This year’s Christmas greetings are coming to you from our new home just 50 miles away from the (not so) Little Town of Bethlehem. Alas, times being what they are, we will not be singing carols beside the original nativity scene any time soon. It is strictly off-limits to us embassy folk. But this is an exception to an otherwise wide-open region. The Americans here don’t think twice about crossing into Syria – proud member of the Axis of Evil – to go shopping. In fact, several of us even brought our parents along with us.
Since coming to Jordan six months ago, this is the biggest surprise so far: life here isn’t so different. Of course, living so far away from family and friends is hard. Especially during the holidays. But our daily routines and creature comforts have undergone very little adjustment. We thought life in Washington, DC was paradise because we could get sushi delivered to our door. But here we can get deliveries of sushi and flavored popcorn!
Faithful blog readers may recall Dan lamenting the lack of street addresses when he first arrived. So how does the popcorn get delivered? Actually, there are street names posted on corners, and house numbers attached to houses. Some of us (foreigners and food delivery services) choose to see them while the bulk of the population denies their existence. If we mention addresses to them, they smile and nod at us as if we were talking about Santa Claus.
Don’t be mistaken, we are trying to adapt to better fit in. Dan has even learned how to drive badly, which is safer than driving defensively on these streets. A while back, a helpful Jordanian gave him this key advice: do NOT look in your blind spot as this is taken by your opponents as an implicit yield. You may as well announce that you have all day to get though the roundabout, which will infuriate your teammates in the cars behind you, causing them to lurch about dangerously. Instead, maintain a rigid forward focus – and place some faith in your fellow drivers – to keep things flowing. It is terrifying to observe pedestrians using the same strategy while crossing busy streets. To better emphasize their blindness, many choose to cross while texting on their mobile.
We have also learned how to participate in the elaborate ritual of greeting someone that involves posing at least three questions (chosen randomly) How are you?, What is your news/condition/color?, Is everything perfect?, and another dozen variations – and yet every week we learn a new variation. Thank God, if you don’t comprehend the question, you can always fake it by responding, “Thank God”.
If you have trouble picturing Dan as a reckless, aggressive driver, try envisioning Duffy inseparable from her Blackberry. Yes, it keeps her wired in to work but she has also become addicted to the Brick Breaker game, available exclusively on Blackberry. Dan has a Blackberry also, to help keep tabs on his needy American citizens, but so far he remains insusceptible to the lures of Brick Breaker. Perhaps this is because he isn’t very good at it.
With six months passed and 18 months left here, we have been cautioned that time will fly by and we should identify all the things we still want to see and schedule them all during assorted holiday weekends and vacations. While we have loved seeing Petra, Umm Qais, Jarash, Damascus, and Jerusalem … Cairo, Palmyra and Dubai are still on the list. Our list feels do-able but then we will meet someone who raves about their 10 days in Oman or someone else says that Turkey is their favorite country in the world and so we keep re-prioritizing the list.
Christmas here is different, no doubt about it. We have a chocolate advent calendar from the French grocery store Carrefour (today was a chocolate snowman) but at the British Club’s Christmas Ball last week, we realized that December 14 was the first day we had heard a Christmas carol played – a lifetime record for both of us. We must make our own iPod playlists in order to hear Ella, Elvis or the Muppets sing about the season. We love unpacking (but not yet unwrapping) the boxes of Christmas goodies that have been arriving in the mail. We have tried very hard to avoid spoiling the surprise inside by ignoring the mandatory Customs slips. We have suggested that the mail room attach “Spoiler Avoidance” stickers but apparently it is unlawful. We were impressed by the creative substitute for packing peanuts that Tim & Rose used: little snack bags of crunchy Cheeto’s. Our imagination soared upon seeing the Sharper Image catalog pages that Pam and Sam used: will we be getting the Pirates of the Caribbean Pinball Game or the Aviator Bifocal Reading Glasses/Sunglasses, we wondered.
We’ve been posting our favorite movies on the blog. Our favorites for the year are The Lives of Others; 3:10 to Yuma; Eastern Promises and Knocked Up. We saw Knocked Up via Netflix, and it also came to the big screen in Amman, but not before undergoing some serious censoring of key courtship scenes. The film as shown here suggests that flirting in a bar followed by breakfast together the next morning may lead to pregnancy. So be careful you unmarried flirtatious breakfast-eaters!
Of course we hope and pray for peace in the Middle East, not only because we would be able to visit Bethlehem and beautiful Lebanon, but mostly because peace here will improve the lives of the many Jordanians and Palestinians who have been so hospitable to us.
Duffy’s favorite books this year (Dan's list is on hiatus)
· Run by Anne Patchett
· Call of the Mall by Paco Underhill
· World War Z by Max Brooks – I am reading this now and it is really, really clever. A Studs Terkel style oral history of the world after the zombie wars – rest assured that a post-zombie infestation is not a pretty thing. Safety note: to kill zombies you must destroy their brain.
· Eat, Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert – memoir of a woman who spends a year traveling/living in Italy, India and Indonesia.
· Twilight by Stephanie Meyer – this was my favorite teen fiction book of the year – a vampire romance with a vampire that reminded me a lot of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (or maybe that is just who I pictured in my head.)
We have had Dan’s parents and Duffy’s parents as house guests and hope we can offer our hospitality to you too. I think they will assure you that Jordan is not scary; shwarma is really tasty and that there is indeed something thought-provoking about being in the midst of so much history.
With hopes of peace for you, your families and the world.
Love, Dan and Duffy
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