I made this little plan: if I could find cheap flights to Europe, then I'd go with Rian, escape my 'stress' etc. for a few weeks and come back to Jordan happy and refreshed for the next semester (which at that point, and still now, I don't know if it will be passed in Australia or Jordan....). Unfortunately the flights from Jordan to Holland were in the $1000 range, and thus completely out of reach and justification...But then, light of lights! I found a flight from Tel Aviv to Belgium for just $370 return! Wow. I didn't have any desire to go to either Israel or Belgium. You could even say I had negative desire. But I thought to myself, it wont be that bad and I booked.
Four days later, I found myself sitting in the 'Entrace' building to 'Israel' at the Jordanian Israeli borders, with a lot of poor Palestinian people that were trying to go and visit their families. Of course, the average, hard working, nice Palestinian has to spend some hours sitting on these cold metal seats, waiting to be cleared to get into their country by a bunch of 18 year old Israeli girls sporting low rise cargo pants, tight, unbuttoned blouses and a bad attitude.
The fact that I am neither Arab, nor Palestinian, nor Muslim, changes nothing in the eyes of the Israelis, for I have the bad taste to CHOOSE to live with these untrustworthy types. So I spent two hours there, as they asked me stupid questions:
What are you doing in Jordan? Why? Why do you study Arabic? Oh, you like the Middle East? Why not learn Hebrew then? Why not study Arabic in Israel? Do you have an Arab friends? (I live in an Arab country you morons), Why did you go to Syria? When? How many days? With who? Did you talk to any Syrians? Where did you stay? Lebanon? Why are you coming to Israel? To fly out of Tel Aviv. Why? It's cheaper. No it's not, what's the real reason? What are you doing when you go back to Jordan? How long do you want to stay? Give me your email address, your phone number, and your fixed number, and all your numbers in Australia, and your parents numbers, what are their names? Do they know where you're going?
And so it went on. And I don't want to complain too much, because first of all, most Arabs, and especially Palestinians, can never go to Palestine (Israel). Ever. And then, those that do have the chance to go, normally have to go through a much longer and more aggravating experience at the borders, not to mention that it is more degrading, given they are fighting for access to their own homes (in those cases where they still stand). So, no I can't complain, but I hate the system, and I hate that they know everything I have done in the last 3 years, and that I have to justify studying Arabic (as though there is no reason to associate with one of the richest, oldest and most hospitable cultures on the planet). Anyway.
Four hours later I arrived at the Tel Aviv airport, and low and behold, had a simillar, but worse, experience. As I lined up to enter the check in part of the airport, my passport was checked, standard. But, as soon as she saw the dozens of Arabic stamps, she was off. She returned with two more security personnel who proceeded to question me for a good 10 minutes. All the same questions as before. And this is me trying to get out of their paranoid country (which, obviously gave me the possibility to do something rash like blow up a plane or an airport garbage bin, as though I'd know how to do that!). So they then spent 45 minutes searching my luggage, taking absolutely everything out, opening sachets, searching dirty clothes pockets, swipping everything with the chemical detector, scanning things numerous times, feeling me up all over, and finally giving me a security escort through check-in. Free at last, I sat in the airport and listened to the security announcements which were a bit different to what I am accustomed ("A reminder that guns are prohibited in this airport"). Of course, in a country where everyone is allowed to (even encouraged) to carry guns, this warning is not as intuitive as it may seem.
