Hey everyone,
Just wanted to announce that Fried Camel will go on a hiatus until late February. The first semester has come to an end and I'm coming home for a much needed break.
I hope to see some or all of you when I get back. Thanks for keeping in touch and for following my Middle East adventure.
See y'all next month.
להתראות
-Drew
Monday, January 25, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
David's Shining Star
By now, everyone is familiar with the opening of the Gates of Hell upon the half-island nation of Haiti. The response by the world has been overwhelming and deservedly so. Although conspicuously absent from the list of nations sending aid and relief is just about every Islamic nation, with the exception of Jordan and Qatar. With one of the five pillars of Islam being that of zakat, alms-giving or charity, such a gaping void in just that is something worth scrutinizing.
I wanted to highlight Israel's contribution to the efforts in Haiti because I think they provide a view into the very soul of Israeli society, as well as some perspective on just how big of an impact this country of 7.5 million has on the world.
The response from Israel was nearly instantaneous. Within minutes of learning of the cataclysmic earthquake that had rocked Haiti, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had authorized the Israeli Defense Force to immediately deploy with a full field hospital detachment and personnel to provide life-saving support and services.
The IDF arrived and set up search-and-rescue squads immediately to comb the devastation for survivors. In fact, every day since Saturday, the IDF has maintained a three squad detachment to search the rubble for survivors. And they have met success as recently as yesterday.
And more help is on the way.
Hundreds of wounded Haitians have been brought inside the IDF Medical Corps facility and treated. The 121 man team has been operating day and night, providing some 25 life-saving surgeries in the field and delivering three children.
One of the mothers was so overwhelmed by Israel's help that she actually named her child Israel.
The number of Israeli medical personnel outnumbers the contribution of both Great Britain and France.
CNN reported yesterday that Israel is the only country actively taking critically injured patients and trying to save them because Israel is the only country that has a world-class medical facility deployed in the field.
Think about that.
Not even the United States has been able to match the quality of field treatment that the tiny nation of Israel is providing. This nation, so often disparaged by the feckless cabal at the United Nations and so often threatened by the radicals seeking its annihilation, is showing its true colors and its true gifts.
The absence of most of the Muslim states' assistance in this crisis, states who so often air their grievances against Israel in our own media, speaks for itself. Aside from Jordan and Qatar, there has been little-to-no substantial assistance allocated by the others.
There are various reasons why they have not. In some cases, financial constraints and turmoil at home prevents or limits the ability to contribute. These are valid and very real explanations.
But they do not unveil the whole story. Just look at Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is basking in immense oil wealth. What has its response been? And Indonesia, a Muslim nation familiar with the terror of the 2004 tsunami and the recipient of overwhelming Western aid, has provided little to assist.
This is not to say that Muslims aren't providing assistance in Haiti or aren't donating money and blood to aid the desperate Haitians. Many are. And King Abdullah II of Jordan is proving why his country is so respected in the West.
This is to say, however, that the heart of every nation is on display at this moment. And right now, the light from Israel's heart is far outshining its size.
The CNN video clip of the IDF Medical Corps facility can be found here.
Lt. Colonel Avi Berman of the Israeli Defense Force watching over a recently rescued child.
I wanted to highlight Israel's contribution to the efforts in Haiti because I think they provide a view into the very soul of Israeli society, as well as some perspective on just how big of an impact this country of 7.5 million has on the world.
The response from Israel was nearly instantaneous. Within minutes of learning of the cataclysmic earthquake that had rocked Haiti, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had authorized the Israeli Defense Force to immediately deploy with a full field hospital detachment and personnel to provide life-saving support and services.
The IDF arrived and set up search-and-rescue squads immediately to comb the devastation for survivors. In fact, every day since Saturday, the IDF has maintained a three squad detachment to search the rubble for survivors. And they have met success as recently as yesterday.
And more help is on the way.
Hundreds of wounded Haitians have been brought inside the IDF Medical Corps facility and treated. The 121 man team has been operating day and night, providing some 25 life-saving surgeries in the field and delivering three children.
One of the mothers was so overwhelmed by Israel's help that she actually named her child Israel.
The number of Israeli medical personnel outnumbers the contribution of both Great Britain and France.
CNN reported yesterday that Israel is the only country actively taking critically injured patients and trying to save them because Israel is the only country that has a world-class medical facility deployed in the field.
Think about that.
Not even the United States has been able to match the quality of field treatment that the tiny nation of Israel is providing. This nation, so often disparaged by the feckless cabal at the United Nations and so often threatened by the radicals seeking its annihilation, is showing its true colors and its true gifts.
The absence of most of the Muslim states' assistance in this crisis, states who so often air their grievances against Israel in our own media, speaks for itself. Aside from Jordan and Qatar, there has been little-to-no substantial assistance allocated by the others.
There are various reasons why they have not. In some cases, financial constraints and turmoil at home prevents or limits the ability to contribute. These are valid and very real explanations.
But they do not unveil the whole story. Just look at Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is basking in immense oil wealth. What has its response been? And Indonesia, a Muslim nation familiar with the terror of the 2004 tsunami and the recipient of overwhelming Western aid, has provided little to assist.
This is not to say that Muslims aren't providing assistance in Haiti or aren't donating money and blood to aid the desperate Haitians. Many are. And King Abdullah II of Jordan is proving why his country is so respected in the West.
This is to say, however, that the heart of every nation is on display at this moment. And right now, the light from Israel's heart is far outshining its size.
The CNN video clip of the IDF Medical Corps facility can be found here.
Lt. Colonel Avi Berman of the Israeli Defense Force watching over a recently rescued child.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Alabama Jones and The Latest Crusade
The alarm on my Blackberry buzzed like a swarm of carpenter bees. Unfortunately, its raison d'etre was wasted. I had not fallen asleep. It had been next to impossible. A storm of excitement and a prickling fear had churned in my stomach through the night.
It was 5:30 a.m. Time to get up.
I wandered in the kitchen and tried to keep my movements as unobtrusive as possible. Ryan and David, our new roommate, were sound asleep in the next room. Dom had not come home during the night which led to believe he had crashed at Chris' apartment or elsewhere.
As I made some scrambled eggs, I tried to focus on the game plan. A few days prior, out of sheer whimsy, I had pitched an idea to go to Petra following the end of Arabic for the semester. That idea had been well received and now five of us were preparing to go to Jordan and spend a day navigating the ancient city.
I forced my thoughts to remain on the plan for getting from Tel Aviv to Petra, but the lack of sleep deflected my attention to the faceless fear that had caused my mind to swirl.
I had a bad feeling about this one. A thousand long forgotten memories had surfaced during the night: Mrs. Brown's first grade class, Brad McDaniel reciting the Presidents of the United Status for Mrs. Livingston (RIP), Brad outrunning everyone during recess football, breaking my ankle during the Chamber's game, Ponder laughing on the bus after Mom successfully derailed Coach Harper's Hooter's expedition, Cody roping a calf from the back of his horse at the Fairgrounds, a conversation with Evan at McAlister's Deli about how I should stop seeking the counsel of men so often, a victory toast from Schriver on the rooftop of Bourbon Street.
I couldn't figure out why these memories had surfaced.
As I washed my hands in the bathroom in preparation to eat, I spun to find Ryan standing in the doorway.
"Bah!"
"Holy sh...dude, don't do that!" I uttered with a startle.
Ryan laughed.
"Do you think it's still possible for me to go?" Ryan asked.
Originally, there had been six of us planning to go to Petra: Dustin, Tyler, Patryk, Huoshin, Ryan, and myself. But financial considerations had forced Ryan to bail out the previous night. A few of us had offered to split the cost of his trip amongst ourselves.
Ryan had wanted to go to Petra all his life. He was an avid Indiana Jones fan. He knew the background of the ancient city better than a tour guide. He had marked going to Petra as one of the top goals of his trip to Israel. And then he had learned the previous night that he didn't have the funds. It was like watching a kid have his birthday presents taken away from him.
Dustin, Huoshin, and myself had offered to help him out. But he had refused citing the fact that he did not want to be indebted to three people.
"Do you think it's still okay?" Ryan asked again.
"Yea," I said. "I told ya last night we would take care of it."
We sat down at the kitchen table to eat breakfast. Our bags were already packed. Five people to Petra had just become six people.
"I didn't sleep last night," I muttered aloud.
"Too excited?"
"I dunno. I did memorize a passage last night though. Psalm 91:9-12."
"What does it say?"
Ryan paused. "You know that's in the New Testament too, right?"
"When Jesus is tempted in the desert by Satan," I said groggily. "Yea...I know."
***
The 8:00 a.m. bus to Eilat rumbled down the highway. Ryan's return had been welcomed by everyone. We had agreed to divide the costs between Dustin, Huoshin, and myself. Ryan had promised to pay us all back whenever he could.
At the back of the bus, an Israeli girl asked me in Hebrew to close the window. She was in her early twenties and was wearing pajamas--her shoes were dog slippers.
"Yea," I said as I reached above Ryan's head and slid the window shut.
"I'm sure you understood every word of that perfectly," Tyler said with a sardonic smile.
"Ani mavin (I understand)!" I fired back.
Soon thereafter, I began to nod off. But it was a futile effort. Unable to fall asleep, I grabbed Ryan's "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" and started reading random trivia.
It came as a great surprise to know that on April 1, 2003, as U.S. and British forces surged toward Baghdad, the Iraqi ambassador to Russia held a press conference in which he claimed the U.S. had accidentally fired a nuclear warhead and killed 7 British soldiers. The press corps sat stunned. After a few moments, the ambassador replied: "April Fool's."
I don't what became of this man, but I do know that that type of humor should have been rewarded.
***
The bus pulled into the Eilat central bus station at 1:15. This was the second excursion to Eilat in less than a month. The last outing had been a blast. But we wouldn't be spending very much time in the Red Sea resort city.
The six of us marched down from the bus station to the waterfront. We passed the Steak House on our right. I nixed that idea before it came to fruition. The Steak House had been the place where we ate following the Welcome Week in Hell. It had caused some extremely abnormal behavior with our digestive systems.
Our quest for food eventually culminated in Burger Bar. Ryan, Dustin, Tyler, and I stood in line. Without thinking, I ordered my meal in Hebrew.
"Ani rotseh burgur h'bayt eem h'arucha. Shelosh maot."
"Beseder," the girl behind the register responded.
Ryan and Tyler got their meals first and went outside to join Huoshin and Patryk. Patryk was the only non-American in our group. As Dustin's soon-to-be leaving roommate, Patryk hails from Poland. He embodies many of the traits that I've heard Poles possess: good-natured, appreciative, and positively pro-American.
"I've had an uneasy feeling. I didn't want to mention it," I said quietly to Dustin.
He furrowed his brow and looked sideways for a moment.
"It'll be fine. If anything happens, we'll kick some ass," Dustin casually replied.
Wouldn't expect anything less from Dustin.
***
The Yitzhak Rabin Border Crossing rose into view. We had piled into two taxis for the three kilometer drive north of Eilat. I sat in the front seat. Patryk and Huoshin sat in the back.
The cab driver and I bantered back and forth in Hebrew. My conversational skills were improving, albeit slowly. He laughed when I told him in Hebrew that people in Alabama hunt bear and bad people.
"Is there not a law against that?" he asked with a chuckle.
"Nope," I responded. "Shooting bad guys is not only socially acceptable, but encouraged."
He seemed genuinely interested that we were going to Petra, even though he probably ferried people there all the time.
