Among my best work days in Jordan

Probably cooler than not meeting Senator Obama – this week I got to go in an Airbus A320 flight simulator! As a U.S. official (and no doubt as a passenger), I think Boeing airplanes are way better than Airbus planes. Unfortunately, Jordan only has a new Airbus simulator – it was very cool.

You are in a walk-in closet sized box that moves (like those rides at Disney World that simulate roller coasters) and has all the buttons and levers of an airplane. The software has been loaded with satellite images of Jordan so I was given a tour of Amman in the flight simulator with the Embassy and the Palace and the sports fields pointed out to me. I believe one of the features of the simulator is that they can fill it with smoke to see how the pilots react to a fire – thankfully our ride was smoke-free. If anyone is a pilot and looking for a place to do their flight simulator hours - I can recommend the very attractive facility at Queen Alia airport.


I believe on the same work day Dan got to go to the morgue.

Dress-up Dinner Club

I remember my friend Shaun talking about his life living abroad in Africa - I think he was in Zambia and he said when you run out of things to do you start having excessively complicated dinner parties. Maybe we have been in Amman too long because our latest dinner club event "serve food from an empire" was also Arab-clothing night. It seems that people who have served in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf fall in love with thobes (the long white robes) and lament that they can't really wear them in Jordan without looking out-of-place.

Dan and I made pretzels from the Martha Stewart Hor Doevre cookbook and they were outstanding. We made a half-recipe and could easily have eaten the full amount. They were outstanding coming out of the oven and very good re-heated a few hours later at the party. Make your own pretzels!!!

Sen. Obama's visit in pictures

The Senators arrived via Osprey. These are half helicopter and half airplane. A friend who was over at the Citadel (which was the site of the press conference and on a really big hill) said that they were visible coming into the city and looked really cool.

Here is the Senator on the tarmac. You will notice that I am no where near him. This will be true for most of the visit.

The press conference was held at the Citadel which is the site of the oldest parts of Amman. Here you can see the approximately 80 journalists that were waiting for his arrival - half were from Sen. Obama's campaign plane (and would fly with him to Israel and Europe) and about half were local journalists.

Here I am near the Senators as they received a guided tour of the Citadel. Later on while Senator Obama is having an interview with Katie Couric, Senators Reed and Hagel and their staff and I will have the same archaeologist show us around the museum which features Jordan's Dead Sea Scroll fragments.

Here is my picture "with Senator Obama" He is the small man behind the podium.

Here is my picture with the life-sized Senators Reed and Hagel.

More Visitors

You all know, the Embassy gets a lot of VIP visitors some big and some little. Recently, I had Senator Kerry who used to be big but is now able to sit in an airport VIP lounge with me totally undisturbed by the three European journalists also hanging out in the lounge.

More recently, I was in charge of Senator Obama’s visit. Hence the near silence on this blog, on emails and on the phone. Speaking of phones our Vonage is working again so if you have our NJ 609 number – it and the voicemail should work.

Anyway, Senator Obama…. No, I didn’t get a picture with him. No one here did except the Charge’ (fancy French word for most senior person in Embassy when the Ambassador is not in-country). The visit was crazy. He was coming from Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq where he did not travel with campaign staff or the press so that when he landed here in Amman his campaign plane (and staffers and press) were here too demanding attention.

I did take some pictures of the visit which I will try to post tonight. I did get some decent pictures of the Senator and of the Ospreys he and Senators Reed and Hagel flew in on. I also got a picture with Senators Reed and Hagel both of whom are theoretically being considered for the VP slot.

The visit was exhausting and complicated but there were some cool things about it:

1. I got to work closely with the Palace. The great thing about a Kingdom is that when you need to get things done, it seems like the Palace can do anything. For the past two weeks, I had a member of the Royal Family (no one you have heard of) who was assigned to this visit on speed dial. I did ask him for help getting an airplane part through customs but this seems like kind of a boring use of one’s (very temporary) access to power.

2. I also got to get caught up with an old friend who is working for the campaign and was in town.

3. I got to eat dinner in the Palace. I didn’t eat anywhere near Their Majesties but I still got some delicious lamb chops.

4. I had an interesting conversation with some journalists on the plane who said that especially the foreign media is really, really interested in Sen. Obama and will print whatever their news services publish. Indeed, this visit had a lot more journalists in-town than last spring’s visit by Senator McCain.

Everyone Likes Everywhere

We still do not have the shorted (aka Vienna-free bid list) but we have started asking people about the cities where there are two+ jobs. Maybe it is because we are living in Jordan (and anyone who is here is at least moderately adventurous) but we have heard great (not just good things) about a number of possible places. Uganda has been described as the jewel of Africa. We met someone Friday night who just left Addis Adaba and said it is great with terrific food and beautiful weather because of the high elevation. Many people (who think Amman is a little boring) think Islamabad is great - with wonderful hiking and fabulous shopping. In fact the only countries people do not like we weren't actually considering - apparently Liberia, Cote D'Ivoire and Haiti really are as difficult as people say.

Shopping for Iranian Stuff

Jordan has a very limited manufacturing base and so very little that one can buy in Jordan was made in Jordan. The exceptions are chicken, some other processed food, some clothes and some really rough tissues.

In DC, I have been to the Convention Center for Home and Garden shows and craft shows, where different vendors will have booths set up to sell stuff to the public. This weekend, we went to the Jordanian equivelent. It was held at Amman's pretty basic convention center (there is a nicer one at the Dead Sea) and it featured Iranian vendors. Before going, we confirmed that the trade embargo with Iran is not like the one with Cuba (and maybe even Cuba's is changing).

