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The internet seems to be doing weird things to me where the ways I usually do things no longer work. Like trying to get to where I can log into this blog. This is probably my third time in a week trying and I just got in. Anyway, my tech savvy aside:

I spent today at the British Embassy with a friend of mine, who happens to also live with Renee. It was a May Day celebration and since the embassy is huge and has a "football pitch" and a swimming pool there were lots and lots of ex-pat and international kids running around. It was a lot like my elementary school Carnival actually which usually happens this time of year. I was invited along to get in touch with my cultural roots, which apparently is by drinking large quantities of beer that are bought in rounds. Hey, I can deal. It was really nice though. I talked to a lot of people that I usually wouldn't and played with lots of small kids which isn't something that happens often, summer camp seems to have killed my paternal instinct.

Last night was also a drinking night. I somehow decided that it would be a good idea to go see Spiderman 3. If you haven't seen it, don't. If you have, I'm not sure I need to tell you this but it's a good idea to wash your eyes with some sort of sterilizing solution. I'm not sure which was my favorite part. The fact that the whole thing was sickly sweet. That the kids in back of us wouldn't shut up and kneed our seats (actually this was a distraction from how bad the movie was so it was ok) That it held enough camp and bad tear-jerking scenes to fill several series of super-kids movies. That it featured Toby McGuire with bad hair pelvic thrusting. That bad advice is really passed off as good. That there was a 'superteam' or that in the definitive moment, Spiderman runs past a large waving American flag. Also, there was a death and a sunrise in the wrong direction for anyone familiar with NYC geography.
Anyway after this incident I felt the need to drink and play ping-pong. Both wishes came true at Kempinskis which is a hotel with a bar and a bowling alley and more other bar sports than you can shake a stick at.
Eventually we were the only people left and had a good long talk about religion, politics, no-fly lists. COINTELPRO. Oh man, it was great.

I don't want to leave my faithful readers with the impression that all my nights are spent in debauchery and bad movies. I actually got up at 6:30 Thursday to track down what turned out to be a fruitful interview which leads me to the actual cultural segment of this post:

More Taxi Stories:
The driver who took me from my house to the interview place in East Amman, which by the way i didn't know the directions to, I called the engineer and she told the driver, was a really friendly guy who discussed with me, in Arabic, the effect of a beard on the apparent age of a subject, the necessity of patience when it comes to children, and the difficulty of finding change for a 50 (about $75) in an area where nothing costs above 1. However, we found some change to pay him and he traded numbers with me. The interview was less fruitful as more was resting on it and the language barrier faced more serious challenges when it came to urban infrastructure. However I did figure out the process of building a road though I never did find out why Amman has so many departments all over the city.

The driver who drove us from Spiderman to the bar was silent most of the way because we were yapping in the back, towards the end he wanted to know where the hotel was and was very good in his English so I said something that has often been said to me by drivers 'b'theki arabi koyes' 'you speak arabic well' only of course I used engleezi. He said "yea I'm from Chicago I've only been in this country 5 months." Fortunately I was saved from a very awkward situation by the fact that I was born in Chicago and can therefore pretend that I'm from there as well. Turns out he lived on the west side of Chicago. Who'da thunk?

Anyway. Back to work. 8 pages into 30 with a week and a half to go. Not bad but I need to finish the first draft soon so I can send it around to be revised.

I'm too tired to blog, but I'll try

From now until Saturday I have nothing to do.
Saturday I will meet my advisor for the second time (Inshallah) and he'll take me around to meet with all these people that I should know of for my ISP. While this has the promise to be really cool, it also is a terrible plan of research. I've sent him an email asking for other contacts and looked briefly at the civil engineers listed on google. But really I have no other leads other than Ali.
Arabic finished today. Rachel and I taught the class how to play Settlers of Catan in Arabic. It was a success because it's hard to explain it in English and the professors got it pretty well. Rachel and I both have the bad habit of saying a word, then correcting it saying it again, then correcting it again, then moving on to the next word and repeating. But like I said, the point got across.

