I was quite dreading coming back to work after 2 weeks of vacation traveling, but now that I'm back and cruising through the highways of Erbil again, and getting laughed at by the Kurdish taxi driver who seems to find my Asian eyes and nose really fucking hilarious, I find I've actually missed this dusty ole place with its hole-in-the-wall restaurants selling fake pizzas, and gutter-lined bazaars displaying the tackiest clothes, and the highway picnics, which now include roaring fires because it is so cold these days, and the Kurds themselves who are very kind to us foreigners everywhere we go. Settled into my spacious apartment once again, I feel like I've come home- a feeling that had gone amiss during my vagabondish travels from hotel to hotel the last two weeks. Traveling and seeing the world is fun and interesting, but there is always that seed of loneliness that accompanies you every step of the way, no matter how welcoming the people are, and it really blooms when you're sitting alone in your hotel room on New Year's Day.
Luckily, I met the kindest taxi driver at the Amman airport. He had the voice of Sean Connery minus the strange 'sh' lisp, and he disapparated my blues away by the sheer goodness of his heart. Before heading down to Aqaba, he drove me to downtown Amman where we stopped by at a kebab restaurant to grab a bite to eat. When I entered the restaurant, I saw a man laying down a small rug and then kneeling down on it to pray to the Almighty. On the way out, another man had taken over his spot and was taking his turn to pray and bow prostrate to the floor. Jordanians are a very religious crowd. It is hard to compare them to the religiosity of the Kurds because I am always in school during the day until 4 pm, but just the fact that I have met so many unreligious Kurds at this officially non-denominational school gives me the impression that Jordanians are the more religious, though by no means fanatical. In fact, from my chats with Jaser, the taxi driver, I get the impression that Jordan is a fairly peaceful bit of land in the otherwise torrid Middle East, where the inhabitants feel favorably toward their king and queen for the most part, where the currency is worth more than the dollar, where the poverty level is not bad at all, and where the cab drivers are gentlemen. But of course, this impression stems from one person's experience during one day in Jordan, so it is mostly meaningless, and very likely false. Read on, and dare to be misled!
As we made the 3.5-hour drive down to Aqaba in the southernmost tip of Jordan, I was fairly quiet, but I asked him some questions and found out that many Jordanians do speak both Arabic and English, and on a personal note, that he had lived in Kuwait for 17 years, had a couple daughters- one of them married and teaching English in Amman, another still in college- and his wife had recently fallen sick and was hospitalized. I took a long nap under the afternoon sun, and woke up to find that the landscape had changed into something incredible- huge, red, jagged mountains rising from the flat desert plains. They reminded me of Kurdistan, the way the mountains just completely eclipsed and dominated the land for miles, and the way they filled me with awe, but they were different too- not rounded softly and dimpled, nor brown, but jagged, edgy and iron red. We passed by several signs pointing to Petra, and I was tempted at each one to ask Jaser to turn into one of them, but in the end, I was in the mood to chill so I let him drive on southward. Soon I saw a shimmering blue oval in the distance which was the Red Sea, and Jaser pointed out the cluster of buildings to the right. “That is Eilat, in Israel.” Wow, I was seeing Israel! I stopped to take a picture like a good tourist.
“If we take this other road for about 20 hours, we can be in Saudi Arabia,” he added. Wow, how strange to be so close...
He dropped me off at a super-fancy “international” hotel and said he would grab a bite to eat and pray and then come back to pick me up. While lying on a lounge chair perched in the sand , mere feet away from the pristine blue Red Sea, I thought how unreasonable I was to have paid a taxi driver so much money to drive so far just to spend 2.5 hours at a hotel beach. I could have stayed at the airport and spent no money, or I could have gone to Petra for less money and seen an ancient rose-red city carved from the rocks. Instead, given 14 hours in Jordan, I chose to go as far south as one could go from the airport for 2.5 hours of relaxation and doing absolutely nothing at a glitzy hotel beach, without even a swimsuit to enjoy the sparkling waters of the jacuzzi and pools. The idea just screamed unreasonable and silly, and yet I felt no regret because this was the year I had no one to think of but myself, the year I had no one to answer to or follow except my own whims and fancies, no matter how unreasonable or silly they seemed.
At the end of the 2.5 hours, I walked out the hotel and felt unreasonably happy to see my kind taxi driver waiting there for me just like he had promised, and during the 3.5 hour drive back, I decided to befriend him the best way I knew how to befriend a stranger in a foreign land- by asking him how to say this and that in his native tongue. I fancied the idea of learning the entire Arabic language during a 3.5 hour car ride in Jordan, though I knew that this was just as unreasonable as the rest of my ideas that day. How do you say “unreasonable” in Arabic? I should have asked him that...The language lesson eased into actual conversation in English, and he told me about his travels all over the Middle East and in Germany. I just loved how every time I asked him about each country he visited, whether it was nice there, he responded with the most genuine “Sure, sure” followed by some positive adjective or another like “wonderful” or “lovely”. I am drawn to people with monotonously (but genuinely) positive attitudes. I loved the way he said “Sure” because it felt like Sean Connery was sitting next to me, saying “Sure, sure” over and over again. Night fell long before we reached our destination, and I happened to look out the window at one point and was awed by all the stars that were visible in the desert sky. “I'll have to come back in the spring when it's warmer and go camping in the desert under these stars,” I told Jaser, “do you think that would be nice?” “Sure,” said Sean.