"Well, can you tell us anything about Jordan?" Huoshin asked him.
The cabbie paused as he pulled up to the front gate of the border crossing. He thought for a moment and then turned around to answer Huoshin.
"If the Jordanians ask you for 100 dinar, give them no more than 1," he said with a smile. "They like ripping people off."
"See there, Huosh, he can tell us something about Jordan," I said with a laugh.
***
"The word you said did not mean dorms," the Israeli woman at the Change station said with a laugh. "It means self-pleasure."
Huoshin turned red in the face and dropped his head into his hands. We were all laughing hysterically.
"Have a good day!" the Israeli woman said sarcastically.
"It's already better!" I said in the midst of a chorus of laughter.
The next stop was Passport Control. We were still on the Israeli side of the border. I had exchanged some 1,000 shekels for roughly 170 dinar. The rate was beyond absurd. In a completely inexplicable twist of fate, the dinar was actually stronger than the dollar. One dinar is equally to exactly one dollar and fifty cents.
Now, I knew the dollar had been battered like an abused wife courtesy of the financial engineers back home, but seeing and experiencing the effects of it was disheartening.
At the Passport Control window, the IDF officer asked us to show a receipt proving that we had paid the 94 shekel exit fee. That's right, Israel charges an exit fee.
I rummaged through my wallet to no avail.
"Oh don't worry, I have all day," the female officer said, sarcasm dripping down her uniform.
"Good to know."
"Come on, Drew," Dustin said with a hint of exasperation.
"I'm trying to find it."
"Take your time," the Israeli girl said. "It's your world, we're just living in it."
"Aren't you just a little ray of sunshine?" I fired back.
After a solid two minutes, I finally found the receipt in a side pocket of my wallet. I whipped it out and slid it under the window.
"Have a wonderful day!" the IDF girl said with a grin.
"And yom tov to you, too!"
The next step required us to pass through a final inspection of our passports by Israeli border security. The border agent flipped through each of our security papers and passports as a M-4 toting IDF officer gave us all a look over. The sun glimmered off his sunglasses. A smirk crept to the corners of his mouth.
"Enjoy your trip," he said caustically.
Walking down the long road toward the Jordanian border crossing, fencing on either side of the road quarantined large sections of arid, desert. A sign on the fence read in Hebrew, Arabic, and English: "Danger Mines!"
Is there any other kind?
Ryan mentioned that Jordan spent the third most of any Middle Eastern country on security. I knew that the Hashemite Kingdom's security forces were relentless and dedicated. King Abdullah II was one of America's few allies in the region. Following the 9/11 attacks, he had offered Jordan's intelligence apparatus to aid the West in battling the radical Islamists across the Middle East.
Just two weeks ago in Afghanistan, a Jordanian turncoat had blown himself up at the CIA's Khost station, killing 7 CIA officers and one of Jordan's highest ranking intelligence officers. That little detail of a Jordanian officer dying went unnoticed in the ensuing media coverage.
Jordan has personnel in Afghanistan, quietly and professionally helping the CIA pick off Al-Qaeda targets throughout the region. This comes as little surprise given that King Abdullah II's mother is an American.
After going through security, passport control, and customs, we stepped out into the open area where taxis sat lined up awaiting new arrivals. It was awesome adding another stamp to the passport.
"Welcome to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan," a giant sign read.
The final security officer greeted each of us with a "Good day. Welcome to Jordan." And in an impressive display of hospitality, he even spoke Polish to Patryk.
We had crossed into Jordan.
***
"Fifteen dinar," I fired back.
The two Jordanian cabbies laughed in response. They were dressed in suits. One was a smaller man who spoke flawless English. The other was a tall and heavier man who fancied himself as the Don Corleone of cab drivers.
"I tell you what, you go fill up the gas and then you tell me if 20 dinar isn't a deal, my friend," the smaller cabbie told me.
"We're your only customers," Ryan said. "And I'm fine with waiting around for a better offer."
This was Egypt all over again. Except this time, we weren't about to pay what they wanted us to pay. Dustin had a mixture of contentment and detachment from the whole process. Patryk was disinclined to acquiesce to their request. Tyler stood back and played it cool, as is his usual temperament. But Huoshin and Ryan were bartering animals.
"We'll pay fourteen if you're lucky," Huoshin deadpanned.
The kid was in his element. Having grown up in Taiwan and spent a considerable amount of time throughout Asia, Huoshin was adept at breaking the backs of his bartering opponents.
"It is twenty dinar," al-Corleone announced with fervor. "This is your last offer! You can stand here all day!"
"Okay," Huoshin said. "We'll wait."
"Look, we're poor college students and our friends just came through here a few weeks ago. They paid fifteen dinar a piece," I told the smaller cabbie.
"That's because they were four people per cab," he responded.
"They were two people total!" I said with exasperated incredulity.
Huoshin walked back to where we were all standing. A group of Asian tourists started to file in behind us. For a brief moment, I became worried that they were gonna ruin our game. Then I realized that they were heading toward the charted tour buses a little further down the road.
Huoshin and Ryan returned and dogged them some more as the rest of us sat back and watched. Patryk and I exchanged grins as Huoshin threw his hands up in the air. I quietly hoped he would start speaking Mandarin just to throw the cabbies off their game.
A few moments later, Huoshin walked back to the group.
"50 dinars per cab," he said. "That's down from 60 dinars per cab. I suggest we take it."
Congratulations Huoshin. You just saved the group a collective thirty dollars.
***
Aqaba was Jordan's port city. It sat on the Red Sea and was directly across from Eilat. Our two cabs zipped through the streets at a wild clip. Unlike the trek through the Sinai, we were not all riding in unmarked white vans. We were in smaller, nicer cars. Tyler, Huoshin, and I rode in the back car. Dustin, Patryk, and Ryan were in the front vehicle.
The city of Aqaba was a developing one for the Hashemite Kingdom. The goal was to turn Aqaba into a resort style city with a bustling port capable of rivaling Eilat. It was also the site of an attempted terror attack on a US warship in 2005 from the very dead Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terror group: the dying and defunct Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Our cabbie couldn't speak a lick of English. Tyler tried speaking Arabic to him. Unfortunately the entire point of our Arabic course is not to be able to speak Arabic, but rather to be able to read and translate. Colloquial Arabic is nothing like the written form that we are learning.
"Nahnu darasa Arabi jamiati," Tyler said with a stutter and intermittent chuckles.
In the backseat, Huoshin and I watched the landscape roll past us. The Jordanian mountains were impressive. They were smaller than their cousins across the way in the Sinai Peninsula, but nevertheless they stretched on for eternity.
Our cab driver was a good-natured man who laughed at just about everything we said. He even took time to point out things to us and tell us their names in Arabic. It was a good way to kill the two hour drive to Wadi Musa.
I passed in and out of consciousness. It was 4:00 p.m. and I had been out of bed since 5:30 a.m. with little sleep from the night before. Tyler continued to try to speak Arabic with the help of a book titled "Making Out In Arabic."
As a Sigma Chi from Florida State, this revelation was par for the course for Tyler.
Flipping through the book, I raised a few eyebrows at the phrases contained with it. Huoshin snatched it from me and began looking it over.
"Might want to hold off on some of these, Tyler."
"I want to touch your butt," Huoshin said aloud. He looked up from the book and over at me with an expression that could only be characterized as confused.
"Like that one for instance."
***
We were given "free" orange juice for shelling out the fifty dinars per vehicle. I knew we had still been ripped off. But fortunately, we had avoided being taken completely to the wood shed.
I figured the cabbies thought for fifty dinars per car, the least they could do was throw in "free" orange juice.
As we approached the outskirts of Wadi Musa, the terrain changed dramatically. Instead of desert driving, we were now high up in the mountains. But these mountains were not the jagged, rocky ones that we had come to expect. Instead, the texture was smoother. The hills were more rounded and the rocks seemed to be arranged in a way that made them blend in with the sand.
The driver blared Arab music as we approached the mountainside city of Wadi Musa. It reminded me of a city built on the very side of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. As night fell, the green lights from the city's mosques cast all in a verdant pall.
Tyler continued his campaign to speak Arabic; his persistence causing some confusion on both ends.
"Driver...uhh...means crazy," the driver said to Tyler.
"You should make that your blog title," Tyler said to me as he laughed.
The winding roads cut through store fronts set in garages, half-constructed buildings, and packs of roaming Jordanian men. A group of kafiyeh-wearing congregants stood outside one of the mosques and glared at us as our two-taxi convoy zipped past.
I put on my game face. If I have learned anything from my experience with Arab culture, it is two-fold: show respect and show confidence.
The cabs pulled up in front of the Sun Set Hotel. The six of us piled out.
"Everyone wait here," Tyler said. "One of us should go check this hotel out."
"You want to do it since you talked to them on the phone or you want me to go?" I asked.
"It doesn't matter."
"I'll go then," I said as I ran up to the steps to the hotel front.
I walked through the glass doors into the lobby of the Sun Set Hotel. The pink facade of its exterior did not lend itself too well to my particular hopes, but I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
I was not.
The hotel owner wore glasses and was balding. He seemed like a nice guy. I asked to see one of the rooms and he agreed to take me upstairs to look.
***
"The rooms look...okay," I said cautiously. "But I'm not gonna lie, it looks like Fallujah on the second floor."
The hotel owner gave us three rooms. He took our passports and typed in our names and numbers in case we tried to get away without paying the next morning.
I gave everyone a final warning as he walked up the stairs toward our third floor rooms. But to get to the third floor, we had to pass through the second.
"What the hell?!" Dustin said with a bellow and a shocked laugh.
"The Marines just left," I said with laughter.
Rubble was strewn throughout the floor. Entire sections of the walls were collapsed. Exposed plumbing ran out from both the floor and the wall at peculiar angles. The windows were merely massive holes that looked like they had been blown open by RPGs. Perhaps they had been.
Tyler's camera came out of his jacket. He panned the war zone.
"You said the rooms are okay, right?" Huoshin asked me with a semblance of concern.
"Absolutely," I said with a hint of showmanship.
We went upstairs to put our stuff away and get ready to grab some dinner. We had a long day coming up. One that would also start at 5:30 a.m.
***
"This is your second visit?" asked the gatekeeper.
"No," Patryk said.
"Yes," Huoshin said.
"Your friends will not be able to enter," the gatekeeper said sternly.
Damnit.
It was 7:30 in the morning. We were standing at the entrance into Petra. Huoshin and Patryk had bought tickets from the hotel owner (two 2-Day Passes) for what he said was a discount price. Tyler and I had refused, recognizing a scalper when we saw one.
The hotel owner turned out to be a con artist. I had managed to save us all a collective fifteen dinar by canceling a third room and convincing the hotel owner to let us sleep three to a room. That morning, complementary breakfast had been thrown in and all seemed to be off to a great start.
The muezzin had woken us up at 5:00 a.m. with the morning call to prayer from the mosque, but other than that we had no complaints.
Until Huoshin and Patryk were screwed over. Or so it appeared.
It turns out that the tickets they had bought had been used the previous day and the Jordanian Antiquities Division (which was run by the Jordanian government and overseen by their security apparatus) did not take too kindly to people trying to cheat their way into Petra.
But they really did not like it when Jordanians tried to screw over tourists. There was trouble at the gates, but it turned out not to be for us.
Within five minutes, the gate keeper had called the hotel owner and requested that he be brought down via taxi to explain himself. Huoshin and Patryk were given their money back to go buy a one day pass like the rest of us, while the gatekeeper berated the hotel owner in Arabic. A Jordanian police officer, armed to the teeth, stood off to the side and watched.
