I say tomato, you say "banadurra"

Last week I did a language trade ("I'll help with your English if you'll help with my Arabic" kind of deal) with Farouq, a Professor of Computer Science at Yarmouk University on his "Dumon", a 1000 square meter plot that serves as a large garden. He showed me how to water his tomato plants (which he does once -- total -- before they give their fruit), how to harvest "kusa" (a zucchini-like vegetable), and he said a lot of things that I couldn't understand.

Farouq speaks with an accent, and was charged by one of my teachers to help me with "Amia", the local Jordanian dialect of Arabic (there are actually several within Jordan, and the manager of the movie store we frequent told us that he finds people from the south of the country -- physically closer than Durango is to Denver -- generally unintelligible). It was the second time that I had met with him, and was doing considerably better than the first, but was still having trouble following much of what he said.

Now, when most people (ourselves included) say that they are studying "Arabic", they are actually studying what is called "Modern Standard Arabic", or "Foos-ha". Foos-ha is a strange language, because, really, no one speaks it on a regular basis except for newscasters. Nearly everything, however, is written in Foos-ha, and, for all intents and purposes, it tends to be similar to most countries' "Amia". And, for the majority of the trip, I really believed that.

In addition to chatting with Farouq, I have also made friends with the manager of the falafel shop across the street from our dorms. He is Egyptian, and easy to communicate with, a fact I gave little thought until this week when I was sitting, watching the news with him when two of his Egyptian friends came over. I could barely understand the gist, the general area even, of what they were trying to communicate to me. Likewise, they were having intense difficulty understanding what I wanted to say, which I, of course, interpreted as mispronunciation (which may have been a part of it). Suddenly, though, as my friend began relaying to me what they were saying, and relaying to them what I was saying, I realized that he has been easy to understand because he speaks to me in Foos-ha. His friends, however, did not understand Foos-ha to the point where he had to translate my Foos-ha into Amia so that they could understand it. I was speaking Arabic, and they were speaking Arabic, but we needed a translator nonetheless.

It suddenly dawned on me that it is as if I am walking around Irbid speaking like Shakespeare without meter (and with a few "cools" and "hips" thrown in). Daphna is my little Juliette, and, despite the success that we have experienced in four short months, there is a long way to go before we will ever walk into a store in this part of the world, and have someone ask us where in the country we're from. Daphna suggests that two more years of living here and taking classes might suffice.

But Farouq is still trying. On Saturday he invited me to a "guy's night" where we and a couple of his friends played cards, ate melon with knives, drank apple juice, and talked about bad words in multiple languages. I could understand a great deal of what they said, and they all liked asking questions about proper usages and pronunciations of English words. Nonetheless, had they wanted to, they could have made many jokes at my expense without my knowledge. But at least my partner and I swept the night's games.

I guess, for now, that will have to do.


Your Arabic words of the day:

To play cards -- La-ebah el-waraq -- لعب الورق

Love is from God (an expression suggesting that you can't choose who to love) -- "El-hob meen Allah" -- الحبّ من الله

Palatial Camel-Humps

Expectations are everything.

Like, when you expect to get an adventurous camel-back tour of one of the most beautiful places on earth atop your trusty white camel (which, of course, brings to mind the possibility of rescuing your beautiful and ever-thankful princess-wife from the tallest tower of some Sultan’s desert castle) and you end up spending the majority of your Wadi Rum tour stuck staring at a camel’s ass. Yes, that was me and my albino steed, Shorban, tied to the back of Daphna’s much taller camel for a lack of guides. Desert mountains towered out of the sand on every side but forward, where Haran’s camely-tail swung back and forth in the smallest arc, like a small unsteady paintbrush wavering in the wind.

It had been days of ecstasy, and of shattered expectations. Traveling with our friends Mark and Ken in Israel had brought us to many of the holiest places on Earth (be you Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or even Bahai) and to some of the best falafel stands in the world. Crossing the border though, wanting to show off the best of our experiences from our time in Jordan, we had been led astray. Daphna was beaned with an apricot in the Irbid Suk (which simply doesn’t hold a candle to its Jerusalem counterpart). We were mislead in a restaurant in Ajloun. Finally there I was, my view of heaven obscured.

