Crossing the Jordan

This is a two-part series, I guess. I've been working on this for several days and have only gotten as far as the border. Sorry. Not only that, I feel like it's long-winded and boring. Sorry again. Inshallah, someone will think it's moderately interesting.

Last Thursday I traveled the roughly 50 miles from Amman to Jerusalem. The embargo on this blog entry was self-imposed, because I didn’t want friends and family to worry about me unnecessarily while I was gone. Now that it’s over, though, let the storytelling begin.

I tried calling Ahmad all morning Thursday to tell him my plans for the weekend. I finally talked to him at 11 a.m. I asked him how to tell the taxi driver to get to the Abdali bus station. Instead of telling me, he and his brother Mahmoud picked me up and took me there. I sat in the car while they negotiated a 20 dinar (down from 35) cab ride to King Hussein Bridge (one of the border crossings between Jordan and Israel). I looked at my watch. It said 4:05, which is apparently when it stopped the night before. I looked at my cell phone. 12 p.m. I was on my way.

My driver made a call on his cell phone shortly after we started out. It used to make me nervous when taxi drivers talked on the phone while I was in the cab. I imagined them calling their friends who moonlight as kidnappers of mute American women. I'm over that now. Anyway, I heard him say something in Arabic - I don't remember what – that told me he was talking to his wife. We hadn’t gone a mile before he started to slow down. I saw a woman dressed in black from head to toe, with black material covering her entire face. It was not her ultra conservative attire, though, that surprised me. It was the fact that she was wearing eyeglasses on the only visible part of her face. Not a lot of people wear glasses here. My taxi driver said, “This is my wife,” and I thought he was joking. The next minute I saw a little girl tugging at the door next to me. A friendly looking young woman with a toddler on her hip - not the woman in black - slipped in the front passenger seat. The curious 6-year-old at the door slid in beside me.

Marhaba – Hi - I said to my little neighbor, who was wide-eyed and staring. She looked away. Her mother, who was, in all likelihood, younger than I, said, Salam Alekum, and I returned the greeting. NOW we were off.

Taxi driver's daughter reached into a sack and pulled out two falafel sandwiches. She handed one to her mother and her baby sister in the front seat. Taxi driver's wife offered part of hers to me, which didn't really surprise me as I've grown accustomed to the amazing hospitality of Jordanians. Every time something like this happens, though, I am touched by the generosity. They had only the two sandwiches. It goes without saying that I declined.

On our way out of town, I saw my first Corvette in Jordan. Red. 2000-something, new-ish anyway. It made me think of my dad and of Jaber, who always, always, always beats me at my own Corvette game (think Slug-Bug but insert Corvettes). I also instinctively wanted to punch someone on the arm. Something told me that was ill-advised. I refrained.

The youngest girl child sat on her mother's lap in the front seat (no child seats, no seat belts, sooooo 1980) and played with a green balloon, half-inflated. When Allison was here she saw her niece playing with a balloon and talked about how unsafe it was: "She could bite into that, inhale a piece of it into her lungs and..." a whole slew of horrible things followed. I can't remember exactly what they were, but she was very specific and I trust her expertise. So I was relieved when the green balloon was retired to the dash, wedged ever so snugly between the windshield and the requisite box of tissues. You don't understand why it's requisite? Neither do I. Let's just say if I were going to own a company in Jordan, it would be a "Fine Tissue" factory.

The trip to the border was beautiful. I wish I had photos. We drove on a mountain road and I could see the valley below. We also drove around Salt, which I was told by one guy used to be the capital of Jordan. It's old and crowded and neat with ancient steps leading up to many of the homes, which are nestled close together on the hillside (just like in Amman). Anyway, my driver pulled onto a gravel road on top of this mountain and dropped his family outside their home. As we drove away, he said, "That's my home." I told him it was beautiful, and it was. The location was gorgeous, anyway, very isolated with olive trees for neighbors.

The photo, btw, is borrowed from bastchild on flickr.com. Check out his other Jordan photos; they're fabulous! I'm not sure how to format a caption on Blogger. So this is the best I can do for now.

He dropped me at a gate and told one of the guys loitering there with a couple of soldiers to direct me inside. The loiterer walked me halfway but lost interst when he discovered I was too stupid to understand the word he kept saying in Arabic. Possibly bus? Not sure. Anyway, he motioned to the "Public Relations and Tourism – Arrivals/Departures" building. I remember it as little more than a rundown warehouse with a few offices. Inside, there was little activity, and I don't even know if someone was manning the X-ray machine until I put my backpack down on it. I walked through the metal detector, it sounded, but no one came to inspect me further, so I walked in. I paid the exit tax of approximately $7, had my passport stamped and was on my way in less than 10 minutes.

I was thirsty, and I saw that the "café" (which amounted to a few tables and some refrigerators with drinks in them) had Coke. I was surprised, because Pepsi is the beverage of choice in Jordan. There is a perception that Coke is "owned by Jews." I'm not sure if this is the only reason, but I have heard this from more than one person. Anyway, I didn't have change, and I tried to pay the young man for a can of Coke with a 5 dinar bill. He didn't have change either, so after a few minutes of neither of us understanding the other, I went to put the Coke back. He smiled and gave me the Coke (and a straw) for free. God bless my Scandinavian ancestors. That's what I say.

Only one bus company is allowed to shuttle passengers across the King Hussein Bridge. The next bus was supposed to leave at 2:00 p.m., inshallah. I looked at my watch. 4:05. Hmm. I looked at my cell phone. It was after 2. No one was surprised. And by no one I mean me, the blondish Dutch woman who spoke Arabic (I secretly hated her) and the Jordanian-American guy who was visiting from Seattle.

The bus finally left at 4:05, or 2:43 in the p.m., depending on who you ask. We were asked to exit the bus once on our way across the desert. I say desert and not bridge, because if I'm being accurate, that's really what it was. There may have been a short little bridge (over the mostly dried up Jordan River?), but there sure as hell wasn't any water. We showed one soldier our passports while another soldier with a scary gun on his shoulder, even scarier because he was just a boy, got on the bus to make sure we three didn't have a bomb.

We reboarded the bus and entered Palestine, or Israel, again, depends on who you ask. The whole bus trip took less than fifteen minutes, including the whole disembarking episode. My cell phone buzzed twice just as we were in the middle of the "bridge." It was a text message from FastLink, my cell phone provider, saying, "Fastlink wishes you an enjoyable stay in Palestine…" Nothing gets by these people.