"That dude is getting a knock on his door tonight courtesy of the King's special service," Tyler said with a smirk. "And he has all day to think about it."
"I knew those tickets were gonna cause trouble."
"We were warned not to buy any tickets from anyone outside the gates," Dustin reminded us.
Patryk and Huoshin sauntered down the hill toward us. Huoshin smiled. Patryk looked unhappy and then eventually smiled, too.
"Good," Ryan quipped. "Patryk caught Huoshin's smiling disease."
***
The road to Petra is a long one. It is rock-strewn and filled with Bedouins on horseback. Like a chapter out of 1,001 Arabian Nights, the Bedouins race down the mountainous, desert trails at high speed on their horses, clothes and kafiyehs billowing in their wake.
Through the passage of time, these tribal people could just as well be the ancestors of the Umayyads, the Isamaili assassins, the Ottoman legions, and the horse riders of the Arab Revolt led by Lawrence of Arabia. They know their trade. And no one is better at it than they are.
The morning light cast the entrance into ancient Petra in a mixture of grays and dull browns. The "red rocks" of Petra turn various colors depending on light and precipitation. It is one of the many attractions to the area.
On our left, the first of many rock-carved structures emerged. It was the Obelisks, a massive tomb-like building with four pillars at its top. Ryan took over as our de facto tour guide, telling us the history of the Nabatean people who used to live in Petra.
After a solid twenty minute hike along the rock-laden path, we arrived at the canyon entrance. Here was the historical entrance into the city. And here was the reason why no army could ever conquer Petra. The narrow canyon path created thousands of choke points. Holes and hiding places were carved out all along the path, creating perfect ambush spots. An entire army could be and would be chopped to pieces.
What I didn't know at the time was that this was the only way into the city. There was no back route. The mountains that we would climb later in the day made sure that Petra was a city in a valley enclosed by their insurmountable edifices. It was a city with its back against a wall. There was only one way in this ancient, hidden place. And only one way out.
Ryan was like a kid set loose on a playground. He was climbing left and right. And we hadn't even set foot in the valley or the city yet. Still making our way through the canyon, we found the trek to be twice as long as the initial path to the canyon entrance.
"Just pretend I'm not here," Ryan said as he slipped behind a large rock off the beaten path.
"That shouldn't be too hard!" I said as I jumped off the path to avoid a Jordanian tour guide and his two guests.
If Ryan were seen, we might be in for a little hassle. Tyler yelled for the all-clear and encouraged us to hurry up. We had to be back at the Petra gate by 3:00 p.m. to catch our cab back to the border. That gave us only about six hours to trek all across Petra--not enough time to see everything.
***
The Treasury is the most famous of Petra's buildings. It was the site of the holy grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And it literally just appears through the crack of the canyon at the most unexpected of moments. As sun light slipped down to the mortal coil below, the monumental edifice of the Treasury stunned all six of us into awe.
Cameras were whipped out in near perfect synchronization.
We walked out into the open alcove area where the Treasury was constructed. Here the canyon broadened into a large circular area that would have been perfect for a market or commerce center during the time of the Nabateans. And this is what they were known for to the outside world. Petra, at its height, was a prime trading stop for supply caravans.
"I'm stealing the carpenter's cup!" I said.
"You'll explode when you cross the seal," Dustin pronounced without hesitation.
"Killjoy."
"Oh snap!" I declared. "Camels!"
Three camels rested on their haunches in front of the Treasury. The docile creatures turned their heads from left-to-right, following each of us with a surprising deftness.
"You want to ride camel?" a Bedouin yelled.
"Nope," I responded. "Just want it to sit still for a moment."
We finished taking pictures around the Treasury after about twenty minutes. Bullet holes marked where its carved images had been defaced by Muslims who believed that such pictorial representations of humans were idolatrous. Tyler's disdain at such an act could not be masked. He reminded all of us of the Taliban destroying the massive Buddhist statues in Afghanistan-- statues that had been thousands of years old.
And we would see more evidence of this practice at the end of our journey through Petra.
***
Outside the Treasury the canyon gave way to a sprawling valley surrounded on all sides by beautiful mountains. But what was more awe-inspiring was the city, literally carved from rock, that sat on both sides of the pathway and rose all the way to the tops of the mountains.
Bedouins opened up their shops and attended to their daily rituals. A group of children seemed to be devising a strategy for selling their wares to the gaggle of incoming tourists. A four person Bedouin family cooked breakfast on an open fire in front of their rock hovel.
Donkeys brayed all about, their cries echoing throughout the entire valley. Bands of dogs chased each other and followed the Bedouin children.
It was surreal.
The dull brown coloring gave way to a brighter, more reddish color, to which the city had come to be known by its nickname: the "Rose-Red City."
We came across an ancient amphitheater built by the Romans following their conscription of the territory into the Empire. Ryan filled us all in on the history of it and how many people it could seat and for what purpose it had been constructed.
Reason gave way to curiosity soon thereafter. Following Ryan's lead, we decided to climb up the mountains overlooking the village and looking out toward the city center where we had yet to visit.
Darting through ancient stone hallways and rock hovels and climbing up exceedingly dangerous and slippery portions of the old village, we pushed our way forward. The amazing thing was that people still lived here. Occasionally, we would find Bedouin blankets and trash marking where they had been the previous night.
The thought of habitation here was stunning.
At one point, we clambered past a donkey which had been tied into its rock alcove-turned-barn. It brayed at us and then failed to give us a second thought as he it bent down toward its stack of hay. A Bedouin girl sitting out in front of her tent on the mountain side called for us to join her for some tea.
But we were on a mission. And Tyler reminded us that the water probably hadn't been boiled. Touche.
Ryan disappeared from everyone for a while and reappeared from about a hundred feet up looking down on us. The kid had turned into a wild man. Slipping through what could have been called the Eye of the Needle en route to catch up with Ryan, I noticed a cat sitting on the ledge below.
"There's a cat over there." I shouted across to Dustin and Tyler.
Following in my wake, Dustin and Tyler inspected it. The cat looked up at Dustin in terror and bounded down a ravine. It wasn't quit suicide, but it was close.
"Nah, that was a Jordanian mountain lion," Tyler shouted back.
Unfortunately for me, Ryan had left his backpack on the ground. I had to carry his pack and my own during the climb, feeling more and more like a sherpa with every passing second during the climb.
"Appreciate it man," Ryan said as he grabbed his backpack.
"Don't ever do that again."
We ventured a little further up and finally reached a plateau. The view kicked us all in the teeth. We looked down on the specks of people in the old Nabatean village and saw the ruins of the old Roman theater. Beyond was the stone-paved walkway leading past a row of colonnades ruins toward what was the "city center." And looking down over the city center was the ancient site of the Crusader fortress.
"Wow," was all any of us could manage to utter.
Mount Sinai had been an amazing experience. This was rapidly surpassing even that indelible trip. I glanced at my watch and noticed that it was already 10:00 a.m. We had to move if we wanted to reach the Monastery.
"Alright, let's rock and ride," I exclaimed.
"As soon as you clean the Petra sand out of your v.." Dustin deadpanned behind me.
"Sheket Carmack."
***
"You speak English really well," Tyler stated to the little Bedouin girl following us.
"I go to school," she said in a matter-of-fact tone. "They teach us English."
"What grade are you in?"
"Sixth."
The little girl had been waiting on one of the 800 stairs leading up to the Monastery. She even had a faux Coach purse. At first she had tried to sell us something, then called for us to wait, and then finally sighed heavily and shoved her wares in her purse to follow us up.
Tyler and I spoke with her a little more from the back of our group. Dustin was bulldogging it up the mountain. As was his custom, whenever he had a goal, he pursued it with tenacity and full devotion. There was no half-assing it at this juncture.
We passed a Bedouin tent and the little girl dropped off to stay with a couple more girls her age. Every time we passed the Bedouins at their strategically placed locations, they would call to us to look at their goods. The chorus of "Everything one dinar!" became as ingratiated into my psyche as that of the D.C. Metro's automated voice when I had worked on the Hill.
This hike was not only difficult, it was treacherous. At one point, Huoshin had to stop to drink water and catch his breath. We passed by a ravine easily five hundred feet deep, skirting along the side wall of the mountain in our final push to reach the Monastery.
As the wind whipped about us and the cold air began to take way, we soon emerged through a narrow mountain pass into a plateau. Off to our left was a Bedouin bazaar and restaurant. Off to our right was the towering structure of the Monastery, carved into the very mountain itself.
***
Standing as tall as the Treasury, the Monastery looked out over the Jordanian Mountains and the Arava Desert. It was the perfect mountain redoubt for solitude. And we learned just how impossible it would have been to attack Petra from the West.
Ryan bolted off toward the Monastery. Dustin, Tyler, and myself took a seat on some benches in front of the Bedouin-run restaurant.
"Ryan wait up!" Huoshin exclaimed.
Dropping his duffle bag beside us, he darted after Ryan.
"Huoshin's great. The kid just does the goofiest stuff." Tyler quipped.
At about that moment, Huoshin tried to climb the wall leading into the mouth of the Monastery. Ryan stood atop and watched. Huoshin slipped off and dropped to the ground. Patryk's laughter reverberated across the plateau.
"Hey guys, shut up!" Huoshin yelled back.
"He'll fall again now that he knows we're all watching." Tyler said.
"You know he used to be a wannabe Asian gangster, right?" I offered.
"Awesome!" Huoshin's voiced echoed across the valley after a successful second attempt.
"You're kidding me..."
Behind us, a small puppy rolled around in the sand. It was pretty awesome until Tyler ruined the moment by pointing out that the only thing it had to look forward to on this mountain redoubt was death.
After Ryan and Huoshin returned from the Monastery, we opted to head toward an encampment a little further ahead with a sign that read: "The End of the World."
Sounds promising.
***
The End of the World was not an exaggeration. From the very edge of the mountain, we looked out over the rest of the Jordanian mountains and the great Arava desert beyond.
A mattress sat nestled on the very edge of the cliff.
"Now this is what I call living on the edge," Huoshin observed with a cheesy grin.
We gathered together on the top rock and sat down to soak it all in. It was a moment where you literally felt like you could touch the face of God. On my way up, however, God felt inclined to interject a little more levity into the experience.
"Ah crap," I said as I looked down.
"Ahahahaha," Dustin bellowed as he whipped out his camera.
My jeans had ripped straight down my left thigh, right along the crotch seam. My blue and white checkered boxers were suddenly exposed to the elements. Fortunately, I had packed some extra shorts in my backpack in case the weather became too warm for jeans. Looks like my retentiveness had paid off for once.
We asked a couple of Korean tourists to take our picture from the "End of the World." They happily obliged as we all grouped together. Then Huoshin asked me to take an "epic shot" of him staring out into what seemed like infinity.
"You sure you want this angle?" I asked Huoshin.
"Yea," Huoshin said confidently.
"Even with that giant zit on the side of your face?"
"Thanks, Drew." Huoshin said with a sigh.
We hung around for a solid thirty minutes before beginning the arduous journey back down the mountain and to the Petra "city center." The trek back was a lot cooler than the trek up, if only because I was wearing shorts.
We passed more and more of our Bedouin friends.
"Everything one dinar!" a little Bedouin girl yelled.
"Hey, Tyler, you hear that? Everything's just one dinar!"
"Sounds like a deal, man," Tyler remarked tongue-in-cheek.
