Halva and Baklava
Although the distance between Jerusalem and Wadi Rum, Jordan is very small, there is a not-so-insignificant swath of land called the "West Bank" that makes traveling between the two complicated. As a result, back through southern Israel I went, entering Jordan at Aqaba.
On the bus-ride south-bound, I met another solo, round-the-world traveler named Stephen, from Australia. He was about my age, but had a somewhat different itinerary: his travel plans were geared toward the biggest parties on planet earth. He had been to the full moon party in Thailand, had gone to Oktoberfest and the World Cup, and next was heading to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro. Out of nowhere he asked whether I planned to go to Latvia. "No," I said, "what's in Latvia?" In Latvia Stephen had made the mistake of having a 6 AM night-cap drink at a bar that, upon entering, turned out to be a strip-club. After having his drink, the bouncer proceeded to "bounce" him on the way out the door, breaking two of his ribs, stealing his camera, and forcing him to sign $2500 onto his credit card. His credit card company will not reimburse this because police reports in Latvia are difficult to come by ("So you say you lost your camera, then?"). Snap. I pass this along as my unofficial travel-warning for Latvia.
My first stop in Jordan was Wadi Rum. The guidebook made it sound like a popular tourist destination and this turned out to be absolutely false (in the winter, anyway). There are two restaurants in town, both serving one meal exactly. There are two areas in town to sleep: one is a decrepit "guest-house," the other has only tents. During my three-day stay in Wadi Rum, I saw exactly five other tourists. Luckily, two of them were Korean guys about my age, one of whom spoke English enough to get along, so the three of us spent our time there together. The scenery is unlike anything else I have seen: large islands of sandstone separated by vast expanses of desert. It gave the impression of being a miniature in a movie-set that was much, much too big. "Let's go to that one," one of us would say, pointing to a rock outcropping. An hour later, we would finally arrive at "that one." It is amazingly beautiful, and I think even more so for people (like me) who are not used to this sort of scenery. Two of the nights I spent in town, sleeping in a tent, and the third was spent in a Bedouin tent out in the desert, organized by a local tourist agency and something that many tourists do. All these nights were so cold that I could sleep in one position only. The stars are very clear in the desert.
Continuing in my tradition of quoting non-native English speakers who, for brief moments in time, manage to beautifully penetrate the tangles of the English language, I will quote my Korean friend, Mugo. Mugo spoke English better than he thought he did, but had some difficulty understanding me; he was the liaison between me and his Korean friend, Soo-Hyun. Sitting atop a sand-stone mini-mountain that we had all climbed as the sun was beginning to set, he lit up a cigarette and looked around. "The world is very, very amazing," he sighed.
From Wadi Rum we caught the bus to Petra. On the bus-ride north I met an American named William from Atlanta, also going around the world but in the opposite direction that I am. He had been invited to stay and work in Wadi Rum for a month, but after flipping a coin to decide whether or not to stay, he hopped on the bus. I thought this was pretty funny; this decision -- a very simple decision -- completely changed the course of his trip. We got along pretty well, but this was an otherwise un-notable meeting between travelers, except for one thing: we had been talking for about an hour when he pulled out "Lolita," by Vladimir Nabakov, the book he was currently reading. I laughed and said that it was coincidental that he was reading that book, as it was the last book I had read. He asked what I was currently reading, and I pulled out "Trinity," by Leon Uris. This turned out to be the last book that he had finished. Statistically this is a tremendous coincidence -- really, I cannot emphasize this enough. These books are no longer "popular fiction;" it isn't as if we were reading "The Da Vinci Code" and "Life of Pi." The odds against this are staggering. Sadly, although our initial meeting had such cosmic implications, we parted ways unceremoniously 48 hours later.
Before this departure, however, we visited Petra, the "City of Stone." The "Rose City." Some call it the eighth wonder of the world, but I'm not sure that I would give it that status. It's beautiful and strange, but most of the time I felt that I was just looking at it, just looking. This is probably a personal failure -- I didn't do much research or anything. I would recommend seeing Petra to anyone who is in the region.