Three weeks later I returned, arriving in Tel Aviv airport at 11:30 pm. I stormed through the long airport, rushing with all the other travellers, and was first in line at one of the many immigration queues. I felt almost human as I walked up to the counter, aware of how quickly the immigration processing seemed to be going, and for a second felt that I would be ushered through without a problem. What naivety! I was quickly shown to the waiting room that I hadn't noticed before. There were about 15 people waiting in their, some of them obviously Muslim with their Islamic caps. I gave them the usual grimace, there is definitely a sense of unity amongst those who are rejected by the Israelis. I met most of the people in the room. 10 of them were British Muslims of Indian descent who were on an Interfaith tour with 10 Christians. All of the Christians had entered Israel immediately. Their Muslim companions had been waiting for more than 7 hours. For no reason other than being Muslim. Only two of them had visited Arab countries before (having visited Lebanon, Syria or Iran is normally the biggest reason for being detained). There was also a Columbian Pilates instructor who lives in Cyprus who had come to Tel Aviv for a weekend long training seminar (first time in the Middle East, neither Muslim nor Arab) and had brought his invitation and registration confirmations. There was a random Finnish guy who didn't look too bright, and a French couple of Tunisian origin. I spent two and a half hours there, being ignored for the first hour - not a single question asked, just sitting there. Then all the usual questions, plus a full interogation about my time in Europe. Where did I go, why, who did I see? Oh, you studied there before? Why? Where? What was the name of the school, what were you studing and so on.
Free at last, I went to collect my luggage which had been left on the luggage belt for two and a half hours, pretty nice target really. Then had the same kind of interogation, baggage search etc. from baggage woman who assured me that she was from a different department, so yes it was indeed necessary to ask me all the same questions.
Absolutely disgusted, not so much at my treatment, but at that of these Interfaith travellers, who were coming to learn about each others faiths and share them, and this poor Collumbian! He was just so confused, and had had no idea that that wait would be in stall for him! So I jumped a bus to Jerusalem, arrived near the old city at 3.30 in the morning, and sat in a 24 hour restaurant where I met about half a dozen very friendly Palestinians who chatted with me til I left in search of a bus at 6. Oh, and on the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem....
Well I met a very friendly and open Israeli, and had a fascinating conversation with him which heartened and scared me at the same time. A summary of his thoughts:
What the Israelis do to the Palestinians is not good, (such as building the wall inside their territory instead of outside) but it's effective...
That there is a dirty hypocrisy in Israel's obsession with security and concurrent building of ileagal settlements in Palestinian territories.
That most Israelis regretted the high death toll from the war on Gaza in Dec 2008 - Jan 2009, but thought that the operation in general was necessary and successful.
That there was a general feeling in Israel that it would be good if the Palestinians actually succeeded in hitting a pre-school or something with their rockets, to justify the high civillian casulties caused by Israel.
That the Israeli settlers ileagally living in Palestinian territory are terribly bad people, and do horrible things, and basically see their mission as inhabiting the holy land with Jews, bringing the peace and joy and love so that the Messiah will come. And from this he also sees them as amazing people, who work very hard, are educated, are musical and creative and talented, and believe so strongly in their mission that they are willing to live in highly adverse situations in order to carry it through.
That he has worked as a peace activist helping the Palestinians and that for him the Zionist dream has been dead for a long time.
That he believes Israel is at the lowest point in it's history; prospects for peace are worse than ever before and the two Israeli parties that have a chance of holding government as of the elections this Tuesday have no real desire for peace and are basically fascist and belicose.
So it was heartening on the one hand to hear his critisisms, but grim at the same time to know that his criticisms are largely drawn from the understanding of how irretrievable the situation is.
Monday, February 9, 2009
To get you up to date....
So yeah, after being out of Australia for a good 14 months (I was sitting on the runway of the Bangkok airport when K Rudd's election was announced) I have come to the conclusion that I have difficulty keeping in touch with people, and that a lot of people really don't get what the attraction of Jordan is for me, and why on earth I don't just come home (especially in light of my bank balance which is now negative $2000...). So, this is my attempt to rectify this silence and keeps some kind of contact with you, my loved ones...
So to summarise:
Novemer 2007: Travelled to Dubai for four days where I visited the Bahraini family for whom I was once a nanny to their 3 kids. I hung out with the kids, ran on the beach (which is very nice despite the Emiratis' best attempts to fill all surrounding marine areas with dirt shaped as gimmiky island stuff for rich people) and noticed that Dubai is still growing, ridiculously green (despite being one of the dryest areas on the planet) and cracking under its traffic problems. Nothing much had changed really.