We got to talking about religion and his married daughter. “You know why I like Islam?” He told me he liked Islam because Islam says daughters must bring their love interest home and he must ask the parents for permission to marry or date her. “It is not like that in other places. I saw this in Germany!” he insisted, “In Germany, I saw, they bring many boys home, and don't tell the father and mother.” I nodded, amused by his fatherly concern. I told him I was still as single as ever. “That is good! You are young, you should do other things.” I agreed but it would be nice to do these “other things” with someone by my side to share with. “I hope you will find a Muslim man,” he said, “Muslim men are good. You know, in the Qur'an, it says once you are married, you must never look at anyone else. You must look after your wife and no one else. And I- believe me! I never look anywhere else, I look only after my wife,” he insisted vehemently. I believed him 100%, thinking about his sick wife and how beloved she was by this man. “I hope one day, you will be with a Muslim man,” said he, “inshallah!” I nodded, at the very least pleased by his well-wishes. By this time, my blues were completely washed away by the grace and tide of well-wishes of this kind old man who cared enough to wish me a good Muslim man for a husband. I could not and cannot see myself with a Muslim man, but that was beside the point. Was all of Jordan's taxi service serviced by a league of extraordinary gentlemen such as my taxi driver? I wondered later at the airport.
According to one of my Canadian colleagues who I ran into at the Amman airport, and who had spent several days in Jordan camping in the desert with the Bedouins and climbing Petra on a donkey, this was actually true: Jordan's taxi drivers are extraordinarily and unreasonably nice. She also said the Bedouins lied to her about how nice the tent was going to be, that it was really weird at first getting scrubbed down by another woman at the Turkish bath, and that Petra was “really amazing actually.” So there's a second point of view for y'all. I was so overjoyed to see her and all the Lebanese teachers who happened to share my flight. I had loads of fun telling them about my adventures in their home country- the Music Hall, Jeita, the shopping, the Mediterranean, the music, the people, my New Year's Eve at Dunkin' Donuts-, as well as about my trip to Egypt- the traffic, the donkeys among the traffic, the baksheesh, the Pyramids and the Sphinx, the Nubian village, the racist boatman-, and about my unreasonable trip down to Aqaba with Sean Connery. One of the best parts about traveling comes after the fact- when you're telling stories.
That was the best part about coming home to Kurdistan. I loved sharing my stories and hearing all about the individual adventures of my colleagues who had gone elsewhere- Dubai, Thailand, Turkey, Jordan. And boy did I miss a lot of people here. I was surprised by how happy I felt to see some of their faces and by the genuine affection I felt for people whom I'd met just 4 months ago. Some were greeted with huge bear hugs where the feet momentarily left the floor, others with 3 kisses on the cheek (left-right-left; in the Jordan aiport, I saw Jordanian men do one kiss to the left, then four consecutive kisses to the right!), and others with just an overjoyed “heyyyyyy!” because some just aren't the touchy-feely type, though they were no less missed. So many ways of saying hello.
One was greeted with a handshake and introduction. We have yet another new teacher here- a young American girl fresh out of college, but already a globe-trotter. I'm grateful for her company as much as she is for mine, and we are together determined to make the most out of our last 6 months in Iraqi Kurdistan. Today right after school ended, we had an adventure trying to find a taxi out into the city, and ended up hitching a ride from a man posing as a taxi driver, who was clearly not a taxi driver because his car lacked the distinctive orange markings of an Erbil taxi. But hey, we were desperate. Then we roamed through the labyrinthian Lenga bazaar, shared a lahambajeen (the fake pizza I was referring to earlier), cabbed it back to the school and here is where I apparently provided endless amusement for the taxi driver just by looking Asian. Attempted to get hooked on The Wire (still not happenin'), and finally drifted off sleepily to our respective pads. What is the big deal with The Wire? I'll give it three more chances before I ditch it forever and move on to the John Adams drama or Arrested Development.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a much more successful viewing. It made me think a lot about getting old, about the intense similarities between babies and old people, about the beauty of ballet, and about my hotel stays in Lebanon and Egypt. Watch the movie and you'll see what I mean. It is long (because it has to be), and poetic, and reminds me of Forrest Gump.
Jiro, one of our young school guards, stands in front of the stoops of our apartment complex. He often reminded me of a loafing hound: lazy and loyal.
No comments:
Post a Comment