Last week we spent doing the whirlwind tour of all the tourist sights that we had missed so far. I took something in the neighborhood of 200 pictures. Rachel took 500. It was great.
The first day we went to Nebo, Madaba, Kerak, Shobak, and finished up in Dana. Nebo, for those biblically inclined is where Moses saw the Promised Land. Madaba is the Christian town next to it. There were some cool churches there I guess. Kerak and Shobak are both Crusader castles that were built to guard the east of Palestine (I may be ignorant of medieval war strategies, but wouldn't it make sense to just bypass the castles if you had superior numbers?) Both of them are built on hilltops and are in pretty good state for being close to 1000 years old. They were both converted to Muslim fortresses after the Crusaders were pushed out and so you can kind of see where the new stone is in relation to the older stone, but really you need a guide, which we had. The guide in Kerak was drunk and was annoyed at us until he realized that basically we just wanted to run around and get our ya-yas out like little kids. The one at Shobak was better, his brother was apparently born in one of the rooms while the Bedo still lived in the castle back in the 40's. there was a tunnel in Shobak going down 365 steps into the mountain to get water, there was another one that was an escape hatch. It was awesome.
We spent that night in Dana, after a brief stop in the "Dangerous Valley" that was basically like a very beige canyon that had a dam and lake at one end. It was windy. Dana was mostly obscured that first day from the Khamseeneen winds which are basically like hurricane winds only with dust instead of water. It basically made everythng look a very unflattering shade of greyish brown and reduced visability to maybe a mile if not less. I soon discovered that black and white is the best photo option in that muck.
The morning after though was pretty incredible. I defied the laws of probability and went for a morning hike. Dana is a nature preserve that encompasses a freak valley that opened up south of Nebo. We were standing at one end and we could see down the entire length of the valley with the visible trail going off and on for the entire length. The village of Dana is one of the many small villages that were abandoned in the 60s during the resettlement of the rural areas and the new village is about a kilometer down the road where the roads and infrastructure is. Some of the houses were restored by a womens' group in Amman but most of them are used for sheep corralls now. The old village is on an outcropping of rock that has a spectacular view of the valley as well as being pretty picturesque itself. It also had a cloud forest effect going where the top of the valley as well as the village was shrouded in cloud but the valley was very clear and wet and green and it was what I needed to see on Easter. I took lots of pictures of flowers.
After that we went to Petra. It was great to be turned loose to explore. Little Petra, which is older, was actually more fun because we were running up the staircases carved into the sandstone, arguing over whos niche was cooler and heckling the people at the bottom.
Petra was Petra, the rocks were the prettiest part. That and that they'd carved water catchment and canals into the rock face all over the place. The landmarks of Petra, the treasury and the monastary in particular were actually both tombs for Nabatean kings originally. There's not really any rooms behind them, or rather the rooms behind them are pretty small. The ascetic is more in "how in the world did they do that" rather than "let's make this the most functional building ever". Same with the pyramids though I think that the Nabateans picked a better spot than Giza. There were many many many smaller homesteads though. I think there are 33,000 individual caves around Petra though I might be making that number up.
It was neat though this was by far the most touristy thing we've done in Jordan. People seemed surprised when we spoke Arabic.

I've done nothing today but read about the Lebanese Wars and translate horrible pick-up lines into really horrible Arabic. (Bafaker 3yni takseer. Ma baqdar akhadtha hum min inti). I consider it a day well spent even if I should be studying Fushah like a mother. Tonight I'm going to Palm Sunday Mass in English.

Lately we've been contemplating our impending doom related to ISPs. Essentially, in two weeks, classes will end. We will turn in our preliminary papers on Egypt, as well as complete exams in Arabic and write about our lecturers. We will then be turned loose into Greater Jordan, where we will spend 3 sleepless weeks trying to research, interview, and apply college grammar our way into a 30 page paper, as well as cramming in any cultural experiences we somehow have missed. It's not that we're in denial. I think we've moved on to the anger stage.
For example. We were dropped off at Jordan University Sunday (remember that it's the Jordanian Monday) with the goal of speaking to potential advisors and contacts, as well as looking into resources at their library. The latter experience is summed up in this sonnet:

Oh Library, bound in fair Jordan's yard
University academic calls
your catalogue, quirky but not so hard
into laps you make the resources fall

Your numbering systems simple and precise
follow parallel structures found just
in russian pulp novels, one would suffice
You keep a cloth covering Dewey's bust

Your books once found, the ones without prefixes
are most exciting and unusual
steam locamotives need appendices
they're post revolution (industrial)!