So I headed across to Jordan, where I met up with 10 of the students from my Arabic class in Australia, and my teacher who is Jordo-alian, and lived with them in to neighbouring appartment buildings in Jubeihah, a suburb next to the University of Jordan and home to a large population of Saudis. We studied for a couple of months, at one point I took a bus south with Ben and we jumped on a ferry across to Egypt, sat on the beach for a few days, and then with a rush of nostalgia fled back to Amman to celebrate a good Aussie christmas with the rest of the crew. At this point the weather in my stomach kind of exploded, meaning hard core stomach bug killer pills, a dry christmas and thankfully lots of turkey.
Amman was nice, and time was mainly passed smoking argileh (water pipe) in the local Saudi hangout, Midwakh, studying, and attemping to communicate in broken Arabic with the natives. After 2 months, the Arabic was finally picking up, so Phoebe and I decided to stick on for another month and try and 'consolidate', in search of a change of scene and cheaper argileh, we lugged our bags up to Syria, found room with couches! in a house with a fountain in the living room, in the middle of the old city, which is the longest continually inhabited city in the world. Eager to settle in to our new home and meet some locals, we (logically) headed off to Lebanon in the middle of a blizzard in a taxi without snow chains. Going at about 2 ks an hour because of the poor vision (we could basically see snow) and the bad roads (they were frozen and we were ilequipped) we arrived late to Beirut and checked into our hotel, which was one of three identically named hotels in the same building, and appeared to double as a brothel cum cockroach mueseum. Never mind! We quickly enough found out where the real hookers hang out (in the clubs around our hotel) and went into the central resto-bar area where we found Gus. Beirut is cool, and we also went skiing in some mountains nearby.
Back to Jordan, and reluctantly on to France. For a moment it seemed that this part of the plan, which I had grown less keen on was going to be sabotaged, as snow started to fall once more, and our planes threatened to be grounded, and the hire car people refused to leave the warmth of their office to come and get the car and give us back our oh so useful passports. A brief encouter between our car and that belonging to a 'pilot for British Airways' threatened to further complicate the situation, but alhumdulilah, finally we boarded our flights, but alas, I had lost the beautiful posters I had carefully selected of President Assad of Syria.
I arrived in France in the middle of February and found it to be cold, grey and unfriendly. I had no where to live and not much clue any more of why I was to study in France for a year instead of my beloved Middle East. But, in a very quick time, I found a very nice share house in the company of a Serb guy and and Italian guy and girl. We even had a view of La Tour Eifel from our bedroom window....oh Paris! so got used to that, went to my uni where I was to study some fairly random courses for the next year, mainly focused on improving my French. Found the courses fairly unstimulated and some of the students very aggravating which was more irritating in the cases where they we wearing cuff links or stilletos (depending on their sex). But had a couple of classes that didn't leave me feeling suicidal and one very nice teacher who taught me how to pass off as a man in even the poshest parts of the city. At some point I decied I needed to make some cash, so I took to working in an Irish pub at La Bastille, which was quite dull really, but I learnt how to make good Mohitos, so I have no real complaints. Oh and I got to eat the cheeseburgers that they sold for $25 free of charge!!!! France was fun, lots of nice exchange students from around Europe, and when the sun came out, lots of drinking cheap and good wine and cheese along the river Seine, or in the forest/park thingys they have. Met lots of great people (who I don't keep as close in contact as I should) and was pretty happy when I made the decision to stop paying 400 euro ($800) a month to share a bedroom in a boring part of Paris and move to Jordan.
