Jordan: It's for Lovers

I am, always, thankful that I have Daphna in my life. On this trip, however, there is every reason to highlight that gift. Jordan is not well suited to single people, and we have seen that repeatedly on our trip thus far.

Irbid is a relatively conservative town, and men and women rarely chat, let alone truly date, or even touch. The dress, too, reflects that: while men will occasionally walk around in t-shirts, shorts are so uncommon that one of my Turkish friends, seeing how many people were staring at me on the way to the basketball court, jokingly suggested that, no doubt, the mere sight of my legs would impregnate all of the Jordanian women around (oh, rue the power of the pale, hairy, chicken-legs!). Women here also dress very conservatively by US standards, although you will see women in the veil with very tight fitting clothing, or even, as we saw yesterday, in loose, flowing black robes with a full black veil, and red "hooker" high heels. I guess you do what you can. . . .

But the absence of inter-gender communication in Jordan can make things very interesting for any foreigners, who Jordanians tend to feel are outside of the normal rules for all things sex-related. The only problem is, well, many of the people here have no idea how to interact with single people of the opposite sex. So, they turn to the one source that's readily available and seems to make sense: Hollywood.

Oh, yes, Hollywood. Thank you James Bond. Thank you Brad Pitt. Even our friends here, sweet, wonderful, caring people, can display. . . well, an embarrassing adherance to Hollywood style when trying to warm up to foreigners. One of our friends who's attending the university, after meeting one of the Italian girls in the Language Center (who has a boyfriend back home, nonetheless), began incessantly texting her that he was in love with her. Likewise, Evan, before he left last week, was hounded by a young woman over 10 years his junior, in a manner that left no option but that she be left with a broken heart (to his credit, he "broke her heart" in the far more gentlemanly fashion). It's as if a bunch of American thirteen year-olds were let loose, complete with questions like, "If you were to marry anyone in this room, who would it be?"

The difference in the portrayal and relations of the sexes goes much further than that -- people of the same gender interact much differently here than in the US. Men kiss other men "hello" (there are various traditions, the most common being one kiss on the first cheek, and two on the second), hold hands, and link arms. Combined with the fact that women don't typically go out at night and that men here dress far better than most Americans, the night scene in Irbid makes it look like the largest gay scene imaginable. San Francisco's got nothing on the Middle East. . . .

And while most of the people here are aware of the no-kissing-Americans-thing (thank you, once again, Hollywood), it is a little shocking to have another man grab your hand, or link arms while walking down the street, and to realize that, a)this is normal here, and b) to jump away would be incredibly insulting. So, growth for all, I suppose.

Ironically, though, there is also a great fear of being seen as homosexual here (how do you distinguish, I wonder, when it is perfectly acceptable to kiss another man's neck while he is singing, for instance), and many times people have assured us that they are not gay (one even offered to change when we mentioned that gay men tend to be the best dressers in America). One of our teachers had a hard time grasping that, when I talked about the gay rights movement, I didn't consider it a bad thing. On the other hand, teenage pregnancy is basically a non-issue here. Everybody's got their's, I suppose.

And now our time as students in Jordan is starting to draw to a close -- we only have 8 days of class left before we head back to Israel on May 18 for Jackie Siegel's wedding and to meet Mark Piper and Ken Long, our awesome friends who are coming to meet us in Israel and to travel with us in Jordan. We will try to post a couple more times before we leave, but, just as a warning, mid-travel posts may be rarer. . . .

We're sending lots of love.

Your Arabic phrases of the day:

La Ahref. - I don't know.
Nahnu, hata Aalan, Taliban. - We are, still, students.