Watching the Flytilla

Arabic classes start in 2 days, I’m doing a lot of hanging out. I haven’t managed to find a home stay, but I’m happy in my hotel. There are a lot of tourists who pop over from Europe, it’s weird to me, they catch a cheap Easyjet flight direct to Amman and have a one week or two week holiday, then fly home.

It’s a great place for intel. Heaps of single female travellers... we now outweigh the pairs and the guys massively, times have changed. And a lot of have come through Israel/Palestine, with stories of interrogation and how they avoided getting stamps in their passports... or failed and got the dreaded stamps.

Here is the deal. Palestine is occupied by Israel. Israel controls all the borders into and out of Palestine, and they really don’t like people visiting Palestine at all. So to get into Palestine, all visitors must pretend that they are only visiting Israel, or going to Bethlehem on a Christian pilgrimage visiting scared sites.

At the moment there is a pro-Palestinian campaign called the Flytilla (in reference to the flotillas that attempted to get to Gaza), International activists are intending to get to Bethlehem. The difference is, they are not going to lie at the border about their intentions. At the border they are saying that they are intending to travel to the occupied West Bank to stand in support of the Palestinians.

Of course they are being stopped at the airport and sent home.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/04/201241545637130915.html
(at the bottom is Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s response... he's a dick)

Israeli nationals at the airport have also been arrested for the crime of holding up "Welcome to Palestine" signs.

Israel also managed to prevent the activists from even leaving their home countries.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/07/2011712891421784.html
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/236403.html

and some airlines are getting in trouble for it
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israels-behest-woman-removed-air-france-flight-not-being-jewish

This is the 3rd year of the Flytilla, and I think it’s doing a good job of getting people talking and getting media attention to the issues of freedom of movement, and freedom of speech/thought. There has been some good discussion in Israeli media on the left
http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/sights-that-the-flytilla-activists-weren-t-allowed-to-see-1.424717

and on the right
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?ID=266099&R=R1

Well I assume Jerusalem Post is the right... I might just be confusing right wing with terrible design.

Anyhoo, I won’t be crossing the Israeli controlled border for another month. And after talking to a lot of people travelling through, I have also decided not to join up with the International Solidarity Movement, I don’t know enough about the situation to join any political activist groups, and also word on the ground is that the use of short term international activists can leave negative repercussions for the Palestinians who do not have the choice to leave, long after the internationals have gone.

Instead I have started to apply for longer term volunteer positions teaching English.

Ruins of old buildings

I keep thinking about money, it’s a weird feeling having to pace out my finances for a long period of time, and also not earning. The Jordanian Dinar is about 1:1 with the British pound, but I have to remind myself, I don’t have British pounds in my New Zealand bank account.

So I have a daily budget that I always go over. But have allowed enough for trips to many of the historic sites. This place is oooold, really old, stupid old, like literally ancient history type old. And here are some photos...

A Byzantine place 5 mins walk from my hotel, and that white dot is the moon.

Inside of of the buildings at the Amman Citadel, 15 mins walk from my hotel.

Umm Quais at the very tip top of JOrdan, this is a view of Syria, and Golan Heights. 

Sun hats for sale. 

Jerrash, about an hour North of Amman. 

A museum in Jerrash.

Jerrash

Amphitheater in Jerrash... The roams love their amphitheaters, there were 2 in Jerrash, a couple in Amman, Also in Petra, this place is littered with Roman amphitheaters.

If I had read my guide book or paid for a guide I would be able to tell you what it is, but all I can say is the the fluro pink ice cream I bough of the kid was delicious in the heat of the day. 

Hercules temple at the Amman Citadel behind my hotel.  

Cool huh.

Keffiyeh

As we all know all Arab men wear tea towels on their heads, sometimes they wear an italian restaurant tablecloth, but mostly a tea towel.

I fell in love with the keffiyeh in Yemen, the little old men (who were far more adorable than the young men) wore the beautifully coloured scarves smoothly placed over the shoulders of their suit jackets. I bought a couple there, lost one and wore the other around my neck over the NZ winters.

The Gulf Arabs wear plain white keffiyeh (In different regions it has different names if you google them you'll see the different styles), they sit smoothly on the head and are held down with a black ring (agal), Actually in the gulf their whole outfits are white, bright white, they must go though a lot of bleach.