JU: your library has made me weep
of course jordan scholarship only creeps

I'm OK for now, regarding my ISP. I have some contacts and one of them has helped our students in the past. What's more is that I'm on familiar ground, that of car culture and urban transportation, and Amman is rife with material and ripe to be written about in a systematic way. But I can't get into it, it's just scary. Everyone is.

Taxi Drivers

Taxi drivers late at night can be a mixed bag. The other night coming back from the airport, the driver was sitting high in his chair, his face pockmarked, hair badly shaven, eyes severe, and lit up with the strange blue neon lights that taxi drivers seem to prefer. Religious drivers will often play tapes of sermons or of passages in the Koran so they can recite them. These tapes are often of a very emotionally charged man reading things occasionally breaking into song while an echo effect is added. This taxi driver was listening to one where "jihad 3ala yehuden" (struggle against the jews) came up occasionally. Last night though, we boarded a taxi which already had someone in it, for company I guess. He was from Hebron and so we talked pleasantly about that. He then started branching out into other matters. Apparently the hashish in Amman is terrible but the prostitutes are really wonderful. He gave me his card, apparently he works for the city of Amman.
I'll probably be at HQ for another couple of hours and I wonder what I'm going to get tonight.

Egypt

I came into Egypt not really knowing what to expect other that a lot of tourists. Though I haven't been disappointed in that regard (or maybe I have) Egypt has turned out to be much more than I could've guessed. Start with the fact that it's *huge.* In Amman the highest buildings are 10, maybe 12 stories but most of the buildings are 5 at most. Egypts apartment blocks are all 15 -20 stories. The hotels are usually higher. The buildings are mostly European style, not the simple blocky Amman type, and covered in a thick coat of grime from the horrendous pollution. My punk rock sense was immediately assuaged after a month and a half in suburban Amman. They actually have a metro here which I will ride at the first opportunity because it's *awesome* their railroad too makes me feel very punk rock. The cabs are all ramschackle and don't run on the meter so you have to negotiate the price before hand. This can suck in that you end up by and large paying more but also can help because it's in their interest to get there as fast as possible. They drive very fast and are all black except for the many blue light accessories that they can buy. This has led me to sing "Black Cab" by Jens Lekman nearly constantly while I am in them. The roads are really well designed for their lack of proper planning and means of expansion. Basically they run two levels of traffic, a two lane road above and below plus parking and turning avenues between the columns. The constant sense of being under something also lends to the punk rock feel.
The other thing is that there's actually water here so there's lots and lots of green. And huge trees of all varieties. Honestly they don't have enough to filter out the pollution that is giving even me asthma.
We've met so far with the Grand Mufti (actually he only spent a few minutes with us because, as the most preeminent Muslim scholar in Egypt he has commitments) who was not very helpful but his assitant definitely was. The Grand Mufti and his assorted mufti assistants are in charge of issuing fatwas, which are literally 'non-binding religious advice' so essentially what amounts to chatting it up with a priest. About 250 people come in a day to talk to a Mufti, there's also a hotline and a webserver that issues fatwas. All told they probably issue about 1000 fatwas a day and they have a web based database for past fatwas, ordered by subject. Most of the fatwas relate to family advice, another big chunk to financia. So basically it's like a counseling session for many people, which is a very very good thing. However, as hard as I try I can't shake the image of the Grand Mufti and his little mufti elves making fatwas for all the good boys and girls.
We of course have done the museum/pyramids/holy buildings tour because that's what you do when you're in Egypt. Pyramids are big and apparently come from Uganda.
Do you remember that kid in elementary school who was really eager about everything and knew everything, usually a little pudgy, always had his hand up really high and acted with such naive purpose? Chances are, if I consider you a friend, you were this person, as was I, but he was also our tour guide for the Egyptian museum and the pyramids. It was great in that he could actually read heiroglyphics, knew extensively the history of everything, and set us up for hilarious commentary (for example he was discussing the bent pyramid and how the pharoah that built it had not given up because his first pyramid was bent, prompting about half the group to start quoting Monty Python: "So I built a second one, just to show 'em, that sank into the swamp, so I built a third one, that burned down fell over then sank into the swamp...") It sucked in that he moved very quickly and had a very loud and eager voice, and obviously mourned the loss of such a culture that could produce such wonderful things. I did appreciate a lot of what he had to say.
Our hotel rooms have balcony's. They've been employed for drinking as St. Patty's was last week. It was convenient that since green is the color of islam, all mosques have neon green lights at night. Therefore, they celebrate St. Patricks day.