William and I did have an amazing experience at Petra, though. We finished our first day by climbing to "The High Place of Sacrifice," which is a place where sacrifices were once made that is also very high (periodically I like to assume my readers are horribly, horribly stupid). As the sun was about to set we met Feriah, a Bedouin trinkets and jewelery vendor, who offered to take walk us back toward town on a route that required a guide. William and I were sceptical, but she insisted that she was not doing it for money -- she wanted to show us the walk.
Away we went, and,as you would expect from a local guide, there were spectacular views that most people do not see. At one point Feriah made a phone call to her brother, and after hanging up invited us to dinner at her house. Uh oh. This is straight out of the guidebooks (in most of the world, anyway); in s.e. Asia there are plenty of warnings about scams that begin exactly this way. But Feriah seemed genuinely nice, and genuinely concerned that we had concerns about this arrangement. I decided it was a good idea, and convinced William of the same.
I will admit that my heart-rate went up as the taxi began to leave town on a windy, mountainous road, and that my heart-rate went up even more as we entered a slum. I have seen poorer in my life, but this was pretty poor. Lots of children running around, a few animals loose that should not have been, and a lot of trash. Feriah led us right into the heart of it, turning into her "house": it was one, apartment-sized room where the entire family lived, ate, and slept. We spoke with Feriah for a while, drank tea, met many of her family members. At one point one of the brothers brought a portable fire-pit inside the room, filled with burning logs and embers. Amazingly, though it was inside, it was entirely smoke-less. Perplexed, William and I asked him how it was possible that he had made a smoke-less fire. He explained to us that he had simply removed the "smoking ones." This really didn't answer the question at all -- if it were this easy all of my fires would be smoke-free -- but we left it at that; I like it better as a Bedouin mystery.
The dinner was absolutely delicious: fresh chicken that had first been cooked, then boiled in milk; rice with an unidentifiable sweet sauce mixed in; and heaps of Bedouin bread (something like thin corn tortillas). William and I stuffed ourselves, then ate more at the request of our guests. Nobody else ate. We could not tell exactly why this was the case (was it customary? Would they eat the left-overs? Had they already eaten?), but we never found out the answer. When I thanked them for everything -- and I thanked them profusely -- the women behaved very deferentially, as if my thanks were unnecessary, or even making them uncomfortable. Feriah offered her only justification for the ridiculous kindness that all of them had shown -- the same line she had used all evening: "You are in my country," she said, "I want to do this for you."
Are you listening to this?
Back to Jerusalem, where things are cozy. Having gone to Jordan and come back, it was a very, very nice feeling to be returning. I can't explain how nice it is after four months of traveling to return to a city that I already knew, and to an apartment (Adam's) that was waiting for me. I am not speaking figuratively when I say that I had a skip in my step. My first stop was the market, and -- you guessed it! -- I went straight for the halva. The halva! Big, heaping blocks of it, cut to size.
For the next two days I treated myself like a king. Conor the Indulgent! By the end of my second stay in Jerusalem I actually had a pretty good relationship with the owner of a felafel stand near the market ("Where did you go? I have not seen you!"). I took full advantage of the fact that I was temporarily living above a market, making entire meals out of figs, olives, cheese, hot nuts, pressed fruits, real fruits, and so on. I watched movies, read quite a lot, and frequented the only cafe I could find in the place. At one point I was drinking tea, the space heater was on, and I was laying in bed watching a movie -- it was then that I realized I had reached the highest possible level of comfortability possible for that moment. This type of behavior is a blasphemous thing to do in a city with so much history, but I had seen enough for one trip to Jerusalem. I regret absolutely nothing.
Now I am in Turkey, and have been for a week. Obviously, then, I am a little bit behind, but this city makes it difficult to want to spend any time at all on a computer. I am not ready at this point to begin wildly throwing superlatives about to describe Istanbul, but they will certainly be coming when I next update this. I have been fueling myself with Baklava and Turkish Delight, tea and Turkish coffee. I think it is about time to ask you, my friends, to please send me a bag of insulin. Please. I am inducing diabetes, here. Unfortunately there is no one here to tell me not to eat Baklava for breakfast, so I am learning these types of lessons the hard way. Pity me, my friends. Please pity me.