In Jordan the tradition is the red and white keffiyeh, I heard the red and white ones are for people from a country with a king and only if the wearer has made the hajj... I also heard the red and white is for supporters of Hamas (and the black and white a supporter of Fatah), I have als been told not to listen to that, it's a load of rubbish.

I think of them like the Scottish tartans; they denote history and tribal affiliations but the ones I like most are just invented to look cool. My favourite tartan is the Royal Stewart tartan, invented by an Englishman for an English king and made popular in the era of punk rock, now mass produced in China for shops like H&M.

The black and white keffiyeh is connected to Palestine, and because of icons like Yasser Arafat and Leila Khaled, are now linked to Palestinian solidarity. Originally they were produced only in Palestine, but because of the increasing demand (The ones sold in Camden are half the price of the ones in Amman) the Chinese manufactures have reduced the Palestinian keffiyeh manufacturing to only one lonely factory Ironically the desire to support Palestine has put them out of business.

I bought a pile of them in Amman, I was pleased to see they came out of a box labeled “Palestinian Trading Company” after all the negotiation, mint tea drunk and a price agreed on the seller closed the box... the Palestinian Trading Company is a tea importer, the shop owner was using an old tea box to store his stock in, and the keffiyeh I had bought off him were most likely made in China the same as the ones sold in Top Shop and Urban Outfitters.

Oh well, I sent them to my old workmates in NZ, delightfully they sent me back photographs. Fashion statement, political statement or practical accessory, I love em.

I attacked a Bedouin

I got into my very first physical fight ever last night. It wasn’t really a fight I attacked a man, a Bedouin man in Petra.

But let’s start a little earlier.

I arrived in Amman, the capital of Jordan, every interior stinks of stale smoke, my hostel duvet feels like it’s stuffed with lumps of sawdust held together with rat shit, whiney music blares constantly, it’s loud, it’s hot, it’s smelly and I love it. There is no where in the world I’d rather be than right here.

I have signed up for a month of Arabic lessons, but classes don’t start until the 18th of April, so I have a couple of weeks to explore. I’m going to see if I can arrange a home stay while I study, it will probably help to learn Arabic faster.

2 nights ago, with 2 lovely Australians from my hostel I got a bus 4 hours south to Petra. Petra is one of those ‘must see’ places, so why not. My plan was arrive, see Petra, one night in a hostel, a package overnight tour to Bedouin camp in Wadi Rum, and then back up to Amman. The Australians decided to go there and back in one day. Crazy.

Petra is magnificent. I got chatting to a local guy called Lost. He was cool, he showed me around, introduced me to his cousins, we smoked apple shisha (apple tobacco though a water pipe) I rode his mule (not a euphemism), He invited me to spend a night in his cave, I’m sure as hell not turing that offer down. I went back to my hostel that night and promised to meet him in his village the next day.

He has a cave in Petra, and he also has a house in a village next to Petra. The village is full of his family. An aunt can be either an aunt, or another wife of his father, and the children of the father’s other wives are sometimes called cousins, sometimes brothers and sisters, so everyone was an aunt, uncle, cousin, brother or sister.

I met him the next day, and he took me back into Petra. I learned that when descending a steep rocky cliff on the back of a mule my swear words of choice are “holy shit buckets”.

We spent the day hanging out with his friends and cousins, he took me to a natural spring where we had a picnic with yet another cousin and his ridiculously pretty French girlfriend. In the evening we watched the sunset over Little Petra while one of his cousins cooked an amazing meal of chicken and vegetables on the fire coals.

Here is where I went wrong:
1. I kissed him
2. I brought him a gift of whiskey.

In my defense:
1. he’s hot.
2. from all accounts he and his friends were regular drinkers, he had lived in the Czech Republic for 3 years (with a girlfriend), travelled to places like Germany, Italy & Thailand. So it’s not like I was corrupting a totally innocent Muslim man with my terrible western ways.

Turns out the cousins/friends we were hanging out with last night didn’t drink, so Lost got stuck into the bottle himself. And as he got drunk he became a bit of a dick “why do you go back to Amman? It is because you don’t like me.” I told him to stop drinking, but I didn’t take the bottle away from him (I should have, but it was a gift, he’s an adult, I’m not his babysitter).

