Kuwait

1/23/05, Kuwait City, No Place Like Home

I thought I might never get home. Trouble started last night when the schwerma I had for supper went into reverse. I spent the night puking my dinner into the toilet. In the morning I was famished, but I ate a small breakfast to go easy on my stomach. I figured I would catch a bigger meal in Amman.

I drove around Amman for an hour, but I was lost most of the time, and I never stopped for lunch. I decided to just go to the airport early and grab a meal there. But when I got there, the security guard wouldn't let me check in. I arrived at noon though my flight left at five, and the guard said I couldn't check-in until four. I asked if I just go past him to get some lunch, but he refused. So I sat in the lobby for four hours while I waited for the guard to let me pass.

At the Kuwaiti Ariways check-in counter, the agent asked why I didn't make a reservation for the flight. I told him I made a reservation when I bought the ticket. He told me they had overbooked the flight, and I wouldn't be allowed on. I made a big fuss, but they wouldn't budge. Finally, about twenty minutes before takeoff, they let me buy an upgrade to first class for an extra $200. I paid with my now maxed-out credit card and got on the plane just before they closed the doors.

So I almost missed my flight, I had to pay an extra 200 bucks to get home, and my only meal for the last day and a half was a slice of toast. By the time I touched down in Kuwait, those first-classes flight attendants hated me. I was buzzing that damn call button every five minutes. Tea! Coffee! Water! Peanuts! Where's my dinner? Get me a pillow! Bring me that newspaper! No, the English one! Now! I feel sorry for them, but, dammit, if I had to buy a first-class seat, I was determined to get first-class service.

So now I'm home. I never thought I'd refer to Kuwait that way. I thought I would finish this trip with "So now I'm back in Kuwait." But Kuwait feels different now. Everything I own is here. All my friends are here. I know the roads, and I know the people. Every night I've spent in Kuwait, I've dreamed of being back in San Diego. But every night I was in Jordan, I dreamed of being back in Kuwait. Now I'm laying in my own bed, in my own apartment, and I don't care about moving back to San Diego. Kuwait is where I live now; it's where I want to be. I saw a lot of amazing things in Jordan, but maybe the most amazing thing is that, for me, Kuwait is now my home.

Madaba, 1/22/05, Aqabba Sucks

I've been in Aqabba for two and a half days. I was ready to leave two days ago. I had hoped Aqabba would be the relaxing part of my trip. I thought I would stumble into town exhausted, with sore muscles and skinned knees. And I would roll into a 5-star beach-front resort, and I would slap down my Mastercard (unlimited credit, of course) and rent the penthouse suite, 200 floors up, with a view of the entire Red Sea, an open bar, 24 hour room service, and a personal masseuse. I would spend my days in a jacuzzi bubble bath drinking champagne. Three days of luxurious pampering. After a week of scrambling, scraping, falling and walking all over Jordan, I had earned it.

It was a disaster-a total disaster. Everything that could go wrong did. The one place where I should have been completely relaxed was the only place where I was completely miserable.

In Aqabba's defense, the town wasn't really the problem. If I'd arrived two days earlier or two days later, I probably would have had a blast. Instead I arrived on Eid weekend, the biggest holiday of the Muslim year. Aqabba was packed with tourists from all over Jordan. It was like Cancun on the Fourth of July. Traffic was awful. The people were pushy. Those 5-star resorts were fully booked. The only hotel that had vacancy for two nights was Aquarmarina I, a shitty one-star dump that was built in the '70s and hasn't been touched since. The air conditioner blew hot air, and the TV remote had a range of about three feet. The walls were so thin I could hear a radio in one room and a couple humping in the next.

The locals (I should say, the other tourists) made me feel distinctly unwelcome. It wasn't anything specific, just a feeling, a vibe. The friendly smiles were replaced by angry glares, and the enthusiastic service I got elsewhere was a short and spiteful here. Bush's inauguration speech was Thursday night, and CNN was playing the highlights during breakfast the next morning. A man at the table next to mine glared at the TV, then glared at me. Sneered at Bush. Sneered at me. I finished my meal early and retreated to my room.

The dive trip was another disaster. I went to Aqabba International Dive Center. I asked if they had any snorkel tours. They said they only did scuba tours, but I could tag along on a shallow water dive. The divers would go into ten meter water, and I could swim over to a five meter zone.