Our tour led to “Lawrence of Arabia’s spring,” a beautiful location sadly lacking a spring (though there was a camel troph – I almost asked Daphna to water my camel a la Rebecca, but Shorban did it himself). And on the way back, we camel-trotted, which was marvelous save for the bouncing up and down in an uncomfortable position on a wooden saddle. Everyone else did have fun, though.

I was still sore when we pulled off the road on the way home to take pictures of the sunset over Wadi Araba, the desert just north of Wadi Rum. We missed the turn for the lookout spot and pulled into what appeared to be an extended driveway. As Ken scampered to the ledge of the mountain, his new SLR camera in hand, I waddled to the edge of the road and joked to Daphna and Mark that the gate at the end of the driveway had three crowns on it because the King was about to walk out.

It was then that we noticed the two men walking down the mountain towards us in coats despite the evening’s intense heat. At that point I would have been happy to head out quickly – as much attention as Daph and I attract walking around Jordan it is nothing compared to the four of us together, and while much of it is well-meaning, endless shouts of “Welcome to Jordan” can begin to feel invasive. But the two men walked up to us, and introduced themselves as Ali and Hamdan, local Bedouins that summer in Wadi Araba. They asked about where we had come from, and then announced that we were outside Prince Hassan’s (the King’s uncle) desert palace where their friend is a guard.

“We are going to have tea,” they said, and with that, they escorted us into the gate, and to the guard shack immediately behind it. We sat as more Bedouins joined and brought out their famously sweet tea (“Bedouin Whiskey,” as they call it). Ali regaled us with tales of hunting gazelle and hyena, and of his travels in Israel and Egypt. About an hour later he announced, “We are making dinner.”

It wasn’t a question, nor an invitation – it was simply a series of unstated but assumed facts: we are cooking a local delicacy, you will stay here and join us for a meal, and that is that.

“Thank you, and we are very happy to join you,” I said. “But I should warn you that I don’t eat meat or fish or dairy or eggs or honey.”

Ali stared at me.

“Why?” he said, as if I had just told him that on Mondays I do everything while doing a moonwalk on stilts, which in his mind might have been a similar statement. All of the other Bedouins in the room laughed.

I tend to try and avoid being in group food situations where I am not in control of my menu, or when I have not at least had the opportunity to bring my own food. Here, I had accidently walked backwards (alas, it was not a Monday) into a sticky situation – the Bedouin culture is an intensely hospitable culture, but it is also one where a guest’s actions can easily be insulting. When the food arrived it was kibsa, rice cooked with vegetables on a large tray, about three feet in diameter, topped with chicken. Spoons angled out of the side of the dish towards the four of us, and the Bedouins dug in with their right hands (truly never touching the food with their left), and covering it with a goat-milk yogurt.

I did my best not to insult our hosts, picking at the rice I could get to that had not contacted the meat or the yogurt and eating dry bread and the cucumber that they handed the four of us (I think I did enough to please Ali, but the chef seemed frustrated that there were several pieces of chicken left at the end of the night, mostly in the area towards Daph and my corner of the dish). It was a difficult thing to do, an odd personal balance beam of uncomfortably stretching my own boundaries while alert to the way I was stretching the borders of our hosts' hospitality. The majority of the Bedouins finished very quickly and commenced egging the four of us on to eat more, to the point where Mark and Ken began, in turn, insisting that Hamdan continue to partake. Finally, one of the men took away the tray, and replaced it with more tea, and apples and oranges, and then we turned in time to see a man carrying a gigantic watermelon through the gate to the palace. They sliced open the watermelon and left it on a tray under the mostly-full moon, telling us that it needed time to cool because it had been in the sun all day (still attached to its plant, of course).

It is amazing the power that a single person’s actions can hold in defining a broader group. Until we met Ali and Hamdan, I had felt that Mark and Ken had no good reason to have a positive impression of the Jordanian people. Between Ali and Hamdan and Fadi, a Bedouin living in Petra who invited us to join him in his cave for more Bedouin Whiskey and some fresh fire-baked Bedouin bread, they had plenty to write home about.

We left shortly after partaking of the watermelon, Ali offering to escort us around the Wadi Araba desert if we finished with Petra early enough the following day. We didn’t have time to meet with him again, but that night’s visit (a desert palace, perhaps, but lacking its prince, a rescue attempt, and, thankfully, my noble white steed) will remain a highlight of our time here.