"Everything two dinar!" the little girl suddenly yelled.
"I thought it was one dinar!" I protested.
The girl, no more than nine years old, cracked a full smile.
"Clever little twit aren't you."
When we reached the bottom, we came to a crossroads on what to do. We were running short on time. Ryan wanted to try to find the Springs and the burial grounds. So we followed him down a path--a path to nowhere.
En route, Huoshin, Patryk, and Ryan quarreled amicably over the route to the Springs. Dustin turned toward me and made an astute observation. Husohin was holding the map up and pointing at various way points.
"Can't you see Huoshin in 30 years as that dad with the fanny pack, the map, the..." Dustin said as he started to laugh.
"The floppy hat and the camera hanging around his neck." I finished.
"Dude, I'm pretty sure we go this way!" Huoshin said adamantly to Patryk.
"Absolutely," I answered Dustin.
It turned out that no one had any idea where we were going. And in fact we were wandering on government land run by Bedouins. We found lemon tree orchards and orange tree groves that were sectioned off. They were settled in a massive gorge where every step literally rolled my ankles like a ship being tossed at sea.
It was a small miracle that they didn't roll completely or break. After twenty minutes of hiking, it became apparent that we were going nowhere. And the silence of the gorge was more than a bit unsettling.
Every muscle in my body was aching. My feet throbbed from the pain. And I took particular offense to a flock of goats looking down on us condescendingly from a ledge.
"Perfect place for an ambush," I said through gritted teeth.
"No kidding," Tyler said with some disgust.
"We can't run away either."
"Guess we'll have to stand and fight."
"With what exactly?"
An elderly Bedouin man emerged from between a pair of olive trees. He was riding on the back of a donkey. Huoshin approached him and asked if we were close to the Springs.
Negative.
We tracked back the way we had come and eventually made it to the city center. It was almost 1:00. We had to be back at the front gate by 3:00 p.m. This meant we needed to allocate about an hour to get back.
Sitting down for a water break, we all decided that time was wasting. We climbed up the ridge toward the Petra Cave Museum when we saw a sign that read "Crusader Fortress."
Jackpot.
Winding our way around a massive mountainous spire that could have been used for a scene in Lord of the Rings, we saw even more rock hovels carved into the mountains across the gorge below us. In fact, looking down, we soon realized that the gorge was where we had just come from.
Seeing a couple of people crossing a wooden bridge at the top of the spire, we felt renewed vigor to push ahead on this final hike to the top of the Crusader Fortress.
Small green plants sprouted forth from the hill side and throughout a hidden valley stretching further south. Dustin started whistling a rendition of the Green Acres theme song. I focused on the climb up.
Halfway up the brutally steep climb, my knees began to feel jolts of pain coursing through them. Dustin's knees had been giving him hell all day. No one complained. Everyone kept going.
"I sense Patryk behind me," I said as we neared the halfway mark.
"Yes," he stated. "I'm waiting for the perfect opportunity to push you off."
"My advice is to wait until we reach a ledge."
"I will. And when I shove you, you won't do anything," Patryk said in his crisp Eastern European twang.
"Nonsense," I countered. "I'll be dying."
Finally, at the zenith of our climb, we reached a mound of stone rubble. Blocks that had been crushed into oblivion by Muslims seeking to annihilate any evidence of the Crusader's claim to the region.
A girl and her father were waiting for us. They were Australians who were doing some geocaching. The girl was about sixteen or seventeen years old and very pretty.
They welcomed us as we moved toward the top of the Crusader ruins. At the top, someone had created a peace symbol with rocks. Ryan turned to see me scattering the rocks with unremitting fury.
"Why are you destroying the peace sign?" Ryan asked in concern.
"I just climbed all the way up here," I said with heavy breath. "I reserve the right to do whatever the hell I want."
After a few moments of creative rearrangement, I stood back and admired my work.
"There," I said in satisfaction. "Now it's a V for Victory sign."
Looking up, we saw the entire valley of Petra. It wasn't the same monumental view from the "End of the World," but it was nevertheless an all-encompassing view of the valley from its centralized point.
Nabatean civilization had just been conquered. I looked down at the stone rubble of the Crusader fortress and recalled part of the verse that I had memorized the day before.
Amen to that.
Crossing Jordan. From (L) to (R): Dustin, Me, Patryk, Huoshin, and Tyler.
Cash Money Dinars!
Dustin marking his territory in the rubble of the Sun Set Hotel.
The Treasury.
Ryan and I hanging out with the camels.
Me and Joe.
Overlooking the valley of Petra.
The Theater. Courtesy of the Roman Empire.
It was cold at the time.
Anyone home?
Standing the test of time.
Trek to the Monastery.
The Monastery.
The End of the World.
Standing on the edge.
Dustin, Patryk, and Ryan living on the edge.
Tyler and I staring off into the distance. Kind of gay but what can you do?
Group Shot: From (L) to (R) is Huoshin, Dustin, Me, Patryk, Ryan, and Tyler.
It was 5:30 a.m. Time to get up.
I wandered in the kitchen and tried to keep my movements as unobtrusive as possible. Ryan and David, our new roommate, were sound asleep in the next room. Dom had not come home during the night which led to believe he had crashed at Chris' apartment or elsewhere.
As I made some scrambled eggs, I tried to focus on the game plan. A few days prior, out of sheer whimsy, I had pitched an idea to go to Petra following the end of Arabic for the semester. That idea had been well received and now five of us were preparing to go to Jordan and spend a day navigating the ancient city.
I forced my thoughts to remain on the plan for getting from Tel Aviv to Petra, but the lack of sleep deflected my attention to the faceless fear that had caused my mind to swirl.
I had a bad feeling about this one. A thousand long forgotten memories had surfaced during the night: Mrs. Brown's first grade class, Brad McDaniel reciting the Presidents of the United Status for Mrs. Livingston (RIP), Brad outrunning everyone during recess football, breaking my ankle during the Chamber's game, Ponder laughing on the bus after Mom successfully derailed Coach Harper's Hooter's expedition, Cody roping a calf from the back of his horse at the Fairgrounds, a conversation with Evan at McAlister's Deli about how I should stop seeking the counsel of men so often, a victory toast from Schriver on the rooftop of Bourbon Street.
I couldn't figure out why these memories had surfaced.
As I washed my hands in the bathroom in preparation to eat, I spun to find Ryan standing in the doorway.
"Bah!"
"Holy sh...dude, don't do that!" I uttered with a startle.
Ryan laughed.
"Do you think it's still possible for me to go?" Ryan asked.
Originally, there had been six of us planning to go to Petra: Dustin, Tyler, Patryk, Huoshin, Ryan, and myself. But financial considerations had forced Ryan to bail out the previous night. A few of us had offered to split the cost of his trip amongst ourselves.
Ryan had wanted to go to Petra all his life. He was an avid Indiana Jones fan. He knew the background of the ancient city better than a tour guide. He had marked going to Petra as one of the top goals of his trip to Israel. And then he had learned the previous night that he didn't have the funds. It was like watching a kid have his birthday presents taken away from him.
Dustin, Huoshin, and myself had offered to help him out. But he had refused citing the fact that he did not want to be indebted to three people.
"Do you think it's still okay?" Ryan asked again.
"Yea," I said. "I told ya last night we would take care of it."
We sat down at the kitchen table to eat breakfast. Our bags were already packed. Five people to Petra had just become six people.
"I didn't sleep last night," I muttered aloud.
"Too excited?"
"I dunno. I did memorize a passage last night though. Psalm 91:9-12."
"What does it say?"
If you make the Most High your dwelling place--even the Lord, who is my refuge, then no harm will befall you, no disaster will come near your tent. For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone. -Psalm 91:9-12
Ryan paused. "You know that's in the New Testament too, right?"
"When Jesus is tempted in the desert by Satan," I said groggily. "Yea...I know."
***
The 8:00 a.m. bus to Eilat rumbled down the highway. Ryan's return had been welcomed by everyone. We had agreed to divide the costs between Dustin, Huoshin, and myself. Ryan had promised to pay us all back whenever he could.
At the back of the bus, an Israeli girl asked me in Hebrew to close the window. She was in her early twenties and was wearing pajamas--her shoes were dog slippers.
"Yea," I said as I reached above Ryan's head and slid the window shut.
"I'm sure you understood every word of that perfectly," Tyler said with a sardonic smile.
"Ani mavin (I understand)!" I fired back.
Soon thereafter, I began to nod off. But it was a futile effort. Unable to fall asleep, I grabbed Ryan's "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader" and started reading random trivia.
It came as a great surprise to know that on April 1, 2003, as U.S. and British forces surged toward Baghdad, the Iraqi ambassador to Russia held a press conference in which he claimed the U.S. had accidentally fired a nuclear warhead and killed 7 British soldiers. The press corps sat stunned. After a few moments, the ambassador replied: "April Fool's."
I don't what became of this man, but I do know that that type of humor should have been rewarded.
***
The bus pulled into the Eilat central bus station at 1:15. This was the second excursion to Eilat in less than a month. The last outing had been a blast. But we wouldn't be spending very much time in the Red Sea resort city.
The six of us marched down from the bus station to the waterfront. We passed the Steak House on our right. I nixed that idea before it came to fruition. The Steak House had been the place where we ate following the Welcome Week in Hell. It had caused some extremely abnormal behavior with our digestive systems.
Our quest for food eventually culminated in Burger Bar. Ryan, Dustin, Tyler, and I stood in line. Without thinking, I ordered my meal in Hebrew.
"Ani rotseh burgur h'bayt eem h'arucha. Shelosh maot."
"Beseder," the girl behind the register responded.
Ryan and Tyler got their meals first and went outside to join Huoshin and Patryk. Patryk was the only non-American in our group. As Dustin's soon-to-be leaving roommate, Patryk hails from Poland. He embodies many of the traits that I've heard Poles possess: good-natured, appreciative, and positively pro-American.
"I've had an uneasy feeling. I didn't want to mention it," I said quietly to Dustin.
He furrowed his brow and looked sideways for a moment.
"It'll be fine. If anything happens, we'll kick some ass," Dustin casually replied.
Wouldn't expect anything less from Dustin.
***
The Yitzhak Rabin Border Crossing rose into view. We had piled into two taxis for the three kilometer drive north of Eilat. I sat in the front seat. Patryk and Huoshin sat in the back.
The cab driver and I bantered back and forth in Hebrew. My conversational skills were improving, albeit slowly. He laughed when I told him in Hebrew that people in Alabama hunt bear and bad people.
"Is there not a law against that?" he asked with a chuckle.
"Nope," I responded. "Shooting bad guys is not only socially acceptable, but encouraged."
He seemed genuinely interested that we were going to Petra, even though he probably ferried people there all the time.
"Well, can you tell us anything about Jordan?" Huoshin asked him.
The cabbie paused as he pulled up to the front gate of the border crossing. He thought for a moment and then turned around to answer Huoshin.
"If the Jordanians ask you for 100 dinar, give them no more than 1," he said with a smile. "They like ripping people off."
"See there, Huosh, he can tell us something about Jordan," I said with a laugh.
***
"The word you said did not mean dorms," the Israeli woman at the Change station said with a laugh. "It means self-pleasure."
Huoshin turned red in the face and dropped his head into his hands. We were all laughing hysterically.
"Have a good day!" the Israeli woman said sarcastically.
"It's already better!" I said in the midst of a chorus of laughter.