The next morning there were no customers at the shop, just one employee. He told me I was the only person on the tour today. He drove me to a local beach, pointed toward the shore, and dropped me off. He didn't even get out of the car. I found out later that after he dumped me on the beach, he raced back to the shop and led a crew of divers on another tour.

He dropped me off at 9 and agreed to pick me up at 11, but by the time he was twenty meters underwater. I gave up waiting at 11:30 and decided to hitch hike home. At noon, I was still trying to catch a ride when the shop owner picked me up and drove me back to the shop.

A word about the water: It was my first swim in the Red Sea, so of course it was exhilerating. I saw sea urchins for the first time. I saw my first flounder that wasn't cooked. First lionfish, first puffer fish, first shrimp. Everything I saw was new.

And insightful. From a distance, the bottom looked like big gray rocks spotted with bright coral. At a closer look, I saw that only about a quarter of the coral was alive. The gray rocks rocks weren't rocks. They were dead coral. It looked like a bombed-out city, with collapsed buildings and shelled-out hulls. I remember a large sphere, twenty feet across.One end was bright orange. The middle part was gray. On the far side collapsed cylindrical columns lay flat on the sea floor. It was like watching different stages of decay. After touring so many ruins on Jordan, now I was touring ruins underwater. It was the last remains of a once-vibrant reef, and the few living spots of color were not beautiful, just reminders of how beautiful it used to be.

I drove out of Aqabba as fast as I could. A storm came in just after I left. Five solid hours of driving through rain, snow, and sand have brought me back to Madaba, where I started my vacation. A hot plate of schwerma, a warm room, and a friendly staff that's happy to see me again. Aqabba is just a memory now, and I'm anxious to fly back home.

Aqabba, 1/20/05, God Bless McDonald's

The nicest thing about being an American on travel is that you can find a McDonald's just about anywhere. In super-Sunni Riyadh, where non-Muslims are shunned, you can buy a Big Mac. In New Delhi, where the Hindus don't eat beef and the Muslims don't eat pork, you can eat Chicken McNuggets until you burst. In Berlin you can get a beer with your Quarter Pounder, and in Mexico City they give you packets of salsa for your fries.

The rest of the world hates this American export. At least, the snobbish, intellectual people of the world do. The rest of the rest of the world chows down on burgers and fries as much as we do. So for those outside America, I guess McDonald's is a blessing and a curse. For Americans, it's a gift from god.

See, when a person-any person, any nationality-travels to a foreign country, he has to speak another language, eat a different cuisine, drive a different way. Sometimes he has to dress a different way or walk or talk at a different speed. After a week or so of this adjustment, culture shock sets in. He longs for his own country. He wants to speak his own language, to watch his hometown sports team, to gossip about neighbors next door. And he especially wants to eat his national cuisine. Because eating in a foreign country means strange textures and unusual tastes. Sometimes it also means projectile vomiting and violent diarrhea. Hometown food is comfort food, especially when you have a live oyster squirming down your throat, or when you learn that your hard-boiled egg holds a half-formed fetus.

McDonald's has given Americans a great advantage in this area. I feel for the poor Japanese man who tries to find sushi in Morrocco. I pity the German who orders a plate of wurst in Taiwan. I feel sorry for the Mexican in Egypt who doesn't know the Arabic word for tortilla. And I laugh at them all as I bite in to a hot, fresh Quarter Pounder with Cheese, wherever I happen to be.

After 8 long days, hiking through ruins, studying mosaics, climbing mountains, sleeping in leaky tents next to pissed off goats, after beheading, butchering, and eating said goats, I have finally arrived in Aqabba, Jordan's port on the Red Sea. I would like to thank the McDonald's corporation for building one of their fine restaurants here. For if they hadn't, I might never have had a decent burger and fries. I might have reached my breaking point, and I might have run off into the desert and never been seen again. Totally John the Baptist style, living on locusts and wild honey.

Wadi Rum, 1/19/05, Nightfall

In the afternoon, we went to Radi's father, Haoud. We would spend the night in Haoud's tent and finish the tour in the morning. Radi went to get fresh water, Haoud looked after his flock of goats, and the rest of the family started cooking supper. There was a little daylight left, and I had some time to kill.