The show was definitely for Jordanian tastes - which meant some over-the-top gold leaf furniture and enormous chandaliers. But we also were intrigued by the novelty of shopping for Iranian stuff. There were lots of rugs, pistachios and candies. Most booths had one Iranian person and one Jordanian - so we were able to use our Arabic - since we had no Farsi.

A lost bet

Let me start with the disclosure that during my own childhood, my parents had a Karmen Gia which had no backseat and that my favorite place during long roadtrips was sleeping on the window ledge in their Grand Torino.

That said, it is still shocking to see small kids in Jordan in cars without seatbelts or car seats or anything. Small kids are usually in their mothers lap and backseats can often have four or five kids in them.

Yesterday, in our posh neighborhood (where if they aren't using car seats they aren't using them anywhere), we pulled up at a streetlight behind a car with a sunroof. A small child (3?) was standing on the console between the front seat with its head out of the sunroof. He was very cute and we laughed. Then Dan said "I bet he's still there when the light changes." I replied "No way. I bet you a dollar." But indeed, the light changed. Their car and our car turned left and the kid's head was still stuck out of the sunroof for at least the next block while we still followed. A parent was holding on to him but it was our "we're not in DC" moment of the day.

Did someone here order a pallet of breakfast cereal?

Point B - Amman, Jordan

Dan here. The supplementary household effects shipment has arrived! A little less than 2 months ago, while Duffy was resting and relaxing with her friends in DC, I was exploiting my parents, their large pickup truck, and their Costco membership. They graciously gave up their living room, and allowed me to build a mountain of quilted Charmin toilet tissue, family-sized boxes of Cheez-its, and several cases of Kilt Lifter, a tasty Scottish-style microbrew from Phoenix.

Our employer allows us a second shipment like this, provided our first one - our initial move - was under the total weight limit. It is a generous benefit: big burly men bring a giant shipping crate to your home, and hand-pack everything themselves. However, my mom just retired from a civilian job that involved coordinating overseas shipments like this for the military. Having heard more than a few tales of missing items, she kept an watchful eye on the packers. Her diligence paid off: they almost "forgot" to list one of the boxes on the shipment manifest, the box in which they had so carefully packed all the beer.

Thanks to Mom, the beer made it. In fact, everything made it safely, except for the four gallons of laundry detergent. Apparently, one of the boxes imploded in a fury of Mountain Air Scented Tide concentrated detergent, leaving behind only a toilet plunger covered in hardened goo (no, there do not seem to be decent plungers available in Jordan).

Point A - the living room in Phoenix. Thanks again, Mom and Dad

(Note the doomed laundry detergent bottles on the right, rear)

We have the long bid list.

Today, we received the long bid list. Yes, it includes some dream assignments like New Zealand and Ireland. No, there is no chance we are going there.

What Bidding Is:
Bidding is the rank-ordering of 20 Foreign Service jobs from the list of about 400 jobs that will be available sometime in 2009-2010.

How Bidding Works:
While it sounds like it would be easy to find 20 fabulous positions in a list with 400 jobs, in fact it will not be. There are a number of constraints:

1. We want to stay together. So while there is one job in Dubai which could be a fun place to live – there aren’t two.

2. We can only bid on jobs in countries where they speak English or Arabic. This is actually a lot of countries but some of the biggest English-speaking embassies are in Nigeria and India and we aren’t very excited about going there (although we actually know people who loved, loved, loved serving in India – we know no one who loves Nigeria.)

3. Our timing has to work. Management doesn’t want us hanging around Washington so because our jobs here end in summer 2009 we need to find something that starts in Fall 2009 (giving us time for home leave and job training).

4. Submissions are reviewed in order of how “hard” your current post is. For second tours (but not for our tours in the future), people will be assigned in rank-order of how “hard” their current assignment is. This means colleagues in Afghanistan and Iraq get first pick – we’ve heard that Embassy Rome is filled with people who just served in Iraq. Colleagues in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Pakistan, etc. are next. We will bid at the same time as colleagues who are in countries considered equally hard (or easy) as Jordan – this includes many countries including Venezuela, Colombia, Ukraine, and Sri Lanka. Jordan is about “middle of the pack” as far as bidding goes.

What is Next:
1. We’ve read through the list and started noting some jobs that look fun (Barbados, Trinidad, Toronto).

2. In early August, the bid list is actually reissued and all of the jobs which went to people in really hard countries will be removed. When we get the revised list, we will see which of our favorites are still on the list and haven’t been taken by bidders from hard countries. We know many people who reported that they created a top 20 list from the original long list and had NONE of theirs left after they saw the revised list.

3. In mid-August, we will submit our final bid list with 20 rank-ordered jobs. We have been warned that it will be hard to stay together (our top priority) and that doing so may require going to places other people don’t want to go. So we’ve started having conversations that include:

“Now that we are hopelessly addicted to our Wii, do you think we could enjoy somewhat boring Bahrain?”
“Do we think because [so and so] loved India that we would?”
“What would life on a military base in Seoul be like?”

There are actually no jobs in Baghdad on our list. We were given the option of selecting Baghdad before we saw this list and seemingly all of the jobs on that list were taken by people who wanted Baghdad as their first choice. We have a lot of colleagues here in Amman whose next tour will be Iraq.

When we have a list of 20 to send-in we’ll let you know. No promises that many vacation dream spots will be on the list – but perhaps you will be able to see Uganda in a whole new way! But we have really enjoyed our first tour and it was an easy decision to decide that yes, we want to do a second tour abroad. We hope we love where we are going as much as we’ve loved Jordan.