The next stop was Passport Control. We were still on the Israeli side of the border. I had exchanged some 1,000 shekels for roughly 170 dinar. The rate was beyond absurd. In a completely inexplicable twist of fate, the dinar was actually stronger than the dollar. One dinar is equally to exactly one dollar and fifty cents.
Now, I knew the dollar had been battered like an abused wife courtesy of the financial engineers back home, but seeing and experiencing the effects of it was disheartening.
At the Passport Control window, the IDF officer asked us to show a receipt proving that we had paid the 94 shekel exit fee. That's right, Israel charges an exit fee.
I rummaged through my wallet to no avail.
"Oh don't worry, I have all day," the female officer said, sarcasm dripping down her uniform.
"Good to know."
"Come on, Drew," Dustin said with a hint of exasperation.
"I'm trying to find it."
"Take your time," the Israeli girl said. "It's your world, we're just living in it."
"Aren't you just a little ray of sunshine?" I fired back.
After a solid two minutes, I finally found the receipt in a side pocket of my wallet. I whipped it out and slid it under the window.
"Have a wonderful day!" the IDF girl said with a grin.
"And yom tov to you, too!"
The next step required us to pass through a final inspection of our passports by Israeli border security. The border agent flipped through each of our security papers and passports as a M-4 toting IDF officer gave us all a look over. The sun glimmered off his sunglasses. A smirk crept to the corners of his mouth.
"Enjoy your trip," he said caustically.
Walking down the long road toward the Jordanian border crossing, fencing on either side of the road quarantined large sections of arid, desert. A sign on the fence read in Hebrew, Arabic, and English: "Danger Mines!"
Is there any other kind?
Ryan mentioned that Jordan spent the third most of any Middle Eastern country on security. I knew that the Hashemite Kingdom's security forces were relentless and dedicated. King Abdullah II was one of America's few allies in the region. Following the 9/11 attacks, he had offered Jordan's intelligence apparatus to aid the West in battling the radical Islamists across the Middle East.
Just two weeks ago in Afghanistan, a Jordanian turncoat had blown himself up at the CIA's Khost station, killing 7 CIA officers and one of Jordan's highest ranking intelligence officers. That little detail of a Jordanian officer dying went unnoticed in the ensuing media coverage.
Jordan has personnel in Afghanistan, quietly and professionally helping the CIA pick off Al-Qaeda targets throughout the region. This comes as little surprise given that King Abdullah II's mother is an American.
After going through security, passport control, and customs, we stepped out into the open area where taxis sat lined up awaiting new arrivals. It was awesome adding another stamp to the passport.
"Welcome to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan," a giant sign read.
The final security officer greeted each of us with a "Good day. Welcome to Jordan." And in an impressive display of hospitality, he even spoke Polish to Patryk.
We had crossed into Jordan.
***
"Fifteen dinar," I fired back.
The two Jordanian cabbies laughed in response. They were dressed in suits. One was a smaller man who spoke flawless English. The other was a tall and heavier man who fancied himself as the Don Corleone of cab drivers.
"I tell you what, you go fill up the gas and then you tell me if 20 dinar isn't a deal, my friend," the smaller cabbie told me.
"We're your only customers," Ryan said. "And I'm fine with waiting around for a better offer."
This was Egypt all over again. Except this time, we weren't about to pay what they wanted us to pay. Dustin had a mixture of contentment and detachment from the whole process. Patryk was disinclined to acquiesce to their request. Tyler stood back and played it cool, as is his usual temperament. But Huoshin and Ryan were bartering animals.
"We'll pay fourteen if you're lucky," Huoshin deadpanned.
The kid was in his element. Having grown up in Taiwan and spent a considerable amount of time throughout Asia, Huoshin was adept at breaking the backs of his bartering opponents.
"It is twenty dinar," al-Corleone announced with fervor. "This is your last offer! You can stand here all day!"
"Okay," Huoshin said. "We'll wait."
"Look, we're poor college students and our friends just came through here a few weeks ago. They paid fifteen dinar a piece," I told the smaller cabbie.
"That's because they were four people per cab," he responded.
"They were two people total!" I said with exasperated incredulity.
Huoshin walked back to where we were all standing. A group of Asian tourists started to file in behind us. For a brief moment, I became worried that they were gonna ruin our game. Then I realized that they were heading toward the charted tour buses a little further down the road.
Huoshin and Ryan returned and dogged them some more as the rest of us sat back and watched. Patryk and I exchanged grins as Huoshin threw his hands up in the air. I quietly hoped he would start speaking Mandarin just to throw the cabbies off their game.
A few moments later, Huoshin walked back to the group.
"50 dinars per cab," he said. "That's down from 60 dinars per cab. I suggest we take it."
Congratulations Huoshin. You just saved the group a collective thirty dollars.
***
Aqaba was Jordan's port city. It sat on the Red Sea and was directly across from Eilat. Our two cabs zipped through the streets at a wild clip. Unlike the trek through the Sinai, we were not all riding in unmarked white vans. We were in smaller, nicer cars. Tyler, Huoshin, and I rode in the back car. Dustin, Patryk, and Ryan were in the front vehicle.
The city of Aqaba was a developing one for the Hashemite Kingdom. The goal was to turn Aqaba into a resort style city with a bustling port capable of rivaling Eilat. It was also the site of an attempted terror attack on a US warship in 2005 from the very dead Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terror group: the dying and defunct Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Our cabbie couldn't speak a lick of English. Tyler tried speaking Arabic to him. Unfortunately the entire point of our Arabic course is not to be able to speak Arabic, but rather to be able to read and translate. Colloquial Arabic is nothing like the written form that we are learning.
"Nahnu darasa Arabi jamiati," Tyler said with a stutter and intermittent chuckles.
In the backseat, Huoshin and I watched the landscape roll past us. The Jordanian mountains were impressive. They were smaller than their cousins across the way in the Sinai Peninsula, but nevertheless they stretched on for eternity.
Our cab driver was a good-natured man who laughed at just about everything we said. He even took time to point out things to us and tell us their names in Arabic. It was a good way to kill the two hour drive to Wadi Musa.
I passed in and out of consciousness. It was 4:00 p.m. and I had been out of bed since 5:30 a.m. with little sleep from the night before. Tyler continued to try to speak Arabic with the help of a book titled "Making Out In Arabic."
As a Sigma Chi from Florida State, this revelation was par for the course for Tyler.
Flipping through the book, I raised a few eyebrows at the phrases contained with it. Huoshin snatched it from me and began looking it over.
"Might want to hold off on some of these, Tyler."
"I want to touch your butt," Huoshin said aloud. He looked up from the book and over at me with an expression that could only be characterized as confused.
"Like that one for instance."
***
We were given "free" orange juice for shelling out the fifty dinars per vehicle. I knew we had still been ripped off. But fortunately, we had avoided being taken completely to the wood shed.
I figured the cabbies thought for fifty dinars per car, the least they could do was throw in "free" orange juice.
As we approached the outskirts of Wadi Musa, the terrain changed dramatically. Instead of desert driving, we were now high up in the mountains. But these mountains were not the jagged, rocky ones that we had come to expect. Instead, the texture was smoother. The hills were more rounded and the rocks seemed to be arranged in a way that made them blend in with the sand.
The driver blared Arab music as we approached the mountainside city of Wadi Musa. It reminded me of a city built on the very side of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. As night fell, the green lights from the city's mosques cast all in a verdant pall.
Tyler continued his campaign to speak Arabic; his persistence causing some confusion on both ends.
"Driver...uhh...means crazy," the driver said to Tyler.
"You should make that your blog title," Tyler said to me as he laughed.
The winding roads cut through store fronts set in garages, half-constructed buildings, and packs of roaming Jordanian men. A group of kafiyeh-wearing congregants stood outside one of the mosques and glared at us as our two-taxi convoy zipped past.
I put on my game face. If I have learned anything from my experience with Arab culture, it is two-fold: show respect and show confidence.
The cabs pulled up in front of the Sun Set Hotel. The six of us piled out.
"Everyone wait here," Tyler said. "One of us should go check this hotel out."
"You want to do it since you talked to them on the phone or you want me to go?" I asked.
"It doesn't matter."
"I'll go then," I said as I ran up to the steps to the hotel front.
I walked through the glass doors into the lobby of the Sun Set Hotel. The pink facade of its exterior did not lend itself too well to my particular hopes, but I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
I was not.
The hotel owner wore glasses and was balding. He seemed like a nice guy. I asked to see one of the rooms and he agreed to take me upstairs to look.
***
"The rooms look...okay," I said cautiously. "But I'm not gonna lie, it looks like Fallujah on the second floor."
The hotel owner gave us three rooms. He took our passports and typed in our names and numbers in case we tried to get away without paying the next morning.
I gave everyone a final warning as he walked up the stairs toward our third floor rooms. But to get to the third floor, we had to pass through the second.
"What the hell?!" Dustin said with a bellow and a shocked laugh.
"The Marines just left," I said with laughter.
Rubble was strewn throughout the floor. Entire sections of the walls were collapsed. Exposed plumbing ran out from both the floor and the wall at peculiar angles. The windows were merely massive holes that looked like they had been blown open by RPGs. Perhaps they had been.
Tyler's camera came out of his jacket. He panned the war zone.
"You said the rooms are okay, right?" Huoshin asked me with a semblance of concern.
"Absolutely," I said with a hint of showmanship.
We went upstairs to put our stuff away and get ready to grab some dinner. We had a long day coming up. One that would also start at 5:30 a.m.
***
"This is your second visit?" asked the gatekeeper.
"No," Patryk said.
"Yes," Huoshin said.
"Your friends will not be able to enter," the gatekeeper said sternly.
Damnit.
It was 7:30 in the morning. We were standing at the entrance into Petra. Huoshin and Patryk had bought tickets from the hotel owner (two 2-Day Passes) for what he said was a discount price. Tyler and I had refused, recognizing a scalper when we saw one.
The hotel owner turned out to be a con artist. I had managed to save us all a collective fifteen dinar by canceling a third room and convincing the hotel owner to let us sleep three to a room. That morning, complementary breakfast had been thrown in and all seemed to be off to a great start.
The muezzin had woken us up at 5:00 a.m. with the morning call to prayer from the mosque, but other than that we had no complaints.
Until Huoshin and Patryk were screwed over. Or so it appeared.
It turns out that the tickets they had bought had been used the previous day and the Jordanian Antiquities Division (which was run by the Jordanian government and overseen by their security apparatus) did not take too kindly to people trying to cheat their way into Petra.
But they really did not like it when Jordanians tried to screw over tourists. There was trouble at the gates, but it turned out not to be for us.
Within five minutes, the gate keeper had called the hotel owner and requested that he be brought down via taxi to explain himself. Huoshin and Patryk were given their money back to go buy a one day pass like the rest of us, while the gatekeeper berated the hotel owner in Arabic. A Jordanian police officer, armed to the teeth, stood off to the side and watched.
"That dude is getting a knock on his door tonight courtesy of the King's special service," Tyler said with a smirk. "And he has all day to think about it."
"I knew those tickets were gonna cause trouble."
"We were warned not to buy any tickets from anyone outside the gates," Dustin reminded us.
Patryk and Huoshin sauntered down the hill toward us. Huoshin smiled. Patryk looked unhappy and then eventually smiled, too.
"Good," Ryan quipped. "Patryk caught Huoshin's smiling disease."
***
The road to Petra is a long one. It is rock-strewn and filled with Bedouins on horseback. Like a chapter out of 1,001 Arabian Nights, the Bedouins race down the mountainous, desert trails at high speed on their horses, clothes and kafiyehs billowing in their wake.
