In Aqaba, sweltering before the fast

Crusader Fort at the Port

Container vessels queue up in the harbor, making for quite an industrial vista for those of us sitting poolside at the posh resort hotel.

Dan here. We took the Labor Day holiday to drive down to famous Aqaba, Jordan's only port. The guidebooks warned us that the summer months are unbearably hot there. King Abdullah II, like his father before him, has a winter retreat not too far from our hotel.

Our solution: spend as much time underwater as possible. The Royal Diving Club - not at all exclusive despite the name - rented us fins, masks and snorkels. An amazing expanse of coral lies right smack against the coast, so they provide a walkway to allow you to splash into the water well clear of the fragile reef. We were joined by several exotic looking fish, and a good number of Jordanian vacationers, enjoying their last weekend of daytime eating and drinking before Ramadan fasting.

This will be our last Ramadan for a while. Yes, we got our onward assignment. More on that later.

The view out of our window. Our hotel elevator had the usual buttons you'd expect: floors 1, 2, 3 etc. but the feature we loved was the "B" button, for "Beach". Needless to say "B" was our favorite floor.

Happy Labor Day

We are heading out this afternoon for the beach. Our weekend is Friday and Saturday so we will get Sunday off (and will be back at work on Monday). This weekend isn't a Jordan holiday so it is possible that the other customers at the beach resort will all be Americans from the Embassy heading to the beach like us. We spent last Labor Day at the Dead Sea and that was definitely the case - we stayed at a hotel that had just opened and only a few rooms were rented and we knew a significant percentage of the other guests. In Aqaba, I don't think we will know quite as high a percentage but I suspect that we will see co-workers. Jordan is a small country.

Last night we went to a concert sponsored by the Dutch Embassy. It was guitarist Jan Akkerman and his band. In all of the emails that we received inviting us to go, it was mentioned that he was famous and before the concert started we were all trying to think of what band he was from - someone suggested maybe Yes had a Dutch musician - we tried using the web browser on our Blackberries to confirm but it wasn't working (maybe they didn't want cell phones going off during the concert). But then during the introduction it was explained that he was from Focus and later in some other band that we also hadn't heard of. The music ended up being really loud smooth jazz but we don't hear much live music in Jordan (we do hear a lot of recordings of Umm Kalthoum and Fairooz) so we were glad for the opportunity + the local easy listening station "Sunny 105.1 - your home for feel-good music" was giving away free mini-fans.

Vacation Planning

A colleague here cautioned us about 6 months ago that if you are only in a country for two years, you need to plan out where you want to go because there are only a limited number of holiday weekends or Eids and they can slip by. Last year, we didn't make plans for Eid (the holiday which follows Ramadan) and we were kicking ourself when we had a sleepy weekend at home. So now we are over-planning and have booked transportation and hotels for the next three holiday weekends:

Labor Day - Aqaba - which Duffy has only visited for work but Dan has never seen

Eid - Cairo and Alexandria

Columbus Day - Aleppo (Syria's other big city which we have been told is totally different from Damascus)

At this point, we have seen nearly everything we wanted to see in Jordan so our travel is more complicated because it invariably involves a flight (and tickets are expensive and don't run very often).

We are not planning beyond this because our next "must see before we leave" city is probably Dubai but if we are assigned to Bahrain then we won't go to Dubai now but will wait until we live in the Gulf. Likewise if we are going to Bucharest, we might wait on a trip to Turkey. If we are going someplace in N. America, then we will be frantically scheduling long weekends in both places.

Book Club and Dinner Club updates

This week my book club met and last week my dinner club met.

This month my book club read A Person of Interest by Susan Choi - I have to admit that without a book club with very high social norms of "you will read the book" - I probably wouldn't have finished this one. It was really well written and is a fictionalized version of a combination uni-bomber + Wen Ho Lee case. Unfortunately, the book also combined my two least favorite features in a book or movie - absolutely no sympathetic characters and a case where someone is wrongfully suspected of a crime and suffers for it (the best/worst example of this genre is Brokedown Palace - for me an almost unwatchable movie.) You would think these two qualities would cancel each other out - if the book's main character (Professor Lee) is unsympathetic - who cares if he has his life destroyed because he is a terrorist suspect - and yet I still do care. Next month's book (which I actually read about a year ago) is Snow Flower and the Secret Fan which while a good story has really disturbing passages about the process of foot binding.

The theme of this month's dinner club was "Food without Silverware." Our host for the event Ben is the lone bachelor in the group and complained that dinner club is really designed for people who have gotten married because they own dishes and silverware for 10-12 people - voila we had a meal that did not require silverware and hardly required dishes. I think silverware must make food healthier because this was probably our least nutricious dinner club - with vats of guacamole and seven-layer dip counting as a side dish. Dan and I made miniature bisteeya - a moroccan dish of chicken, nuts and cinnamon in phyllo dough. The dish contains pine nuts - girl friends and I have talked about the fact that we have a hard time eating/cooking with pine nuts because our mutual friend Megan is allergic to them - somehow we have subconciously absorbed this fear of pine nuts and everytime they are in a dish I notice it - in a way I would not notice "this dish has peanuts in it."