Haoud's tent is about twenty feet long and ten feet deep, divided into two rooms-a living/sleeping room and a pantry/kitchen. There's a small pen with about twenty goats outside.  There's also a donkey tethered to a post and three guard dogs who bark loudly at the slightest noise. The tent is built on the east side of a high stone hill, so it warms up quickly in the morning and cools off in the afternoon. I figured I had about an hour of daylight left, so I took a hike around the hill. I scrambled up to the top and watched the sun go down behind a distant mountain. Everything was red. The sunset was red. The stone was red. The sand that came from the stone was red. I climbed back down, hiked back to the tent, and said hello to the animals.

The donkey didn't like me at all. He was bigger than me and looked ready for a fight, so I left him alone. The goats-well, goats look like mutant sheep and smell like day-old shit. The only time I interact with a goat is when it's on my dinner plate. That left the dogs. Two of them were friendly but skittish. I couldn't get within ten feet of them. The third looked and acted like a golden retriever. When I kneeled in front of him, he obediently came up for a scratch. So I wound up sitting on the red sand, petting a friendly mutt, facing a little southwest. I was watching the mountains, watching the light fade. One of those moments of clarity in Wadi Rum.

I didn't hear Haoud come outside. I didn't know he was standing behind me. I just heard the first notes of his prayer. "Allaaahuakbar, Allaaahuakbar," echoed between the hills. He was also facing a little southwest, toward Makkah. His prayer somewhere between a song and a shout. Strong, so God would hear. Lucid, so God would be pleased. I paused in reverence, in respect, in awe. In this open and empty space, in the last of the light, I held my breath, while the father of the house gave his sunset prayer to God.

The maghreb prayer lasted about two minutes. Haoud went back inside. The dogs ran off to get supper. The sound of the donkey and the smell of the goats and the rest of the world came back. A little breeze kicked up, and the moment was gone. We're just not meant to stay trapped in those little moments forever. I think we can only feel at peace for two minutes at a time. But I'll keep that moment with me. It will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Wadi Rum, 1/19/05, Climbing

I drove from Petra to Wadi Rum, a rugged desert nature reserve a short drive south. I checked in at the Visitor's Center, where I had to pay a 2 JD fee for entry. I gave them the name and phone number of my guide, whom they called and who said he would meet me at the guest house down the road.

The guest house was little restaurant with a few one-man tents out back. I spent my first night in Wadi Rum in one of those tents, not a very happy experience. The temperature dipped below freezing, and a strong wind blew icy sleet through a hole in the top of my tent. But there aren't any other accomadations in Wadi Rum. Call it trekking or ecotourism or just "roughing it," that's what Wadi Rum is all about.

After the first night, I met my guide, Radi, and started a two-day tour of the desert. Years ago, I spent a few days in Baya Concepcion, in Baja California. It was a big, crescent-shaped bay, fairly shallow, dotted with tiny islands. The islands were only a few hundred meters across and about a kilomer apart from one another. I spent most of the day in a kayak, paddling from one island to the next. Here in Wadi Rum, far from any ocean, that memory came back to me. Wadi Rum is a desert filled with red and yellow sand. And scattered across this desert are small mountains, little islands of rock in a red desert sea. While my guide drove me between the mountains in an ancient Toyota pick-up, I had the same feeling I got when I paddled between the islands in Baya Concepcion.

I got my first taste of rock climbing in Wadi Rum. My guide, Radi, took me to a stone arch at the eastern end of the park. It was about 100 meters tall and not very easy to reach. The sandstone sides were smooth and steep, almost vertical. It didn't have any obvious handholds, just small divots a few centimeters deep, deep enough to grip with fingers or toes, but not big enough to plant a whole hand or foot. Radi showed me the easiest climbing path and sent me up. I got up about ten meters before I lost my nerve. I stopped and looked down and thought, if I fall right now, I'm going to die. And it was true. There wasn't any soft patch of sand beneath me. It was solid rock. Falling ten meters onto a slab of sandstone doesn't result in a broken arm. It results in a corpse. That thought became a fact. Then it became a certainty. I couldn't get it out of my head. So I pressed my body against the rock and crawled back down. I was defeated.

Radi was disappointed. He thought I would make it to the top, but I didn't even get halfway. He didn't say anything to me. He just shook his head and walked back to the truck. I looked at him, and I looked at the arch. I looked at the climb path, and I looked at the arch. I looked at myself, and I looked at the arch. God dammit, I didn't care about the fall anymore. I didn't care if I fell twice. I wasn't going to pussy out on what ought to be the greatest physical challenge of my life. Whatever it took, I was going to get to the top of that god damn arch.

