I strongly recommend that everyone have work trips to beach towns. Last week, I went to Aqaba, which although still a pretty small place (population 90,000) is the site of a lot of investment. There are currently two large hotels (I stayed at the Intercontinental) – but another hotel is scheduled to open soon (they just need to remove the ship that got beached on its beach during a freak windstorm). Many more hotels are scheduled to open in the next few years but it will still be very small relative to Eilat which is quite literally right next door. After Aqaba, I went up to Wadi Rum, a desert national park where I joined a ceremony to honor locals who have taken some tourism classes (food handling, English, etc.) My picture was taken many times as I was given a tour of the handicraft shops run by local women’s cooperatives. Unfortunately, I can't find it actually posted anywhere.I just had a minute to get caught up reading Megan’s blog and she included a description of what her weekend was like. It was exhausting. Here I will include our weekend as a comparison to show how easy life without children can be – okay easy for me – Dan keeps working a lot.
Thursday night – I (Duffy) get back from Aqaba. We have dinner at the Embassy “club.” Dan has the tuna melt and I had chicken wings. Thursday night is called “steak night” but it took me a while to realize – “the steaks are bad – why do we keep ordering them?” Dan had to go meet some people at the airport so he left and I stayed at the club chatting with colleagues and drinking the only cheap beer in the country (Jordan has a 300% tax on alcohol).
Friday - Dan goes to work for a few hours. Duffy attempts to make bagels. The resulting bread product tastes like a bagel – it is chewy and yummy but it doesn’t stay in a circle – so they become crescents – which is perhaps appropriate for bagels made in a Muslim country. Friday night we go to a friends’ house for dinner and afterwards we go home to discover that our neighbor in the building is having a party. There is music blaring – there are flashing purple, green and yellow lights but there are seemingly no guests. We can see into their yard from our balcony and there is no one there – they did put their typically noisy German shepherd away but the volume of the music forces us to sleep in the guest room. No doubt our maid Molly will think we are sleeping in separate beds.
Saturday – We sleep in. Eat bagels for breakfast (they are not nearly as delicious the second day). We watched a mediocre movie “Death at a Funeral” and got caught up on American Idol, which we are taping off of our AFN box. We both really like Jason. Dan also likes Michael – I think Michael is too old. We keep talking about switching to non-US military satellite television so that our Arabic will get better but then we couldn’t watch American Idol. We go out to a new coffee shop and I have strawberry juice and Dan has a banana milkshake. We read in the afternoon (Dan – a Thomas Friedman book about Lebanon; Duffy “Predictably Irrational” – a good Freakanomics knock-off). We go to other friends’ house for dinner – they are moving out of Jordan soon and want us to take their cheap champagne glasses (since they have to pay for their shipping and they have had to drink champagne out of white wine glasses at our last party because the champagne cocktails were popular and we probably had 40 guests.)
Thursday night – I (Duffy) get back from Aqaba. We have dinner at the Embassy “club.” Dan has the tuna melt and I had chicken wings. Thursday night is called “steak night” but it took me a while to realize – “the steaks are bad – why do we keep ordering them?” Dan had to go meet some people at the airport so he left and I stayed at the club chatting with colleagues and drinking the only cheap beer in the country (Jordan has a 300% tax on alcohol).
Friday - Dan goes to work for a few hours. Duffy attempts to make bagels. The resulting bread product tastes like a bagel – it is chewy and yummy but it doesn’t stay in a circle – so they become crescents – which is perhaps appropriate for bagels made in a Muslim country. Friday night we go to a friends’ house for dinner and afterwards we go home to discover that our neighbor in the building is having a party. There is music blaring – there are flashing purple, green and yellow lights but there are seemingly no guests. We can see into their yard from our balcony and there is no one there – they did put their typically noisy German shepherd away but the volume of the music forces us to sleep in the guest room. No doubt our maid Molly will think we are sleeping in separate beds.
Saturday – We sleep in. Eat bagels for breakfast (they are not nearly as delicious the second day). We watched a mediocre movie “Death at a Funeral” and got caught up on American Idol, which we are taping off of our AFN box. We both really like Jason. Dan also likes Michael – I think Michael is too old. We keep talking about switching to non-US military satellite television so that our Arabic will get better but then we couldn’t watch American Idol. We go out to a new coffee shop and I have strawberry juice and Dan has a banana milkshake. We read in the afternoon (Dan – a Thomas Friedman book about Lebanon; Duffy “Predictably Irrational” – a good Freakanomics knock-off). We go to other friends’ house for dinner – they are moving out of Jordan soon and want us to take their cheap champagne glasses (since they have to pay for their shipping and they have had to drink champagne out of white wine glasses at our last party because the champagne cocktails were popular and we probably had 40 guests.)
4 comments:
Hmmm...doing things you want to do, semi-organized events, random moments of peace...yes, your weekends are different than ours.
I now offer to trade lives with Dan. Because I like Dan and I know he's a good guy, I will even chip in a beer for the inconvenience of having to shlep back here to the States. Duffy, you'll hardly notice the change, I assure you.
There would also be the advantage that you and I both like Taco Doritos which are available here (with a slightly different spice) and Dan still likes Nacho Cheese.
Well, Nacho Cheese is ok, but it's about 3rd on my preference list behind Taco and Cool Ranch.
You forgot the added advantage that with our birthdays exactly 6 months apart, we'd be hard pressed to forget one.
Ok, sold. We shall begin our affair when you visit in April, in preparation for life swapping later on. Eventually, assuming things work out, we can deal with the minor annoyances of legal documents and irate former spouses.
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