So now we're down to the real stuff. To cut to the chase, I quickly remembered why I had fallen in love with the Middle East the first time (I had forgotten that intensity along with my Arabic) and decided that I had no wish to return to Paris to complete my second semester. So began the 2 month process of asking my uni in Australia to credit me for a semester there instead of in France. Also good was that Rian, who had moved into the house I was living in the same week as me, and was equally bessotted with Jordan, decided to extend her stay. So we both threw off our intended courses of study and enrolled in the highly renowned and internationally prestigious University of Jordan. Actually it's a beautiful campus of almost 40,000 students and it's quite a good place to study I reckon. My Arabic teachers were a little eratic and sometimes spontaneously didn't come to class, but I learnt lots, and at the same time improved my spoken Arabic (which is entirely different to the Arabic you get at school, on the news and in books). So that was a good semester. Had a bit of a falling in love episode, that was nice for a time, went back to Australia for christmas, came back, took exams, got stressed, realised that I needed to show my uni in Australia all the work I had done in Jordan in order to get credit for it and that it didn't look so impressive, so focused on that, and then decided to break up with boyfriend, got emotional and stressed about the uncertainty of my future (yeah my life is so tragically hard I know...) and ran off to Europe with Rian for 3 weeks where I increased my debts and also noticed that the debt collectors were after me. Went to Holland, a very nice country, Belgium and Israel (to very unfortunate bi-products of my travels) and France where I saw some good old friends, had a terrorist scare on the metro, drank wine and saw my brother who lives in Polland.
Have just come back to Jordan, and am relieved to find the sun is mainly present and it's not too cold at all for survival (Europe I think is an evolutionary challenge). I am passing my time with trying to live up to the Obamalutions, which are 86 resolutions for change that we do believe in, conceived on Obama Day of course. I also look at photos of my new baby sister Madeline, am starting at uni, and nervously waiting for an email from ANU telling me what my destiny is for this semester. It's an edgy time really.
I hope to stay in Jordan, it's a nice country with good people, and now that I have the structure of the Obamalutions, which make demands of me such as:
Must always have toilet paper in the house
Clean teeth daily
Yoga once a week
If we ever end up in prison, make the most of it
Approach a hero and assign a mentor.
So, I think life's looking up really. Mainly thanks to Obama.
So to summarise:
Novemer 2007: Travelled to Dubai for four days where I visited the Bahraini family for whom I was once a nanny to their 3 kids. I hung out with the kids, ran on the beach (which is very nice despite the Emiratis' best attempts to fill all surrounding marine areas with dirt shaped as gimmiky island stuff for rich people) and noticed that Dubai is still growing, ridiculously green (despite being one of the dryest areas on the planet) and cracking under its traffic problems. Nothing much had changed really.
So I headed across to Jordan, where I met up with 10 of the students from my Arabic class in Australia, and my teacher who is Jordo-alian, and lived with them in to neighbouring appartment buildings in Jubeihah, a suburb next to the University of Jordan and home to a large population of Saudis. We studied for a couple of months, at one point I took a bus south with Ben and we jumped on a ferry across to Egypt, sat on the beach for a few days, and then with a rush of nostalgia fled back to Amman to celebrate a good Aussie christmas with the rest of the crew. At this point the weather in my stomach kind of exploded, meaning hard core stomach bug killer pills, a dry christmas and thankfully lots of turkey.
Amman was nice, and time was mainly passed smoking argileh (water pipe) in the local Saudi hangout, Midwakh, studying, and attemping to communicate in broken Arabic with the natives. After 2 months, the Arabic was finally picking up, so Phoebe and I decided to stick on for another month and try and 'consolidate', in search of a change of scene and cheaper argileh, we lugged our bags up to Syria, found room with couches! in a house with a fountain in the living room, in the middle of the old city, which is the longest continually inhabited city in the world. Eager to settle in to our new home and meet some locals, we (logically) headed off to Lebanon in the middle of a blizzard in a taxi without snow chains. Going at about 2 ks an hour because of the poor vision (we could basically see snow) and the bad roads (they were frozen and we were ilequipped) we arrived late to Beirut and checked into our hotel, which was one of three identically named hotels in the same building, and appeared to double as a brothel cum cockroach mueseum. Never mind! We quickly enough found out where the real hookers hang out (in the clubs around our hotel) and went into the central resto-bar area where we found Gus. Beirut is cool, and we also went skiing in some mountains nearby.