Through the passage of time, these tribal people could just as well be the ancestors of the Umayyads, the Isamaili assassins, the Ottoman legions, and the horse riders of the Arab Revolt led by Lawrence of Arabia. They know their trade. And no one is better at it than they are.
The morning light cast the entrance into ancient Petra in a mixture of grays and dull browns. The "red rocks" of Petra turn various colors depending on light and precipitation. It is one of the many attractions to the area.
On our left, the first of many rock-carved structures emerged. It was the Obelisks, a massive tomb-like building with four pillars at its top. Ryan took over as our de facto tour guide, telling us the history of the Nabatean people who used to live in Petra.
After a solid twenty minute hike along the rock-laden path, we arrived at the canyon entrance. Here was the historical entrance into the city. And here was the reason why no army could ever conquer Petra. The narrow canyon path created thousands of choke points. Holes and hiding places were carved out all along the path, creating perfect ambush spots. An entire army could be and would be chopped to pieces.
What I didn't know at the time was that this was the only way into the city. There was no back route. The mountains that we would climb later in the day made sure that Petra was a city in a valley enclosed by their insurmountable edifices. It was a city with its back against a wall. There was only one way in this ancient, hidden place. And only one way out.
Ryan was like a kid set loose on a playground. He was climbing left and right. And we hadn't even set foot in the valley or the city yet. Still making our way through the canyon, we found the trek to be twice as long as the initial path to the canyon entrance.
"Just pretend I'm not here," Ryan said as he slipped behind a large rock off the beaten path.
"That shouldn't be too hard!" I said as I jumped off the path to avoid a Jordanian tour guide and his two guests.
If Ryan were seen, we might be in for a little hassle. Tyler yelled for the all-clear and encouraged us to hurry up. We had to be back at the Petra gate by 3:00 p.m. to catch our cab back to the border. That gave us only about six hours to trek all across Petra--not enough time to see everything.
***
The Treasury is the most famous of Petra's buildings. It was the site of the holy grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And it literally just appears through the crack of the canyon at the most unexpected of moments. As sun light slipped down to the mortal coil below, the monumental edifice of the Treasury stunned all six of us into awe.
Cameras were whipped out in near perfect synchronization.
We walked out into the open alcove area where the Treasury was constructed. Here the canyon broadened into a large circular area that would have been perfect for a market or commerce center during the time of the Nabateans. And this is what they were known for to the outside world. Petra, at its height, was a prime trading stop for supply caravans.
"I'm stealing the carpenter's cup!" I said.
"You'll explode when you cross the seal," Dustin pronounced without hesitation.
"Killjoy."
"Oh snap!" I declared. "Camels!"
Three camels rested on their haunches in front of the Treasury. The docile creatures turned their heads from left-to-right, following each of us with a surprising deftness.
"You want to ride camel?" a Bedouin yelled.
"Nope," I responded. "Just want it to sit still for a moment."
We finished taking pictures around the Treasury after about twenty minutes. Bullet holes marked where its carved images had been defaced by Muslims who believed that such pictorial representations of humans were idolatrous. Tyler's disdain at such an act could not be masked. He reminded all of us of the Taliban destroying the massive Buddhist statues in Afghanistan-- statues that had been thousands of years old.
And we would see more evidence of this practice at the end of our journey through Petra.
***
Outside the Treasury the canyon gave way to a sprawling valley surrounded on all sides by beautiful mountains. But what was more awe-inspiring was the city, literally carved from rock, that sat on both sides of the pathway and rose all the way to the tops of the mountains.
Bedouins opened up their shops and attended to their daily rituals. A group of children seemed to be devising a strategy for selling their wares to the gaggle of incoming tourists. A four person Bedouin family cooked breakfast on an open fire in front of their rock hovel.
Donkeys brayed all about, their cries echoing throughout the entire valley. Bands of dogs chased each other and followed the Bedouin children.
It was surreal.
The dull brown coloring gave way to a brighter, more reddish color, to which the city had come to be known by its nickname: the "Rose-Red City."
We came across an ancient amphitheater built by the Romans following their conscription of the territory into the Empire. Ryan filled us all in on the history of it and how many people it could seat and for what purpose it had been constructed.
Reason gave way to curiosity soon thereafter. Following Ryan's lead, we decided to climb up the mountains overlooking the village and looking out toward the city center where we had yet to visit.
Darting through ancient stone hallways and rock hovels and climbing up exceedingly dangerous and slippery portions of the old village, we pushed our way forward. The amazing thing was that people still lived here. Occasionally, we would find Bedouin blankets and trash marking where they had been the previous night.
The thought of habitation here was stunning.
At one point, we clambered past a donkey which had been tied into its rock alcove-turned-barn. It brayed at us and then failed to give us a second thought as he it bent down toward its stack of hay. A Bedouin girl sitting out in front of her tent on the mountain side called for us to join her for some tea.
But we were on a mission. And Tyler reminded us that the water probably hadn't been boiled. Touche.
Ryan disappeared from everyone for a while and reappeared from about a hundred feet up looking down on us. The kid had turned into a wild man. Slipping through what could have been called the Eye of the Needle en route to catch up with Ryan, I noticed a cat sitting on the ledge below.
"There's a cat over there." I shouted across to Dustin and Tyler.
Following in my wake, Dustin and Tyler inspected it. The cat looked up at Dustin in terror and bounded down a ravine. It wasn't quit suicide, but it was close.
"Nah, that was a Jordanian mountain lion," Tyler shouted back.
Unfortunately for me, Ryan had left his backpack on the ground. I had to carry his pack and my own during the climb, feeling more and more like a sherpa with every passing second during the climb.
"Appreciate it man," Ryan said as he grabbed his backpack.
"Don't ever do that again."
We ventured a little further up and finally reached a plateau. The view kicked us all in the teeth. We looked down on the specks of people in the old Nabatean village and saw the ruins of the old Roman theater. Beyond was the stone-paved walkway leading past a row of colonnades ruins toward what was the "city center." And looking down over the city center was the ancient site of the Crusader fortress.
"Wow," was all any of us could manage to utter.
Mount Sinai had been an amazing experience. This was rapidly surpassing even that indelible trip. I glanced at my watch and noticed that it was already 10:00 a.m. We had to move if we wanted to reach the Monastery.
"Alright, let's rock and ride," I exclaimed.
"As soon as you clean the Petra sand out of your v.." Dustin deadpanned behind me.
"Sheket Carmack."
***
"You speak English really well," Tyler stated to the little Bedouin girl following us.
"I go to school," she said in a matter-of-fact tone. "They teach us English."
"What grade are you in?"
"Sixth."
The little girl had been waiting on one of the 800 stairs leading up to the Monastery. She even had a faux Coach purse. At first she had tried to sell us something, then called for us to wait, and then finally sighed heavily and shoved her wares in her purse to follow us up.
Tyler and I spoke with her a little more from the back of our group. Dustin was bulldogging it up the mountain. As was his custom, whenever he had a goal, he pursued it with tenacity and full devotion. There was no half-assing it at this juncture.
We passed a Bedouin tent and the little girl dropped off to stay with a couple more girls her age. Every time we passed the Bedouins at their strategically placed locations, they would call to us to look at their goods. The chorus of "Everything one dinar!" became as ingratiated into my psyche as that of the D.C. Metro's automated voice when I had worked on the Hill.
This hike was not only difficult, it was treacherous. At one point, Huoshin had to stop to drink water and catch his breath. We passed by a ravine easily five hundred feet deep, skirting along the side wall of the mountain in our final push to reach the Monastery.
As the wind whipped about us and the cold air began to take way, we soon emerged through a narrow mountain pass into a plateau. Off to our left was a Bedouin bazaar and restaurant. Off to our right was the towering structure of the Monastery, carved into the very mountain itself.
***
Standing as tall as the Treasury, the Monastery looked out over the Jordanian Mountains and the Arava Desert. It was the perfect mountain redoubt for solitude. And we learned just how impossible it would have been to attack Petra from the West.
Ryan bolted off toward the Monastery. Dustin, Tyler, and myself took a seat on some benches in front of the Bedouin-run restaurant.
"Ryan wait up!" Huoshin exclaimed.
Dropping his duffle bag beside us, he darted after Ryan.
"Huoshin's great. The kid just does the goofiest stuff." Tyler quipped.
At about that moment, Huoshin tried to climb the wall leading into the mouth of the Monastery. Ryan stood atop and watched. Huoshin slipped off and dropped to the ground. Patryk's laughter reverberated across the plateau.
"Hey guys, shut up!" Huoshin yelled back.
"He'll fall again now that he knows we're all watching." Tyler said.
"You know he used to be a wannabe Asian gangster, right?" I offered.
"Awesome!" Huoshin's voiced echoed across the valley after a successful second attempt.
"You're kidding me..."
Behind us, a small puppy rolled around in the sand. It was pretty awesome until Tyler ruined the moment by pointing out that the only thing it had to look forward to on this mountain redoubt was death.
After Ryan and Huoshin returned from the Monastery, we opted to head toward an encampment a little further ahead with a sign that read: "The End of the World."
Sounds promising.
***
The End of the World was not an exaggeration. From the very edge of the mountain, we looked out over the rest of the Jordanian mountains and the great Arava desert beyond.
A mattress sat nestled on the very edge of the cliff.
"Now this is what I call living on the edge," Huoshin observed with a cheesy grin.
We gathered together on the top rock and sat down to soak it all in. It was a moment where you literally felt like you could touch the face of God. On my way up, however, God felt inclined to interject a little more levity into the experience.
"Ah crap," I said as I looked down.
"Ahahahaha," Dustin bellowed as he whipped out his camera.
My jeans had ripped straight down my left thigh, right along the crotch seam. My blue and white checkered boxers were suddenly exposed to the elements. Fortunately, I had packed some extra shorts in my backpack in case the weather became too warm for jeans. Looks like my retentiveness had paid off for once.
We asked a couple of Korean tourists to take our picture from the "End of the World." They happily obliged as we all grouped together. Then Huoshin asked me to take an "epic shot" of him staring out into what seemed like infinity.
"You sure you want this angle?" I asked Huoshin.
"Yea," Huoshin said confidently.
"Even with that giant zit on the side of your face?"
"Thanks, Drew." Huoshin said with a sigh.
We hung around for a solid thirty minutes before beginning the arduous journey back down the mountain and to the Petra "city center." The trek back was a lot cooler than the trek up, if only because I was wearing shorts.
We passed more and more of our Bedouin friends.
"Everything one dinar!" a little Bedouin girl yelled.
"Hey, Tyler, you hear that? Everything's just one dinar!"
"Sounds like a deal, man," Tyler remarked tongue-in-cheek.
"Everything two dinar!" the little girl suddenly yelled.
"I thought it was one dinar!" I protested.
The girl, no more than nine years old, cracked a full smile.
"Clever little twit aren't you."
When we reached the bottom, we came to a crossroads on what to do. We were running short on time. Ryan wanted to try to find the Springs and the burial grounds. So we followed him down a path--a path to nowhere.
En route, Huoshin, Patryk, and Ryan quarreled amicably over the route to the Springs. Dustin turned toward me and made an astute observation. Husohin was holding the map up and pointing at various way points.
"Can't you see Huoshin in 30 years as that dad with the fanny pack, the map, the..." Dustin said as he started to laugh.
"The floppy hat and the camera hanging around his neck." I finished.
"Dude, I'm pretty sure we go this way!" Huoshin said adamantly to Patryk.