Bid List Update

While I was in Paris, we received the shortened bid list. People get to bid on their next assignment in order of how difficult their current position is considered (i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan go first - people "serving" in Scandanavia go last.) Jordan is considered average on the difficulty scale. After the people serving in very difficult places got assigned, we received a new bid list that was without a number of jobs in London and Jerusalem.

We have now figured out the jobs we will request. We had to find jobs that started next fall, didn't require teaching Dan a language (because he was already paid to learn Arabic) and which would allow me to work at least a year in a Consular section. Chances are our next assignment will be one of the positions below - but the HR folks can always tell us "no, we really need you to come up with some other proposed assignments."

Our list:

• Canberra, Australia
• Bridgeton, Barbados
• Port of Spain, Trinidad (and Tobago)
• Bucharest, Romania
• Ottawa, Canada
• Vancouver, Canada (we'd be there during the winter Olympics)
• Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (low crime and high elevation)
• Sydney and Canberra Australia (we'd be in different cities during the work week)
• Bern and Geneva Switzerland (low crime and high elevation too!)
• Kampala, Uganda
• Manama, Bahrain
• Johannesburg, South Africa
• Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
• Kingston, Jamaica

We don't know where we are going next. Lots of people (including people who will bid ahead of us) will certainly want to go to Australia. We think there is a high likelihood for Bahrain because it requires Arabic and is well timed, starting soon after we finish in Amman. Also, there aren't that many Arabic-speakers at our level (and many of the ones we know are serving in Baghdad for their second tour - which means there are fewer to serve in other places in the Middle East.)

We should know where we are headed in about a month - stay tuned!

Here are pictures from each post - can you identify which is which (clue: look for palm trees vs. snow).

Al Pasha Turkish Bath

Yesterday, I went to a new (to me) and fabulous place in Amman - the Al-Pasha Turkish Bath. This bathhouse is housed in an old house in Amman's oldest neighborhood. The hours and the staff are gender segregated. A female friend and I went in the morning when the customers and staff are all women - in the evenings all-men. Our fellow-customers were a mix of older Arabic women and a bridal party - you could tell this because they were prone to ululating in the sauna (and because my friend asked).

You enter into the house into a covered courtyard filled with Damascene furniture and with beautiful glass lamps and lots of pet parakeets and finches.

A Turkish bath has several steps:

1. A regular shower

2. Sit in a sauna

3. Sit in a hot tub and drink hibiscus juice

4. Get scrubbed with a loufah

5. Have a massage

6. Take another regular shower.

In Arabic class we learned a polite greeting that is used when greeting someone coming out of the shower (also after they get a haircut) - since Dan and I don't speak Arabic at home, I had never heard the shower-greeting in context until this Friday - when I was indeed greeted with "Naiman" after the second shower step. Unfortunately, I could not remember the correct response (all greetings have appropriate responses) - but was able to at least smile and say thank you and say how much I enjoyed the experience.

$10 Falafel

Paris was indeed expensive. First it is expensive like all big cities are expensive but the weak dollar is just making it worse. I have been telling everyone here about eating a $10 falafel. It was admittedly a good falafel - with a crunchy cole-slawy filling but falafel here is the cheapest take-away food there is (okay maybe $10 sandwiches are the cheapest take-away meal in Paris too). Falafel is considered so ordinary that our falafel stand closes during the month of Ramadan (just 3 weeks away) because in that month of fasting and then feasting - only special and favorite foods are eaten (and falafel isn't special). I think Dan and I can get two sandwiches for $.75.

This week versus last week

While my week in Paris seemed to fly by – this first week back in Jordan is moving rather sluggishly.

Perhaps it is the contrast between what was great about last week:

1. Picking out macaroons at Laduree on the Champs Elyse – the black current were my favorite but I unfortunately discovered macaroons either don’t keep well or don’t travel well because they weren’t nearly as delicious by the time I was back in Jordan. This picture is of pastries from the same shop - the shopkeepers yelled at us for taking pictures but they were truly beautiful.

2. Picnicking on the steps of Le Madeleine church.
3. Playing canasta until early in the morning -everyone else was suffering from jetlag and so I think it was easier for them to stay up late - or at least that is the excuse I will use for my losing.

4. Admiring the beautiful museum structures at the Orsay and the Tuileries but wishing there was a fraction of the number of visitors – the first Sunday of the month is free entrance day and seemingly every Parisian still in town plus every tourist and backpacker was there – it was as crowded as the most crowded art exhibit I have been to – the Vermeer exhibit at DC’s National Gallery - but in every room. It was a bit quieter in the art deco furniture room but was utter chaos in the rooms with Monet and Van Gogh.

Here is a photo of friends outside of Van Gogh's house in Montmarte.

Jordan, is paling in comparison - as proof - here is how I am spending this week:

1. Trying to understand the politics around the sale of a new GSM license which has phone companies and bureaucrats snarling

2. Reading reports about Jordan’s inflation – now at 19.4%!!!

3. Emptying out an inbox full of email