So I went back to the arch's base. I spent a long time just looking at the climb path, mapping out the divots in the rock. I jammed my right hand into one divot, wrapped my left hand around a jutting rock, dug in my feet, and pulled myself up. I slipped a few times. I scraped both my knees and tore some skin off my hands. Step by step, I pulled myself up that mountain. Fifteen minutes later I was standing on the arch and looking out over the whole desert. It was such a rush. I was so thrilled that I spent half an hour just staring at it all. In fact, for the whole trip, the only picture I have of myself is at the top of that arch. I wanted to take a picture just to prove I'd been there. By the time I got back to the ground, I was hooked. I climbed up, on and over every boulder, crevice and hill I could find. Rock climbing is my new hobby.

I learned a new word in Wadi Rum--friable. That's what the brochure says. "Many of the stone formations in Wadi Rum are friable." I never heard that word before. I was 50 meters up the side of a mountain when I learned what friable meant. I had my left hand jammed into a large hole and my left foot planted on a tiny ledge. My right hand was wrapped around a fist-sized chunk of sandstone that stuck out from the rock face. My right leg was hanging loose and trying to get traction on a small divot about waist high. I couldn't quite get my right foot into that divot. So with my three other limbs, I heaved and pulled myself higher.

And then the rock broke loose. The rock in my right hand became.....friable. It broke off from the mountain and broke into three pieces in my hand. I dropped all three pieces and swung out from the mountain. Now I had my left hand and foot planted, but the whole right half of my body was swinging in space. I hung that way while the chunks of rock fell fifty meters down and shattered at the base of the mountain.

Friable [adjective] Loose and large-grained in consistency. Easily broken into small fragments or reduced to powder. Ex. 1:"The rock in Wadi Rum is friable." Ex. 2: "Climbers who don't pay attention to Ex. 1 may become friable."

Petra 1/17/05 - 1/18/05 Dumbstruck

I finished a two-day tour of Petra today. For hours, I've been trying to write an acceptable article about the place. But I can't think of any original way to describe Jordan's oldest city. That's partially due to the fact that so much has been written about Petra. It's very difficult to write something that doesn't repeat what a dozen other writers have already said. And partly it's the sense of reverence that Petra put into me. It's the feeling that Petra deserves more than just a few quick notes in a journal.

When I see beautiful sights in other places, my reaction is impulsive and exuberant. I yell to my friends, "Hey, look at this!" Or I grab my camera and line up a good shot. Or I just start scribbling in my notebook. Not in Petra. So many times here, I looked up at the old walls and just stared, dumbstruck. I didn't shout to anybody; I didn't reach for my camera; I didn't even think. It's like the beauty of Petra paralyzed me, and every time I turned a corner or reached the top of a staircase I had to stop for a few minutes just to stand in awe.

Petra has an amazing sense of majesty and nobility. All the ancient buildings feel timeless and alive. The city is of course abandoned, but in Petra you're not sure if it's dead or just sleeping. As you walk through tombs and theaters and temples and caves, you can feel old ghosts watching you, demanding that you pay your respect.

And maybe that's why I can't write anything about Petra. On some subconscious level, I don't tihnk that anything I write will show sufficient respect to such a rich and noble place. Maybe I might offend a few of those old ghosts. It's better that I just tell you to go there and see it for yourself.

Wadi Mussa, 1/16/05, Road Trip

I've spent the whole day on the road, driving from Madaba, near Amman, to Wadi Mussa, the small tourist town outside Petra. I got a late start this morning because the dry cleaner that had my laundry opened late. There was a little language barrier when I dropped off my clothes for washing last night. I don't think he understood my English when I said, "I need these back at 8 am tomorrow." And I didn't understand his Arabic when he said, "We're not open tomorrow." Thankfully, my hotel manager knew the owner of the laundry shop and called him on his day off. I gave him a few extra dinars and took off four hours later than I had planned.

I was delayed again and again on the drive south. This time, however, the scenery was the cause of my delay. South of Madaba on the King's Highway, I drove through Wadi Mujib, a beautiful valley surrounded by steep, stark mountains. It had the look of a desert in bloom, and it made me homesick for San Diego. I stopped the car about every twenty minutes to take pictures and admire the view.

After Wadi Mujib, all the road signs were in Arabic, which I can't read. I had a cheap tourist map that didn't show all the roads, and I quickly became lost. After awhile, I made out the Arabic letters 'K' 'R' and 'K' on a road sign, guessed that it spelled 'Karak,' and drove off in that direction. I guessed right. After a few minutes I came around a bend and saw the biggest, crudest, meanest looking castle on the biggest, steepest, most evil looking mountain I'd ever seen.

The only other castle I've seen is Salzburg Castle in Austria. That castle looks like something out of a fairytale, more like a big palace than a fortress. Karak is nothing like that. Built by a French crusader, conquered by Saladin, and later occupied by Mameluke soldiers, Karak is a structure built exclusively for war. It's an amazing sight, but not in a beautiful or romantic way. Karak is powerful and imposing, and ugly and brutal monument from an ugly and brutal time.

Unfortunately, I got to Karak at 3:15 and found that it closed at 4:00. So I didn't get a lot of photos or spend much time on the site. I had to leave almost as soon as I'd come, and I didn't make it back later. Now Karak is at the top of my list of places to visit when I return to Jordan.

Karak was great, but I had a problem: I was still lost and over 100 km from my destination. I couldn't find my way out of the town, and I certainly couldn't find the main highway. I met a man at the castle who spoke a little English. I explained to him that I was on my way to Petra, and I was lost. I hoped he would give me directions or show me where I was on the map. He did much better. First, he led me out of town. He walked through the streets while I followed him in my car. At the base of the Karak mountain, where the town ended and a main road began, he flagged down a friend of his nearby. This friend didn't speak much English, but he said he would drive to the King's Highway in his car and I would follow in mine. Halfway there he picked up a hitchhiker, who lived about 40 km down the highway. When we got to the highway, the driver got out and said he had to go back to Karak. He explained that the hitchhiker didn't speak any English, but he could ride with me to make sure I didn't get lost. I thanked them both and drove off with the hitcher in the passenger seat.

So my passenger didn't speak English, but he was going to give me directions. I took the chance to practice my Arabic. I tried some really advanced Arab phrases: "You house this town?" "What street this?" "I go Petra." He got a kick out of it and taught me a few Arab words, specfically 'left' (shmall) and 'right' (yameel). His house was pretty far off the highway, and I wasn't sure how to get back. As I dropped him off, he gave me directions, which to me sounded like, "Yadda yadda left, yadda right, yadda yadda not left yadda right." I told him I understood and wished him a good day.

Fortunately "left, right, not left, right" were all the directions I needed to get back to the highway. I rolled into Wadi Mussa a little after sunset, something I couldn't have done without help. After driving for hours in confusion, I met three total strangers who worked together to help a stranded tourist find his way. I had hoped they would give me a few directions and send me off. Instead, they stuck with me to make sure I got out of town, got on the highway, and didn't get lost again. I always hope to find that kind of courtesy everywhere, but so far I've found it only in Jordan.

So now it's the middle of the night and I'm curled up in the Petra Moon Hotel. I'm about a thousand meters higher than I was this morning, and it's about 10 degrees colder. Assuming I don't freeze to death tonight, I'll visit Petra in the morning.

Madaba, 1/15/05. Jesus, Moses, and Osama Bin Laden

What a day. What a way to start the day. Reliable Rent-A-Car gave me only enough gas to reach Madaba, so the first order of the day was to fill up the tank. The nearest gas station was a small cinder-block building with no windows and a single rusty pump out front. The first time I drove past it I thought it was closed. The second time, I pulled in just to look at my map, and a teenaged kid came out and asked how much gas I wanted. So it really was open. Good.

I didn't know the Arabic word for "full" so I tried to pantomime. By the way, if you're ever playing Charades and the word you draw is "Full," just give up right there. It's completely impossible to explain the term "full" with hand gestures and odd postures. I wasted ten minutes gesturing at the tank, the pump, the kid, and myself while repeating, "fool, fool," with no success. There were four other guys in the cinder block building, one of whom spoke English. While I was pointing at the fuel pump and holding my hand over my head, he called me over to have a drink. I stopped pantomoming and went inside.

Inside the building were: a large cot covered with blankets, three plastic chairs, an old car seat, a kerosene heater, and four grinning young men (plus the one pumping my gas outside). The guys were chattering in Arabic and having a great time. Gas Pump Guy ran in and asked my English-speaking friend something in Arabic. "How much do you want?" he asked me. "Fill it up," I replied. He translated, and Gas Pump ran back outside. I flopped down in the car seat and got ready for some of that famous Jordanian hospitality.

"Where are you from?"

"The United States."

"United States?" All four of them burst into Arabic. Talked to each other, looked at me, and laughed. Talked some more, looked at me again, laughed again. After a bit, English Speaker said, "Let me show you a picture." He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to me. The background picture was a photo of Osama Bin Laden. The room became very quiet.

"So what you think?" EnglishSpeaker asked.

"Um, it's a nice phone."

"No, the picture."

"Yes, it's a picture of bin Laden."

"What do you think of bin Laden?"

"I think he's in Afghanistan?"

"Where do you visit in the Middle East?"

"Just Jordan this time."

"Syria? Lebanon?"

"Lebanon next time. I want to visit Beirut."

"Israel? Iraq?" Laughter all around.

"I don't visit Iraq."

"Why not?"

"I don't think Americans should be in Iraq."

"What about Israel? What you think about Israel?"

Gas Pump came back in and asked me for forty dinar. I gave him a fifty and told him to keep the change. "No," he said in English, "Forty. Ten and four. Forty." I shove fifteen dinar in his hand. English speaker asked me to sit back down and have some tea, but I mumbled something about seeing Mt. Nebo at sunrise and rushed out the door.

In hindsight, the guy probably didn't mean any harm. He and his friends were just bored and felt like scaring a tourist. Well, it worked. I've been on edge all day, but now I'm more pissed than frightened. If I ever see that son of a bitch in the States, me and four of my redneck friends are going to corner him in the back of a gas station and ask him what he thinks of Jesus, George Bush, and squeeling like a pig.

So, with my gas tank full and my bladder empty, I visited Mt. Nebo. According to legend, Nebo is the last thing Moses saw before he died. Because he (briefly) lost faith in God while the Hebrews were wandering around Sinai, God let him see the Promised Land but not enter it. From the top of Mt. Nebo, you can see half of Israel, and you can imagine Moses standing here at the end of his life.

After Nebo I went to Bethany, where Elijah went to Heaven, John the Baptist preached, and Jesus was baptized. According to my tour guide, the name Bethany comes from two Aramaic words--Bet Ain--which means House of Crossing. Apparently, every major Jewish, Christian, and Islamic figure in history stopped off in Bethany before going into Israel, and the town was a popular place to cross the River Jordan. There's not much to see in the way of ruins, but it is a really beautiful natural setting. I was intrigued to stand on the east bank of the River Jordan and think that Israel was on the other bank. I was tempted to jump over to the other side, just as a "fuck you" to Kuwait, which won't allow me entry if I've travelled to Israel.

Like so many other places in Jordan, Bethany and Mt. Nebo are easier to describe in pictures than words. I'll post photos of both places as soon as I can.

Madaba, 1/14/05, History Lessons

Today I took a tour of Madaba, a small city south of Amman. Madaba's big attractions are the Byzantine mosaics built on the floors of wealthy homes and Greek Orthodox churches in the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries.

First stop was the Church of St. George (the one who slew the dragon). The Church is over 1,400 years old and has been active off and on up to the present day. The original floor of the church was a stone mosaic map of the then-known world: south to the Sinai, west to the Mediterranean, east into Arabia, and north to Asia Minor. Jerusalem is at the center of the map, and to the people who made it, Jerusalem was the center of the world.

After St. George, I walked down to the Madaba Archaeological Park, in the center of the city. The park is an active archeological site, part of which was closed during my visit. I walked down an avenue paved by Romans in the 3rd century and viewed mosaics from a Roman mansion, later converted to an Orthodox church.

The Madaba Museum on the southern edge of the city was a nice, but not quite as interesting, site. There were quite a few artifacts on display, including 4,000 year old pottery (pre-Islamic, pre-Christian, pre-Jewish, pre-everything) that looked freshly made. But pottery shards and oil lamps aren't as impressive as mosaics and ancient columns.

My favorite site in Madaba was the Church of the Apostles. This church is no longer active. It's just several large mosaics under an impressve modern shelter. But it's bigger than the Church of St. George and any single site in the Archaeological Park. Unlike the other sites, you can walk on the mosaic, so I got photos of every part from every angle.

My descriptions here are short because I just can't describe these places in words. When I get home, I'll post my photos, and maybe that will do the site justice.

Parts of the Apostles Church mosaics are new, products of a mid-1990s restoration. But most of the mosaics are old, original tiles laid down in the 6th century. I can walk in that church, kneel down, and touch the tiles that a Jordanian artisan laid down 1,500 years ago. I can see him sprawled on the floor, with ples of brghtly colored stones, lining them up to make a young boy, an old man, a cat, a plant, a bird. I can see the church a century later, when it was part of the Umayyad empire. The Muslim Umayyads saw the Christians as heathens, heretics who worshipped a Prophet as if he were God. But they allowed ther subjects to worship however they pleased, and I can see black-clad Orthodox priest leding their worshippers in prayer. Five hundred years later, my Catholic ancestors would invade this place and slaughter Muslims, Christians, and Jews across the Levant.

Almost a thousand years after that, the Arab Muslim King of Jordan worked with a team of Italian Catholoic archaeologists to restore the church mosaic to its former beauty. And now people of all faiths (or no faith) come to see a work of art that a Jordanian artisan painstakingly made 1,500 years ago. It's a lesson in tolerance, and reverence, that I didn't really learn until I stood on that mosic and touched those ancient tiles.

Madaba, Jordan, 1/13/05

Any time I travel to a new place, I reach a special moment, and the vacation hasn't truly begun until I reach that moment. For me, vacations don't start when I first leave home, nor when I first arrive at my destination. No, the real beginning comes later. After the first rush of excitement, after the preparation and anticipation, after the initial rush of confusion during my arrival, I reach that special moment. That moment when I stop, look around, and think to myself, Dear god, what have I gotten myself into?

That's the special moment. When I've left the airport, with its big, clear, English signs. After I check into my hotel, with the smiling desk staff that are so happy to see me. At about the time I go out into the streets, where nobody speaks English, where there are no street signs, where there's not a single Anglo-Saxon face to be seen. That's the moment. It's a thrilling experience, and I really do enjoy it. But for just one special moment, it scares the shit out of me. And for a while after that, I go into a panic. I frantically search maps and guidebooks for any clue that will help me survive the next two weeks. God help any poor soul who speaks English to me at that time, because I'll latch onto him the way a drowning man latches onto a life preserver.

I reached that moment last night. I got my rental car and turned off the main highway and got completely lost. It was a miracle that I found Madaba, my home for the next three days. Once in Madaba, I was still hopelessly lost. I spent an hour driving around at 10 clicks an hour, craning my neck to look for street signs that didn't exist, while drivers honked and pedestrians laughed. I ran stop signs that I didn't see. I stopped at intersections when I should have kept going. I was clueless. The only English street sign I ever saw was one that said I was driving toward the border with Iraq. I was 300 miles away from Iraq, but I didn't want to take any chances. Half a mile past that sign, I turned the car around.

By the time I reached my hotel, I'd forgotten all of my Arabic and half of my English. I stared dumbfounded at the lady behind the desk and muttered, "Michael Cornn." Thankfully, she spoke Arabic and English, and both better than I did. I found my room, I found my bed, and I curled up like a refugee seeking shelter from a war.

Today was better, much better. But I always put a day between my experiences and my writing, so I'll tell you more about Madaba tomorrow.

A quick note on identity: It's common advice today to tell Americans to lie about their nationality. "Say you're from Canada. Tell them you're from New Zealand." I have no problem telling people I'm from America. I don't think anybody here would refuse to speak to an American, and I want nothing to do with do those who would. But I have made up a small lie about where I work. For as long as I'm away from Kuwait, I don't tell people that I work on a US base. It's not that I'm worried about getting shot or stabbed or blown up. I'm more concerned about bad service at restaurants, rude looks from locals, political lectures from strangers. To say I'm an American working on a US base in Kuwait implies that I'm a soldier who has fought in Iraq. And a soldier who has fought in Iraq doesn't get much respect in a small town in Jordan. I could acknowledge that I work on a US base, but then I'd have to explain my personal pacifism, my liberal politics, and above all my hatred for George W Bush. It's much easier just to say that I teach computer skills at a school in Sharq. That's make a harmless expat who just wants to learn more about the Middle East.

More tomorrow