On the bus-ride south-bound, I met another solo, round-the-world traveler named Stephen, from Australia. He was about my age, but had a somewhat different itinerary: his travel plans were geared toward the biggest parties on planet earth. He had been to the full moon party in Thailand, had gone to Oktoberfest and the World Cup, and next was heading to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro. Out of nowhere he asked whether I planned to go to Latvia. "No," I said, "what's in Latvia?" In Latvia Stephen had made the mistake of having a 6 AM night-cap drink at a bar that, upon entering, turned out to be a strip-club. After having his drink, the bouncer proceeded to "bounce" him on the way out the door, breaking two of his ribs, stealing his camera, and forcing him to sign $2500 onto his credit card. His credit card company will not reimburse this because police reports in Latvia are difficult to come by ("So you say you lost your camera, then?"). Snap. I pass this along as my unofficial travel-warning for Latvia.
My first stop in Jordan was Wadi Rum. The guidebook made it sound like a popular tourist destination and this turned out to be absolutely false (in the winter, anyway). There are two restaurants in town, both serving one meal exactly. There are two areas in town to sleep: one is a decrepit "guest-house," the other has only tents. During my three-day stay in Wadi Rum, I saw exactly five other tourists. Luckily, two of them were Korean guys about my age, one of whom spoke English enough to get along, so the three of us spent our time there together. The scenery is unlike anything else I have seen: large islands of sandstone separated by vast expanses of desert. It gave the impression of being a miniature in a movie-set that was much, much too big. "Let's go to that one," one of us would say, pointing to a rock outcropping. An hour later, we would finally arrive at "that one." It is amazingly beautiful, and I think even more so for people (like me) who are not used to this sort of scenery. Two of the nights I spent in town, sleeping in a tent, and the third was spent in a Bedouin tent out in the desert, organized by a local tourist agency and something that many tourists do. All these nights were so cold that I could sleep in one position only. The stars are very clear in the desert.
Continuing in my tradition of quoting non-native English speakers who, for brief moments in time, manage to beautifully penetrate the tangles of the English language, I will quote my Korean friend, Mugo. Mugo spoke English better than he thought he did, but had some difficulty understanding me; he was the liaison between me and his Korean friend, Soo-Hyun. Sitting atop a sand-stone mini-mountain that we had all climbed as the sun was beginning to set, he lit up a cigarette and looked around. "The world is very, very amazing," he sighed.
From Wadi Rum we caught the bus to Petra. On the bus-ride north I met an American named William from Atlanta, also going around the world but in the opposite direction that I am. He had been invited to stay and work in Wadi Rum for a month, but after flipping a coin to decide whether or not to stay, he hopped on the bus. I thought this was pretty funny; this decision -- a very simple decision -- completely changed the course of his trip. We got along pretty well, but this was an otherwise un-notable meeting between travelers, except for one thing: we had been talking for about an hour when he pulled out "Lolita," by Vladimir Nabakov, the book he was currently reading. I laughed and said that it was coincidental that he was reading that book, as it was the last book I had read. He asked what I was currently reading, and I pulled out "Trinity," by Leon Uris. This turned out to be the last book that he had finished. Statistically this is a tremendous coincidence -- really, I cannot emphasize this enough. These books are no longer "popular fiction;" it isn't as if we were reading "The Da Vinci Code" and "Life of Pi." The odds against this are staggering. Sadly, although our initial meeting had such cosmic implications, we parted ways unceremoniously 48 hours later.
Before this departure, however, we visited Petra, the "City of Stone." The "Rose City." Some call it the eighth wonder of the world, but I'm not sure that I would give it that status. It's beautiful and strange, but most of the time I felt that I was just looking at it, just looking. This is probably a personal failure -- I didn't do much research or anything. I would recommend seeing Petra to anyone who is in the region.
William and I did have an amazing experience at Petra, though. We finished our first day by climbing to "The High Place of Sacrifice," which is a place where sacrifices were once made that is also very high (periodically I like to assume my readers are horribly, horribly stupid). As the sun was about to set we met Feriah, a Bedouin trinkets and jewelery vendor, who offered to take walk us back toward town on a route that required a guide. William and I were sceptical, but she insisted that she was not doing it for money -- she wanted to show us the walk.
