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.

Too much of a good thing?

Now, the first surprise of the week shouldn't have been a surprise, really. Jordan is not the height of organization, and so when you ask if a bus runs on Mondays you should never expect the answer you get to be 100% correct. Because, just for future reference, the bus from Irbid in Jordan to Nazareth in Israel does *not* run on Mondays. When we arrived at the hotel in Irbid where the bus departs from, I watched Daphna's face turn from normal to red to some shade of purplish-green that I didn't know existed outside of cartoons as the same person that had told her the day before that there would be a bus recanted. I was glad that I was outside, behind glass doors. We were lucky, though: Halil and Emre (our infallible "Turkeys") were with us, and they somehow decided that our trip into Israel was their top priority for the day. They each made several phone calls, inquiring with their friends about ways across the border, and finally Emre convinced a Palestinian friend of his to travel with us to the Israeli border by cab. We felt a little baby-sat: we've taken cabs before, walked across borders before, the whole shebang. They would not hear of any resistance. So Emre's friend sat up front and Emre (all 6'3" or so of him) crammed into the backseat with us (Halil had already stayed so long that he was late to meet a friend). They even called us an hour after they dropped us off to make sure that we'd had no problems at the border.

Oh, Turkeys. Why would anyone ever eat them?

Sorry. This is a vegan blog, after all.

The rest of the crossing proceeded little better than the beginning, only without the help of passionate friends. We were fined at the Jordanian border for over-staying our Jordanian visa (our permitted length of stay had been explained improperly), and then, at the Israeli border, the patrol looked at my passport (water damaged since our 2003 stint backpacking throughout Central America), went to her supervisor, and returned to tell me that it was the last time I'd be entering Israel on that passport. No biggie - I'll just be a security threat this one last time, right? And hey, it only took us one more taxi ride and one more bus ride to get to basically where we would have been if we'd been on the Nazareth bus in the first place.

It is amazing, though, what a couple of kilometers can do for you. There is no doubt that Israel is a different country from Jordan. Somehow, in a way that I don't truly understand, it literally is greener on this side (I blame the pine trees). And women don't all wear head coverings (or, when they do, they don't cover nearly enough hair by the Jordanian standard). What's more, walking around Irbid, even when I try to fit in, I've been taken for Arab few enough times that I can count them on my fingers. Walking around Israel, even in shorts with a camping backpack on, people have walked up and asked me for directions in Hebrew ("No, no, of course I live here - I just get depressed if I don't walk a forty pound bag around the block several times a day").

The culture shock reached its apex at Jackie's wedding, which was beautiful. The bride and groom glowed, and were so excited to be together that he turned bright red (and I'm still not sure if his feet touched the ground, though Daph just claims that's because he was jumping up and down) and, well, Jackie's make-up had to be. . . um. . . touched up after the first time she saw him. They were wonderful together.

But we had walked out of Jordan and right into a group of rather conservative American-Israeli Jews, many of whom live in the West Bank. We got a wide range of reactions to our activities, ranging from, in essence: "Wow, I'd love to do that," to "Well, you know, Bibically-speaking you were actually in Israel, so it's OK" to "My son in the army kills terrorists every day" (I'm still working on how I should have responded to that. My favorite idea came from my mom: "Oh, no! Really? I've got to call Ahmed!"). Towards the end of the night we were told that American Jews only have months to leave with all of their possessions before Obama, it seems, creates a Nazi-like state (I still don't quite know how I should have responded to that one, either. Any ideas?).

The height of culture shock, though, might have happened on Thursday. We are staying at Yael's (Daphna's sister) apartment in Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv. Her roommates found a vegan restaurant in Tel Aviv, which we walked to, but it was closed. So we went to another vegan restaurant in Tel Aviv. The restaurant, Buddha Burgers (http://www.buddhaburgers.co.il/english.asp), had amazing sandwiches and burritos and a raspberry-chocolate mousse-coconut pudding-chocolate cake-dessert that, well, promoted Israel out of the "Land of Shawarma" category, to the point where I can no longer talk about it on this blog. Look for updates on the far less controversial: Vegans in the Land of Vegan Desserts, due out next week. The worst part (and note the sarcasm here, please) is that, as we were leaving, one of the workers said, "You know, if you like the food, there's a buffet tomorrow from 12-5."

Let's just say that three-and-a-half months of no tofu, of sub-par vegan items and subsisting off of appetizers in restaurants were obliterated in a two hour smorgasbord of vegan whole wheat crepes, tofu lasagne, wraps, pancakes, salad bar, so many different types of latkes that I couldn't count accurately, chocolate cinnamon cookies and (try to stay seated, folks) homemade mango-apricot soy yogurt with fresh fruit and homemade chocolate granola. It's twenty four hours later, and I'm almost able to move again.

And Israel doesn't only have vegan food. It's got beaches and sun, and we found out the hard way. Yael and her roommate Rikki took us sunbathing after our first lunch at the restaurant, and it was as if we'd gotten the chance to play basketball with the Nuggets and thought it was really fun until we both tore an ACL. Ya and Rikki are daily beach-goers, and Daph and I are on the Disabled List until our sunburns go away (It's OK - we've got enough of our bodies not burned that there's a position we can both sit in without pain). The beach was amazing, though -- perfect water, clean sand, no vicious sea urchins. . . . like Aqaba without all the unpleasant parts. But you try going straight from "cover everything you're in Jordan" to "don't cover anything you're in Tel Aviv" and see if you don't look like a slightly oblong heirloom tomato.

We hate to say it, but we kind of like Tel Aviv. That was a shock, really - we've never loved it in the past and we've started to wonder if it's because it really is a cool city (you have to admit between the wonderful beach and the cute cafes and the ridiculous amount of stuff going on, it has something going for it) or because we basically came here from Irbid, which has none of the above and could make a cow barn seem like an epicenter of activity. It's also been a jarring look at the political situation, a further reminder of how everywhere in this insane conflict there are people. People (those wonderful, beautiful individuals with incredible dreams that blossom everywhere from Irbid to Tel Aviv), and people (those same passionate, stubborn, complex individuals that know how the world works and exactly what is necessary to make it better).

I love so much more about the Middle East than I did before we left on this trip. More about the land, about the people, their warmth and generosity and vision. I have less optimism, though, than I have had before. This is not merely a conflict of governments, as much as the people here want to be done with the fighting. There is stubbornness and fear and pride in this conflict, down to the individual, and it is not only about bending the will of political leaders to work together -- it is about reconfiguring the way that citizens of these many countries think about the land, about each other, about the possibilities of the future. One could say that there is excess of everything here, and not just in the land of milk and honey. And, once again, I don't know what the proper response is.

Your Arabic/Hebrew phrases of the week:

Different cultures -- Tarbooyote sho-note (Hebrew) -- Thiqaaffat muchtalifah (Arabic)

I'm vegan (English) -- Ani Tivoni (Hebrew) -- La akl lah-me, halbon, beyed, ah-sul, o semek (Arabic, literally "I don't eat meat, dairy, eggs, honey or fish" as there's no word for vegan in Arabic)

The Other Pilgrimage to Mecca

Last night we ventured into Amman for the second time, and met our friend Ahmed “Tupac” (here, if you’re named Ahmed, you need a nickname: in our phone alone are Ahmed “Fellata,” Ahmed “Tupac,” and Ahmed “Lebanese”). He brought us to a place we’ve heard praised by several people around Irbid: Mecca Mall. And, immediately, it was obvious why we’d heard so much: Mecca Mall is everything that Irbid is not. It is glitzy, it is foreign, it is humongous – within its walls alone are a bowling alley, a movie theater, a skating rink, multiple arcades, extremely expensive stores (Timberland, Polo Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, United Colors of Benetton) and a humongous food court that featured all of your American favorites: McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, Caribou Coffee. . . .

We wandered the mall for hours (largely because there is little else to do in Amman at night without involving alcohol), gawking at the expensive brands, the ridiculous amount of English, and the swarms of people that at times made the mall hard to navigate. We took a small splurge, and Ahmed and I each got a drink at Starbucks (ahh, that sugary American taste. . . .) and Daph grabbed an ice cream cone as we learned about Ahmed's background. His family lives in Saudi Arabia, but he was born in Eritrea and spent nearly a year in Turkey, so he has been around, and his English is so good that, coupled with his t-shirt and slightly baggy pants, it would be easy to take him for American, with a slight accent that could be from, vaguely, most ethnic inner cities.

For me, though, the main focus of the trip was the food. I pulled us all out to the grocery store across the street (somehow it seemed more interesting than the grocery store in the mall) and, though we failed in the tofu search, we found black beans. I could hear some vaguely classical music start shooting through the back of my brain, could see Raphael’s painting of Mary’s ascent to heaven. . . and we bought two bags. Then we headed back to the mall.

We had found a Chinese restaurant in the food court that had a vegetarian section on its menu and the last menu item was “Tofu and Vegetable Hotplate.” Come dinner time I headed straight there, and Daphna next door to Chili House, a local fast food joint that had a veggie burger. I approached the Chinese Restaurant meekly and asked the man at the counter in Arabic if there was anything other than tofu and veggies in the dish. “No tofu,” he said in English. And that was that.

The veggie burger, it turned out, was vegan, and I decided to try Daph’s before jumping in for my own. She brought it to the table and set it down – it was deep fried, on a bun with a slice of onion, a slice of tomato and a light serving of ketchup. The salad it came with was iceberg lettuce (the first time I’ve seen it here) with tomatoes, cucumbers, and beautiful slices of bell pepper. Daph bit into the burger, and mumbled, “What is this, potato?” And it was. The “burger” was like eating a latke on a bun. Other options at the food court were limited, so I had falafel.

Eating out in Jordan (and especially outside of Amman) as a vegetarian is a very difficult thing to do. As a vegan, it is limited to certain appetizers exclusively: hummus, falafel, ful, mutabal (basically babba’ghanoush), and a variety of appetizer salads. At non-traditional restaurants, it can be even harder – we accompanied Evan to an Italian restaurant before he left this week, and there was not a single available menu item that I could eat. For obvious reasons, we do a lot of cooking at home.

Beyond that, food can be difficult as soon as it involves more than just the two of us. We have been shy to invite friends over for meals (and even to join friends at the “family-style” restaurants around), as meals here are not considered complete without meat ("white beans or garbanzos?" doesn't seem to cut it), and suggesting that you are a vegetarian results in expressions of pity and the immediate question, “Why?” This is not a society given to meditating on the issues behind vegetarianism, and that is clear even in the practices of Hallal, which, we've been told, extends an animal’s suffering in order to best drain it of blood. But unlike in certain parts of Guatemala, where I almost felt bad rejecting meat (where some people, for economic reasons, clearly had no option other than what was immediately available), here I do not – this is a land of plenty, a cradle of civilization for the richness of the earth (and the produce here is incredible, especially as we move into summer). Indeed, veganism owes great debt to Middle Eastern cuisine: homos, falafel, lentils, tahini. People here very much have the option of vegetarianism, it is simply not (yet) considered.

So Amman verged on a complete gustatory success, but alas. The mall, however, did impress us, and as we pulled away we saw that another of the malls we’ve heard so much about was a mere 100 meters from Mecca Mall. From the outside it also appeared lavish, and huge. We were astounded by that, especially in the light of what we know to be the Jordanian economic position. It is certainly not horrible, but minimum wage here is just over $140 a month (wages are not paid hourly, and a friend is working 72 hour weeks for under $160 a month). As we frequently have trouble staying within our $70 weekly budget (which doesn’t include rent), it is difficult to understand how people make ends meet, and even more difficult to understand how Jordan can sustain dozens of luxury boutiques all next door to each other, especially when the 16% sales tax is added onto the already jaw-dropping prices (Ahmed had been quoted a price of 600 dinar – almost $900 – for a pair of shoes at one of the stores in Mecca Mall). We don’t see it here in Irbid, where there are nice buildings but nothing spectacular, but the presence of the malls speaks to the existence of a strong, powerful, upper class.

And, writing about the excursion today, it feels like being that much closer to home – that much closer to all those things "American" – makes us feel so much further away.

Your Arabic phrases of the day:
Limatha? – Why?
Matha? – What?
Shu? – What? (in the local Jordanian dialect)
Ayna? – Where?
When? – Where? (in the local Jordanian dialect)