"Absolutely," I answered Dustin.
It turned out that no one had any idea where we were going. And in fact we were wandering on government land run by Bedouins. We found lemon tree orchards and orange tree groves that were sectioned off. They were settled in a massive gorge where every step literally rolled my ankles like a ship being tossed at sea.
It was a small miracle that they didn't roll completely or break. After twenty minutes of hiking, it became apparent that we were going nowhere. And the silence of the gorge was more than a bit unsettling.
Every muscle in my body was aching. My feet throbbed from the pain. And I took particular offense to a flock of goats looking down on us condescendingly from a ledge.
"Perfect place for an ambush," I said through gritted teeth.
"No kidding," Tyler said with some disgust.
"We can't run away either."
"Guess we'll have to stand and fight."
"With what exactly?"
An elderly Bedouin man emerged from between a pair of olive trees. He was riding on the back of a donkey. Huoshin approached him and asked if we were close to the Springs.
Negative.
We tracked back the way we had come and eventually made it to the city center. It was almost 1:00. We had to be back at the front gate by 3:00 p.m. This meant we needed to allocate about an hour to get back.
Sitting down for a water break, we all decided that time was wasting. We climbed up the ridge toward the Petra Cave Museum when we saw a sign that read "Crusader Fortress."
Jackpot.
Winding our way around a massive mountainous spire that could have been used for a scene in Lord of the Rings, we saw even more rock hovels carved into the mountains across the gorge below us. In fact, looking down, we soon realized that the gorge was where we had just come from.
Seeing a couple of people crossing a wooden bridge at the top of the spire, we felt renewed vigor to push ahead on this final hike to the top of the Crusader Fortress.
Small green plants sprouted forth from the hill side and throughout a hidden valley stretching further south. Dustin started whistling a rendition of the Green Acres theme song. I focused on the climb up.
Halfway up the brutally steep climb, my knees began to feel jolts of pain coursing through them. Dustin's knees had been giving him hell all day. No one complained. Everyone kept going.
"I sense Patryk behind me," I said as we neared the halfway mark.
"Yes," he stated. "I'm waiting for the perfect opportunity to push you off."
"My advice is to wait until we reach a ledge."
"I will. And when I shove you, you won't do anything," Patryk said in his crisp Eastern European twang.
"Nonsense," I countered. "I'll be dying."
Finally, at the zenith of our climb, we reached a mound of stone rubble. Blocks that had been crushed into oblivion by Muslims seeking to annihilate any evidence of the Crusader's claim to the region.
A girl and her father were waiting for us. They were Australians who were doing some geocaching. The girl was about sixteen or seventeen years old and very pretty.
They welcomed us as we moved toward the top of the Crusader ruins. At the top, someone had created a peace symbol with rocks. Ryan turned to see me scattering the rocks with unremitting fury.
"Why are you destroying the peace sign?" Ryan asked in concern.
"I just climbed all the way up here," I said with heavy breath. "I reserve the right to do whatever the hell I want."
After a few moments of creative rearrangement, I stood back and admired my work.
"There," I said in satisfaction. "Now it's a V for Victory sign."
Looking up, we saw the entire valley of Petra. It wasn't the same monumental view from the "End of the World," but it was nevertheless an all-encompassing view of the valley from its centralized point.
Nabatean civilization had just been conquered. I looked down at the stone rubble of the Crusader fortress and recalled part of the verse that I had memorized the day before.
For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.
Amen to that.
Crossing Jordan. From (L) to (R): Dustin, Me, Patryk, Huoshin, and Tyler.
Cash Money Dinars!
Dustin marking his territory in the rubble of the Sun Set Hotel.
The Treasury.
Ryan and I hanging out with the camels.
Me and Joe.
Overlooking the valley of Petra.
The Theater. Courtesy of the Roman Empire.
It was cold at the time.
Anyone home?
Standing the test of time.
Trek to the Monastery.
The Monastery.
The End of the World.
Standing on the edge.
Dustin, Patryk, and Ryan living on the edge.
Tyler and I staring off into the distance. Kind of gay but what can you do?
Group Shot: From (L) to (R) is Huoshin, Dustin, Me, Patryk, Ryan, and Tyler.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Exodus
The apartment was a hollow echo of what it had once been. It wasn't just empty. It was barren. Stefan K sat alone at his desk clicking away on his laptop--the only item still left in the entire room.
Dustin, Stefan, and I stepped inside and succeeded at snapping Stefan K out of his reverie.
"Hey guys," he said as he stood up from his desk. His expression was an impossible-to-mimic mixture of elation and disappointment.
"This is it."
He smiled as he shook each of our hands and slapped us on the back. The time had come for Stefan's departure back to Germany.
***
We sat on the balcony outside Stefan K's room. It was close to 7:30 p.m. He had to catch the train to Ben-Gurion International Airport at 11:50 p.m. for his 5:00 a.m. Lufthansa flight back to Berlin.
Ryan and Dominique joined us along with Stefan K's roommate, Mike. The Dominator had brought a bag full or Royal Dutch beer for the occasion; a brew that neither Ryan nor Stefan cared to indulge themselves with. The German contingent at TAU had probably blitzkrieged through thirty or more cases of the stuff since their arrival.
This of course was more than acceptable in our minds. As Germans, their beer-drinking abilities were considerable, impressive, and far more responsible than their American counterparts.
One of the better attributes of European culture (if there is such an homogenous thing) is that they drink as part of a social etiquette as opposed to an American's mere desire to drink to get as trashed as possible. Sure, it may not be nearly as entertaining and make for far fewer stories, but it does at least cut down on the funeral services.
Being on both the kicking and receiving end of that particular fact, I can appreciate the disparity.
Royal Dutch struck me as the equivalent of Natty Light back home. I could tell immediately that it was about the quantity as opposed to the quality. This was my first Royal Dutch. Shortly after tasting it, I swore that it would also be my last.
Stefan K raised his can: "L'chaim."
"L'chaim!"
***
"Did you work on the Hill?" Mike asked Dustin bluntly.
"I worked for a think tank," Dustin replied affably.
"Which one?" Mike followed up.
"The Heritage Foundation," Dustin responded.
"Alright, some fellow conservatives!" Mike said enthusiastically. "Wait, are you also conservative?"
"Yea," Stefan said in his French-Irish accent. He leaned back against the balcony's side wall, his chair on the cusp of collapsing if he proceeded any further. "Well, according to Drew, I think I am," he added with a hearty laugh.
"You're looking at the first French member of the NRA," I stated unequivocally.
Mike, clearly pleased to finally meet the rumored "conservative underground" took Dustin up in a conversational maelstrom. Come to find out, his mother was the civilian head of Bethesda Naval Hospital and dealt with our wounded warriors on a daily basis.
The topic soon centered around D.C. Ryan told an amusing story about a canoeing incident on the Potomac when he had worked in D.C. Dustin shared a few stories of his own from his time at Heritage. For a little while, I simply zoned out as a cavalcade of memories from Washington D.C. flooded my mind, jolting memories long pigeonholed in the deep recesses of my mind.
"Sometimes I still look around and can't believe that I'm in Tel Aviv," Dustin said, interrupting my thoughts.
"Yea, it went by so fast, too," Stefan K added. His German accent seemed wistful.
"In a way it has, but I'm gonna be honest, there are times when I think that everything before I came to Israel was just a dream," I said sincerely.
"It is wery much like a dream for me as well," Stefan K added, dropping the hard 'v' sound and opting instead for the more familiar 'w' sound of his native tongue.
"I mean, I've felt like I've been here forever, dude," I uttered with a head nod. Dustin nodded slowly to that as well.
There was a pause. It was starting to get cold outside.
"It has been the best experience of my life. Germany is familiar, quiet, and more comfortable. Israel is none of these things, but it is so interesting," Stefan iterated.
"Must be really interesting for an Alabama and Missouri boy, too," Mike added with a grin.
"Yea!" Dustin and I said simultaneously.
***
It was 10:00 p.m. Two and half hours had passed by in what seemed like a minute. We had relieved the Dahab debacle for the benefit of Mike, who hadn't heard all the details of that epic trip. Both Stefans and myself also rehashed the Bethlehem trip on Christmas Eve.
As the clock moved closer to 10:00, there was just five of us left. Ryan and Stefan had left early to go cook dinner.
"That Dahab trip I'll be rehashing for the next 30 years," I said as a shook my head.
"It was as you say, 'epic,'" Stefan said with a laugh.
Laughter was followed by a silence once again. Dustin looked a sleepy as I felt. Stefan looked like he didn't want to leave.
I extended my hand toward Stefan.
"It was a pleasure, sir."
"It was a pleasure."
We shook hands one last time.
"When you come to Germany, you know you have a place to stay."
"And when you come to 'Bama, we'll go mud-riding and shoot stuff."
"Sounds like a plan."
From (L) to (R): Benjamin, Stefan K, Me, Dominator, Dustin, Tyler, Ryan, Liz, Stefan, and Elana (Bethlehem)
From (L) to (R): Dustin, Elana, Me, and Stefan K (Taba, Egypt)
From (L) to (R): Stefan K, Elana, Stefan, Dustin, and Me (Dahab, Egypt)
Dustin, Stefan, and I stepped inside and succeeded at snapping Stefan K out of his reverie.
"Hey guys," he said as he stood up from his desk. His expression was an impossible-to-mimic mixture of elation and disappointment.
"This is it."
He smiled as he shook each of our hands and slapped us on the back. The time had come for Stefan's departure back to Germany.
***
We sat on the balcony outside Stefan K's room. It was close to 7:30 p.m. He had to catch the train to Ben-Gurion International Airport at 11:50 p.m. for his 5:00 a.m. Lufthansa flight back to Berlin.
Ryan and Dominique joined us along with Stefan K's roommate, Mike. The Dominator had brought a bag full or Royal Dutch beer for the occasion; a brew that neither Ryan nor Stefan cared to indulge themselves with. The German contingent at TAU had probably blitzkrieged through thirty or more cases of the stuff since their arrival.
This of course was more than acceptable in our minds. As Germans, their beer-drinking abilities were considerable, impressive, and far more responsible than their American counterparts.
One of the better attributes of European culture (if there is such an homogenous thing) is that they drink as part of a social etiquette as opposed to an American's mere desire to drink to get as trashed as possible. Sure, it may not be nearly as entertaining and make for far fewer stories, but it does at least cut down on the funeral services.
Being on both the kicking and receiving end of that particular fact, I can appreciate the disparity.
Royal Dutch struck me as the equivalent of Natty Light back home. I could tell immediately that it was about the quantity as opposed to the quality. This was my first Royal Dutch. Shortly after tasting it, I swore that it would also be my last.
Stefan K raised his can: "L'chaim."
"L'chaim!"
***
"Did you work on the Hill?" Mike asked Dustin bluntly.
"I worked for a think tank," Dustin replied affably.
"Which one?" Mike followed up.
"The Heritage Foundation," Dustin responded.
"Alright, some fellow conservatives!" Mike said enthusiastically. "Wait, are you also conservative?"
"Yea," Stefan said in his French-Irish accent. He leaned back against the balcony's side wall, his chair on the cusp of collapsing if he proceeded any further. "Well, according to Drew, I think I am," he added with a hearty laugh.
"You're looking at the first French member of the NRA," I stated unequivocally.
Mike, clearly pleased to finally meet the rumored "conservative underground" took Dustin up in a conversational maelstrom. Come to find out, his mother was the civilian head of Bethesda Naval Hospital and dealt with our wounded warriors on a daily basis.