He didn’t eat the amazing meal his cousin prepared, and he kept drinking and went from being a dick to being an arsehole. I said, “I’m not staying in your cave tonight because I don’t like you when you are drunk, I will pick up my bag from your house and go to a hotel tonight.”

I was upset and disappointed.

His cousins/friends dropped us back at Lost’s house where I had left my bag. Now it was just the two of us, he was steamin’. I went in, used the toilet, and grabbed my bag to leave. It was about 8.30pm, We where in the lounge which opened out to an open balcony area on the 2nd floor of his house.

He blocked the door with his body, I asked him to move, he wouldn’t, I asked him to move again, he wouldn’t, he started to grab me. With my left hand I slammed his head into the doorframe by his neck, I kept my left hand grasped firmly around his neck. I was still on the inside of the room, he (understandably) tried to lunge at me. With my right hand I grabbed his balls and squeezed hard, he made squeaking noises though his restricted airway. In this position, with him pinned to the doorframe I got out the door, released him and started to head for the stairs.

He grabbed my hand. He is bigger and stronger than me, but he was really drunk and unstable. When I was about 14 years old (over 20 years ago) I had done a self defense course, up until last night I had never used anything from it. I used my free hand to grab my trapped hand by pulling it through the weakest point in his grip, the gap between the thumb and fingers.

Then I ran down the stairs and into the street. Predictably within 20 metres there were a bunch of guys hanging out. I stopped amongst them, teary, angry, out of breath and full of adrenaline. One said “Problem?” I nodded. Lost appeared on the street. “Did he hurt you?” “No, I hurt him, he’s angry, he is also drunk.” “Ok, we take you away, anywhere you want to go.”

I stayed the night in the village with one of Lost’s cousins, he drove me to the bus stop the next morning. I’m glad I did not go back into the town, there is already a bit of animosity between the towns people and the Bedouin, I did not want give the wrong idea about Bedouin people because on the the whole they are warm, welcoming, kind, and open. Just don’t add alcohol.

So much for keeping the blog concise.

Before you sympathise with me remember: I followed a stranger and his friends into the desert and I gave him whiskey, when it became apparent he was not a good drinker I did not tip out the whiskey, and although I was surrounded by very lovely, helpful sober people I did not ask one of them to escort me inside while I grabbed my bag.

And before you chastise me remember: I am always surrounded by people here, I’m never more than a scream away from assistance. Sure it was dumb, I promise I’ll reign it in and be more careful.

I would promise that I”m not going to hand out any more whiskey to local Arabs, but I still have 2 small bottles of duty free whisky in my bag for gifts or trade.

Back on the road... or in the air

Hello,

Long time I know. I’m back travelling, so I thought I should get back to blogging again too. This time I’m kitted out. Half my pack is weighed down with cables, adapters, dongles and cords. I have a MacBook, iPhone, external hard drive, Kindle, camera and iPod... I don’t yet have insurance I should really think about getting some.

Just to catch up, after returning to New Zealand in November 2009 I got a job as an office administrator which I really enjoyed, I started up the Wellington branch of Dr. Sketchy and ran it for 2.5 years, did a few burlesque gigs and other stuff about which I wrote and performed an award winning, critically acclaimed, sell out stage show. And then I left. Cause that’s how I roll.

I’m writing now on the flight from New York to Frankfurt. I have taken the logistically ludicrous but nonetheless fun path to Jordan via Sydney (4 hours), Tokyo (one week with glorious hostess Laurel), London (4 days to hang out with people of above average sexual attractiveness), New York (2 weeks submerged in bohemian, creative, burlesque bliss) and Frankfurt where I’ll be spending 13 hours, and if they have free wifi, where I’ll be posting this blog (they didn't I'm posting from Jordan).

My Journey so far:

So here’s my plan: I don’t have one. I have ideas, Arabic classes in Jordan, and volunteer work in Palestine. Maybe a trip to Damascus depending on what’s going down in Syria. With this blog my plan is to be more concise, more regularly and with more photos. I have the technology. I also would like to figure out this whole tweeting business. I have mastered Facebook.

I think I have saved enough money to stay for a year. I think, but who can say where life will lead me and how much it will cost.

So, less writing and more photos here are a few shots from my journey so far:

Tokyo:

London:

New York:

Ok, it wasn't all bright lights, big cities. There was Spring sunshine, friends and wondrous adventures, here is a little more perspective...

Japan:

London:

and New York: