Friday April 21, 2005 – “Not that There’s Anything Wrong with That”

We were joined on this weekend’s big adventure to Jordan by one of C’s colleagues Ian (“I”); which made for an extremely fun trip. As mentioned in previous entries, “I” travels all of the time, so he pretty much can upgrade just about anything when he travels– flights, cars…and the vehicle of choice for this weekend was a Hummer H2. As you can probably imagine, our four ton vehicle, with whities in it got quite a bit of attention in our southerly trek through small villages. People would gaze into it hoping to see, I don’t know, Arnold maybe, kids would run along side of it, locals would pose for pictures using it as a backdrop.

So after arriving at 11ish, we barreled down the curvy two lane King’s Highway from the Queen Alia Airport in Amman stopping at Madaba, Wadi Mujib, and Karak Castle en route to Petra. A church in Madaba houses the oldest known map of the Middle East (2^nd half of the 6^th Century) and it is entirely mosaiced. Wadi Mujib is dubbed as Jordan’s Grand Canyon and has a depth of 1,200 meters and 4 km across in some parts.

Unfortunately, it did not share the reddish color of the Grand Canyon, but still very impressive. The last stop before rolling into Petra about 7PM was Karak Castle an extensive 860 year old Crusader fortress. And unlike

the U.S., you could scramble up walls, peer over ledges, crawl down into collapsed rooms… We polished off the evening, after checking into our hotel, with a hearty meal readying ourselves for the 12 straight hours in Petra Saturday morning.

Some of the interesting Middle Eastern customs from our guidebook that we were obliged to be aware of included:

• “walking around with wet hair is – for some reason – an indication that you’ve just had sex.”
• “the nape of the neck is considered particularly erotic and so is best covered…”
• As you can probably guess over the course of a couple days we joked with “C” quite a bit about these two.

• “Western men who break this code (wearing shorts) give roughly the same impression that they would wandering around Bournemouth or Baltimore in their underpants."
• Respecting local customs, left “I” and I in long pants over the 85 degree weekend.

• “Although public displays of affection between men and women are not acceptable behavior, cheek kissing, eye gazing, and hand holding between same sex friends in public is normal and completely sociably acceptable…"
• We did share quite a bit of jokes about spooning, walking hand in hand in Petra, and snuggling because of this one. It was quite unusual for us to see “straight” men in these villages holding hands (fingers intermeshed) and our favorite...locals sitting, holding one set of hands in front with the other arm around the back, hands interlocked, in a half embrace. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” – Seinfeld reference :^)

• “Beckoning with your palm up has cutesy and overtly sexual connotations."
• We had a few laughs at “I’s” expense as he often unintentionally beckoned people to cross the street while driving with his palm up – getting quite a few odd looks.