Back to Jordan, and reluctantly on to France. For a moment it seemed that this part of the plan, which I had grown less keen on was going to be sabotaged, as snow started to fall once more, and our planes threatened to be grounded, and the hire car people refused to leave the warmth of their office to come and get the car and give us back our oh so useful passports. A brief encouter between our car and that belonging to a 'pilot for British Airways' threatened to further complicate the situation, but alhumdulilah, finally we boarded our flights, but alas, I had lost the beautiful posters I had carefully selected of President Assad of Syria.
I arrived in France in the middle of February and found it to be cold, grey and unfriendly. I had no where to live and not much clue any more of why I was to study in France for a year instead of my beloved Middle East. But, in a very quick time, I found a very nice share house in the company of a Serb guy and and Italian guy and girl. We even had a view of La Tour Eifel from our bedroom window....oh Paris! so got used to that, went to my uni where I was to study some fairly random courses for the next year, mainly focused on improving my French. Found the courses fairly unstimulated and some of the students very aggravating which was more irritating in the cases where they we wearing cuff links or stilletos (depending on their sex). But had a couple of classes that didn't leave me feeling suicidal and one very nice teacher who taught me how to pass off as a man in even the poshest parts of the city. At some point I decied I needed to make some cash, so I took to working in an Irish pub at La Bastille, which was quite dull really, but I learnt how to make good Mohitos, so I have no real complaints. Oh and I got to eat the cheeseburgers that they sold for $25 free of charge!!!! France was fun, lots of nice exchange students from around Europe, and when the sun came out, lots of drinking cheap and good wine and cheese along the river Seine, or in the forest/park thingys they have. Met lots of great people (who I don't keep as close in contact as I should) and was pretty happy when I made the decision to stop paying 400 euro ($800) a month to share a bedroom in a boring part of Paris and move to Jordan.
So now we're down to the real stuff. To cut to the chase, I quickly remembered why I had fallen in love with the Middle East the first time (I had forgotten that intensity along with my Arabic) and decided that I had no wish to return to Paris to complete my second semester. So began the 2 month process of asking my uni in Australia to credit me for a semester there instead of in France. Also good was that Rian, who had moved into the house I was living in the same week as me, and was equally bessotted with Jordan, decided to extend her stay. So we both threw off our intended courses of study and enrolled in the highly renowned and internationally prestigious University of Jordan. Actually it's a beautiful campus of almost 40,000 students and it's quite a good place to study I reckon. My Arabic teachers were a little eratic and sometimes spontaneously didn't come to class, but I learnt lots, and at the same time improved my spoken Arabic (which is entirely different to the Arabic you get at school, on the news and in books). So that was a good semester. Had a bit of a falling in love episode, that was nice for a time, went back to Australia for christmas, came back, took exams, got stressed, realised that I needed to show my uni in Australia all the work I had done in Jordan in order to get credit for it and that it didn't look so impressive, so focused on that, and then decided to break up with boyfriend, got emotional and stressed about the uncertainty of my future (yeah my life is so tragically hard I know...) and ran off to Europe with Rian for 3 weeks where I increased my debts and also noticed that the debt collectors were after me. Went to Holland, a very nice country, Belgium and Israel (to very unfortunate bi-products of my travels) and France where I saw some good old friends, had a terrorist scare on the metro, drank wine and saw my brother who lives in Polland.
Have just come back to Jordan, and am relieved to find the sun is mainly present and it's not too cold at all for survival (Europe I think is an evolutionary challenge). I am passing my time with trying to live up to the Obamalutions, which are 86 resolutions for change that we do believe in, conceived on Obama Day of course. I also look at photos of my new baby sister Madeline, am starting at uni, and nervously waiting for an email from ANU telling me what my destiny is for this semester. It's an edgy time really.
I hope to stay in Jordan, it's a nice country with good people, and now that I have the structure of the Obamalutions, which make demands of me such as:
Must always have toilet paper in the house
Clean teeth daily
Yoga once a week
If we ever end up in prison, make the most of it
Approach a hero and assign a mentor.
So, I think life's looking up really. Mainly thanks to Obama.
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