Away we went, and,as you would expect from a local guide, there were spectacular views that most people do not see. At one point Feriah made a phone call to her brother, and after hanging up invited us to dinner at her house. Uh oh. This is straight out of the guidebooks (in most of the world, anyway); in s.e. Asia there are plenty of warnings about scams that begin exactly this way. But Feriah seemed genuinely nice, and genuinely concerned that we had concerns about this arrangement. I decided it was a good idea, and convinced William of the same.
I will admit that my heart-rate went up as the taxi began to leave town on a windy, mountainous road, and that my heart-rate went up even more as we entered a slum. I have seen poorer in my life, but this was pretty poor. Lots of children running around, a few animals loose that should not have been, and a lot of trash. Feriah led us right into the heart of it, turning into her "house": it was one, apartment-sized room where the entire family lived, ate, and slept. We spoke with Feriah for a while, drank tea, met many of her family members. At one point one of the brothers brought a portable fire-pit inside the room, filled with burning logs and embers. Amazingly, though it was inside, it was entirely smoke-less. Perplexed, William and I asked him how it was possible that he had made a smoke-less fire. He explained to us that he had simply removed the "smoking ones." This really didn't answer the question at all -- if it were this easy all of my fires would be smoke-free -- but we left it at that; I like it better as a Bedouin mystery.
The dinner was absolutely delicious: fresh chicken that had first been cooked, then boiled in milk; rice with an unidentifiable sweet sauce mixed in; and heaps of Bedouin bread (something like thin corn tortillas). William and I stuffed ourselves, then ate more at the request of our guests. Nobody else ate. We could not tell exactly why this was the case (was it customary? Would they eat the left-overs? Had they already eaten?), but we never found out the answer. When I thanked them for everything -- and I thanked them profusely -- the women behaved very deferentially, as if my thanks were unnecessary, or even making them uncomfortable. Feriah offered her only justification for the ridiculous kindness that all of them had shown -- the same line she had used all evening: "You are in my country," she said, "I want to do this for you."
Are you listening to this?
Back to Jerusalem, where things are cozy. Having gone to Jordan and come back, it was a very, very nice feeling to be returning. I can't explain how nice it is after four months of traveling to return to a city that I already knew, and to an apartment (Adam's) that was waiting for me. I am not speaking figuratively when I say that I had a skip in my step. My first stop was the market, and -- you guessed it! -- I went straight for the halva. The halva! Big, heaping blocks of it, cut to size.
For the next two days I treated myself like a king. Conor the Indulgent! By the end of my second stay in Jerusalem I actually had a pretty good relationship with the owner of a felafel stand near the market ("Where did you go? I have not seen you!"). I took full advantage of the fact that I was temporarily living above a market, making entire meals out of figs, olives, cheese, hot nuts, pressed fruits, real fruits, and so on. I watched movies, read quite a lot, and frequented the only cafe I could find in the place. At one point I was drinking tea, the space heater was on, and I was laying in bed watching a movie -- it was then that I realized I had reached the highest possible level of comfortability possible for that moment. This type of behavior is a blasphemous thing to do in a city with so much history, but I had seen enough for one trip to Jerusalem. I regret absolutely nothing.
Now I am in Turkey, and have been for a week. Obviously, then, I am a little bit behind, but this city makes it difficult to want to spend any time at all on a computer. I am not ready at this point to begin wildly throwing superlatives about to describe Istanbul, but they will certainly be coming when I next update this. I have been fueling myself with Baklava and Turkish Delight, tea and Turkish coffee. I think it is about time to ask you, my friends, to please send me a bag of insulin. Please. I am inducing diabetes, here. Unfortunately there is no one here to tell me not to eat Baklava for breakfast, so I am learning these types of lessons the hard way. Pity me, my friends. Please pity me.
posted by conor | 9:21 AM
1 Comments:
Glad to see you are indulging a bit, my friend. And thanks for the clarification on the High place of Sacrifice. I eagerly await whatever intercontinental hyperbole is currently swilling about amongst your creative juices. Believe it or not, your narrative is far more appealing than Marbury v. Madison!
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