i love the smell of hizbollah in the morning

This region is going crazy. I fielded my first panicked mom call two nights ago. It was actually pretty cute, just asking me to email her daily saying that I am alive. I am going to think of creative ways to send that message, since I am going to be doing that for the next 50+ days.

For some background: An Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped on June 25. Israel moves into Gaza, promising to beat the shit out of the Strip until Shalit is released. This involved bombing a big power plant, and knocking out a bunch of other stuff. Israel clarifies why it is rolling out the big guns over one kidnapped soldier: actually, this strike is more about knocking Hamas down a notch. Escalations continue in Gaza. Meanwhile, on July 12 (Wednesday), Hizbollah grabbed two Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese border. Israel responded by promising to beat the shit out of Hizbollah. The Hiz rains rockets on Northern Israel, and gets one in Haifa. Hizbollah has said now that if Israel touches Beirut, they will come for Haifa.

Every time I get into a cab and the news is on the radio, it's all "yisraeel" "hizbollah" "Libnan" and stuff like jeysh (army). I can't really understand beyond that, but Jordan kind of sits as this buffer in the middle of a Middle East that is blowing up. Amman is a departure point for a lot of people headed to Iraq as contractors. A shit-ton of Palestinians live here. Now Israel is fighting in Gaza and Lebanon. The feeling here is that Israel has lost its mind, that America is backing it up, and that above all, it sucks but no one is doing much about it...yet.

I just got an email from a friend who is staffing a summer program in Israel, and it is quite a different reality -- seeing as there are rockets falling on all the cities in the North, even the little shitty ones. Then this girl I work with has a cousin who studies in Lebanon and can't get home to Jordan because the country is blockaded. Then you go to a cafe here, and the hookahs are bubbling away.

The way we have felt it in the office so far is there was this big River Jordan Experts Meeting planned for this week, to involve a bunch of UN and other international experts, along with Jordnian, Palestinian and Israeli mayors. They were supposed to tour the river and look at how disgusting it is, and see if it would be eligible to become a UN World Heritage Site. But last week already, with Gaza boiling over, the whole thing was canned.

Thank you to everyone who has weighed in on the topic of how to make friends. Andrew suggested I spend money (i.e. go to hotel bars). Ruby said I should invest in perfume. Olivia is all for me inviting myself to other people's houses. The consensus appears to be that I should shower.

So I took the initiative today and spent longer in a mall than I have over the last 4 years. I bought some heels and more shirts to go to work. Hopefully I will stop moping around this city and enjoy it, even if I will be doing that mostly alone. Any further suggestions on how to make friends here would be great.

Here's something cool - the walls and ceiling/roof divisions here are paper thin. I keep hearing a bubbling upstairs, which is periodically interrupted - it's a hookah. This is a big improvement over the usual scraping of chairs across the floor and hammering.