The topic soon centered around D.C. Ryan told an amusing story about a canoeing incident on the Potomac when he had worked in D.C. Dustin shared a few stories of his own from his time at Heritage. For a little while, I simply zoned out as a cavalcade of memories from Washington D.C. flooded my mind, jolting memories long pigeonholed in the deep recesses of my mind.
"Sometimes I still look around and can't believe that I'm in Tel Aviv," Dustin said, interrupting my thoughts.
"Yea, it went by so fast, too," Stefan K added. His German accent seemed wistful.
"In a way it has, but I'm gonna be honest, there are times when I think that everything before I came to Israel was just a dream," I said sincerely.
"It is wery much like a dream for me as well," Stefan K added, dropping the hard 'v' sound and opting instead for the more familiar 'w' sound of his native tongue.
"I mean, I've felt like I've been here forever, dude," I uttered with a head nod. Dustin nodded slowly to that as well.
There was a pause. It was starting to get cold outside.
"It has been the best experience of my life. Germany is familiar, quiet, and more comfortable. Israel is none of these things, but it is so interesting," Stefan iterated.
"Must be really interesting for an Alabama and Missouri boy, too," Mike added with a grin.
"Yea!" Dustin and I said simultaneously.
***
It was 10:00 p.m. Two and half hours had passed by in what seemed like a minute. We had relieved the Dahab debacle for the benefit of Mike, who hadn't heard all the details of that epic trip. Both Stefans and myself also rehashed the Bethlehem trip on Christmas Eve.
As the clock moved closer to 10:00, there was just five of us left. Ryan and Stefan had left early to go cook dinner.
"That Dahab trip I'll be rehashing for the next 30 years," I said as a shook my head.
"It was as you say, 'epic,'" Stefan said with a laugh.
Laughter was followed by a silence once again. Dustin looked a sleepy as I felt. Stefan looked like he didn't want to leave.
I extended my hand toward Stefan.
"It was a pleasure, sir."
"It was a pleasure."
We shook hands one last time.
"When you come to Germany, you know you have a place to stay."
"And when you come to 'Bama, we'll go mud-riding and shoot stuff."
"Sounds like a plan."
From (L) to (R): Benjamin, Stefan K, Me, Dominator, Dustin, Tyler, Ryan, Liz, Stefan, and Elana (Bethlehem)
From (L) to (R): Dustin, Elana, Me, and Stefan K (Taba, Egypt)
From (L) to (R): Stefan K, Elana, Stefan, Dustin, and Me (Dahab, Egypt)
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Sword and Shield
In a few hours, I'll be taking my Arabic final. But I thought I'd take a few moments to inform everyone about this interesting development. As reported at the Jerusalem Post:
This is a potential game changer for the region and for the West. The U.S. has been struggling with its missile defense shield for years. The Israelis may have finally gotten the hang of it.
Why is this important?
Because being able to stop incoming missile barrages from Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah would be awfully helpful in the decision-making process on whether to finally "unsheathe the sword" and deal with the Iranian regime's nuclear program.
If the shield is ready, is the sword soon to follow?
More to come.
Israel inched a step closer on Wednesday to deploying the Iron Dome missile defense system along the border with the Gaza Strip after it successfully intercepted a number of missile barrages in tests held in southern Israel this week.
This is a potential game changer for the region and for the West. The U.S. has been struggling with its missile defense shield for years. The Israelis may have finally gotten the hang of it.
Why is this important?
Because being able to stop incoming missile barrages from Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah would be awfully helpful in the decision-making process on whether to finally "unsheathe the sword" and deal with the Iranian regime's nuclear program.
If the shield is ready, is the sword soon to follow?
More to come.
Monday, January 4, 2010
A Conversation With Bernard Lewis
Yesterday, Tel Aviv University hosted renowned historian and scholar Bernard Lewis for a discussion on his life and his insight on issues in the Middle East.
If Bernard Lewis sounds familiar that's because he is essentially the most prolific historian of the 20th Century on the Middle East. Born in 1916 in England, Lewis wrote his first book on the Middle East in 1940 when he was only twenty-four years old (i.e. my age). This year he turns ninety-four.
Initially, this information caused some bruising to my ego until I found out that he speaks thirteen languages and realized the entire auditorium put together could not compare to him. The man is a genius and a legend.
Some of the highlights about Bernard Lewis' life mentioned last night that are either poorly covered or not found on his Wikipedia page are, to paraphrase him, "utterly astonishing."
*Lewis' first book on the Ismailis, a revolutionary sect within Islam, was written in large part due to Lewis' own affinity with Marxism when he was young. He would later abandon Marxist thought following World War II.
*His first book was rushed to publication in 1940 due to the possibility that there would be no guarantee of it being published following the war. Or to put it more bluntly, there was no guarantee that there would be an England at all.
*Lewis became fascinated with the Middle East when his parents hired a private Hebrew tutor (Lewis is Jewish) in preparation for his bar mitzvah. Instead of just wanting to learn enough Hebrew to get him through the religious rite of passage, he instead wanted to learn it as a spoken language, which shocked everyone. At that time, Hebrew was only a language utilized for prayer and religious ceremonies.
It would be resurrected as a spoken language after nearly two thousand years in obscurity in 1948 with the creation of Israel. מצוין
*In 1950, after being brought on as Chair of Near-Eastern Studies at the University of London, he returned to the Middle East. Because he was Jewish, he was only allowed into two nations: Israel and Turkey. Thus, he spent most of his time in Turkey doing his work on Ottoman and Turkish history.
*Lewis was personal friends with the late King Hussein of Jordan whom he described last night as a very "decent man." He was also acquaintances with the late Shah of Iran. In fact, the Shah of Iran came to Lewis in utter dismay in the late 1970's and asked him why the Americans were abandoning him.
Chilling.
*The public spat between Lewis and Edward Said (a Palestinian-American English professor at Columbia University), who wrote the famous/infamous book Orientalism, came to define Bernard Lewis. Said's book purported the notion that the travails of the Middle East were largely due to Western interference. He also espoused the claim that the West only studied the Middle East in order to conquer it (sound familiar?).
Last night, Lewis, in an impressive display of energy for a ninety-three year old, asked aloud "Where does ignorance come to an end and deception begin?"
Lewis pointed out last night that the first Middle Eastern and Arabic studies programs in Europe were created in the 17th Century, long before designs of imperialism were conceived and at a time when Europe was under siege from the Muslim Ottoman Empire (Vienna having come under siege twice).
He then made an interesting counterargument against Said and his anti-Orientalist faction. He said that Western interest in the Middle East could indeed be historically due to imperialism: Islamic imperialism.
*Lewis became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1982 and taught at Princeton University where he still retains the title of Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies.
*During the 1991 Gulf War, Lewis spoke to the Prime Minister of Turkey and asked him if Turkey would help the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam if things "took a turn for the worse." The Turkish Prime Minister assured Lewis that they would, just as they had declared war on Hitler in February 1945. The Turkish declaration of war against Germany came just three months before the war ended when it was obvious that the U.S. and Britain were going to win.
The Turkish Prime Minister then famously told Lewis: "We will help you because we like to be at the victor's table as guests as opposed to menu items."
*Lewis believes his two best works were What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Both of these books were written in response to the 9/11 attacks in Manhattan, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania.
Lewis thinks we are in a dangerous and entirely unpredictable era of conflict.
*When asked what he thought about President Obama's new approach to the Middle East, Obama's address to the Muslim world in Cairo, and his desire to find mutual understanding with the Muslim world, Lewis replied with the following statement:
"Support is not gained in this part of the world by showing weakness." Period.
The largely Israeli audience responded with a mixture of enthusiastic applause and murmuring.
If Bernard Lewis sounds familiar that's because he is essentially the most prolific historian of the 20th Century on the Middle East. Born in 1916 in England, Lewis wrote his first book on the Middle East in 1940 when he was only twenty-four years old (i.e. my age). This year he turns ninety-four.
Initially, this information caused some bruising to my ego until I found out that he speaks thirteen languages and realized the entire auditorium put together could not compare to him. The man is a genius and a legend.
Some of the highlights about Bernard Lewis' life mentioned last night that are either poorly covered or not found on his Wikipedia page are, to paraphrase him, "utterly astonishing."
*Lewis' first book on the Ismailis, a revolutionary sect within Islam, was written in large part due to Lewis' own affinity with Marxism when he was young. He would later abandon Marxist thought following World War II.
*His first book was rushed to publication in 1940 due to the possibility that there would be no guarantee of it being published following the war. Or to put it more bluntly, there was no guarantee that there would be an England at all.
*Lewis became fascinated with the Middle East when his parents hired a private Hebrew tutor (Lewis is Jewish) in preparation for his bar mitzvah. Instead of just wanting to learn enough Hebrew to get him through the religious rite of passage, he instead wanted to learn it as a spoken language, which shocked everyone. At that time, Hebrew was only a language utilized for prayer and religious ceremonies.
It would be resurrected as a spoken language after nearly two thousand years in obscurity in 1948 with the creation of Israel. מצוין
*In 1950, after being brought on as Chair of Near-Eastern Studies at the University of London, he returned to the Middle East. Because he was Jewish, he was only allowed into two nations: Israel and Turkey. Thus, he spent most of his time in Turkey doing his work on Ottoman and Turkish history.
*Lewis was personal friends with the late King Hussein of Jordan whom he described last night as a very "decent man." He was also acquaintances with the late Shah of Iran. In fact, the Shah of Iran came to Lewis in utter dismay in the late 1970's and asked him why the Americans were abandoning him.
Chilling.
*The public spat between Lewis and Edward Said (a Palestinian-American English professor at Columbia University), who wrote the famous/infamous book Orientalism, came to define Bernard Lewis. Said's book purported the notion that the travails of the Middle East were largely due to Western interference. He also espoused the claim that the West only studied the Middle East in order to conquer it (sound familiar?).
Last night, Lewis, in an impressive display of energy for a ninety-three year old, asked aloud "Where does ignorance come to an end and deception begin?"
Lewis pointed out last night that the first Middle Eastern and Arabic studies programs in Europe were created in the 17th Century, long before designs of imperialism were conceived and at a time when Europe was under siege from the Muslim Ottoman Empire (Vienna having come under siege twice).
He then made an interesting counterargument against Said and his anti-Orientalist faction. He said that Western interest in the Middle East could indeed be historically due to imperialism: Islamic imperialism.
*Lewis became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1982 and taught at Princeton University where he still retains the title of Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies.
*During the 1991 Gulf War, Lewis spoke to the Prime Minister of Turkey and asked him if Turkey would help the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam if things "took a turn for the worse." The Turkish Prime Minister assured Lewis that they would, just as they had declared war on Hitler in February 1945. The Turkish declaration of war against Germany came just three months before the war ended when it was obvious that the U.S. and Britain were going to win.
The Turkish Prime Minister then famously told Lewis: "We will help you because we like to be at the victor's table as guests as opposed to menu items."
*Lewis believes his two best works were What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Both of these books were written in response to the 9/11 attacks in Manhattan, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania.
Lewis thinks we are in a dangerous and entirely unpredictable era of conflict.
*When asked what he thought about President Obama's new approach to the Middle East, Obama's address to the Muslim world in Cairo, and his desire to find mutual understanding with the Muslim world, Lewis replied with the following statement:
"Support is not gained in this part of the world by showing weakness." Period.
The largely Israeli audience responded with a mixture of enthusiastic applause and murmuring.
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