think the meaning implies that these qualities are reflexive. Stranger in a strange land-type thing. It’s interesting, coming full-circle as a traveler and wanting to see the familiar again, the people who Look And Talk And Act Like Me.

At any rate, I have precious little time left here, so this would be an excellent time to tell me that why yes, you’d love a very modestly priced and extremely portable Jordanian souvenir that won’t rot during my ten day trip through Europe! Small cloth rainbow critters are inexplicably popular here, and probably a good choice. Hold me closer, tiny camel. The Middle East is not that bad. :)

القدس

I find it a little strange that so many of Jordan’s tourist attractions are Roman ruins, and not really Arab at all.

My favorite part of Umm Qais (after getting to visit it with my uncle and his coworker—Americans to show off for!—and the welcome sight of rock that wasn’t beige) was the view over the northern cliff: Israel and the Sea of Galilee to the left, Syria straight ahead and to the right, Lebanon visible beyond the sea on a clear day (not this one). Twenty or thirty feet down the hill was a fence that I can only assume marked the border between Jordan and Syria. Weird to think a few miles over that border, things have become so violent lately, while on this side everything is comparably fine.

Lest I wax too politically poetic, the scenery is also particularly striking up north, featuring green foliage and colorful flowers, and on the day we went there were traces of cloud cover (weather! In the Middle East in June? Chance in a million!)

There is a famous restaurant in downtown Amman called Hashems. It looks like nothing: an alleyway spotted with Coca-Cola umbrellas and plastic chairs, and it serves basically the same food as every other Levantine fast food restaurant: a stack of hot flat khobz (bread) arrives on a piece of paper, followed by bowls of hummus and ful (bean dip) and trays of vegetables (onion, tomato, and mint), batata (french fries) and crisp falafel balls. Nonetheless, it’s renowned throughout the city for its food, and its prime location adjacent to the equally famous pirate DVD shop Hammoudeh means that I eat there at least once a week.

Usually I visit this restaurant with my friend Paul. Both of us are impossibly blonde and pale; Paul is two feet taller than most Jordanians, and I’m a girl, so we invariably attract attention. (Once the man coercing people in at the front of the restaurant looked up at him and yelled the Arabic equivalent of “HIYA, TALL ONE, HOW ARE YOU??”) Oddly, despite looking like no one else in Jordan, we apparently don’t make much of a lasting impression; every time we go, the conversation goes something like this:

Waiter: Hello, hello, welcome in Jordan!

Paul: Shukran. Nejlis hun? (Thank you, we can sit here?)

Waiter: Yes, yes. Ready to order?

Lura: Biddna falafel, wa hummus, wa ful, wa itnain shai bi nana. (We want falafel and hummus and ful and two teas with mint.)

Waiter: Okay, okay. 

(Waiter brings all five possible dishes anyway.)

Waiter: How long in Jordan?

Paul: Bneskun hun munthu khamsa shuhur. (We’ve lived here for five months.)

Waiter: You like Jordan?

Lura: Aiwa. (Yes)

Waiter: Hashems very famous restaurant.

Paul: Aiwa, bnekl hun kateer. (Yes, we eat here a lot.)

Waiter: You speak arabic?

Lura: ….Aiwa. (Yes.)

Waiter: Welcome in Jordan!

Maybe it’s that it’s a tourist attraction, but even when we only speak Arabic with them and order specific dishes, they inevitably ignore us and insist on speaking nothing but English.

(Also: being welcomed to Jordan was nice in February, but we’re getting on half a year here.)

Usually when we don’t order falafel and they bring it anyway, we shrug and say nothing. But a few days ago Paul and I went to Hashems hours after a big brunch, and we decided to see if we could actually get them to listen to our order for once. We asked for only french fries and hummus. These items arrived, with a plate of falafel. We turned it away. The waiter looked at us like we had four collective heads.

“Our falafel very good. Very good price!” This happened twice. The third time, a waiter came over with a falafel ball in each hand. 

“Try, try! Very delicious falafel!”

We ate these, but failed to order an entire plate.

“Paul,” I said, “I think we offended them.”

Paul disagreed, but it wouldn’t be so out of the question. It’s rude here to refuse food in someone’s home; yes, this is a restaurant, but falafel is their famous dish, and what do we white people know about how to order Jordanian fast food? Or maybe they were just trying to make an extra dinar. Who knows.

In other news: look at these tomatoes, Larry. Just look at these tomatoes.