Whither Free Food?

The offer is on the table for me to get free dinner until the end of my trip. Only proviso: it would probably involve sexual relations with an Austro-Iranian man in his late 30s/early 40s who has a wife and kids in Tajikistan. I met him in one of my intrepid “pick up a foreigner” moments in a café, and invited him to a party across the street for expats. This spiraled into him asking me to dinner the next night. I was already having my doubts when at around midnight, when we left the restaurant, he suggested we take a walk in Amman. Irresistible as a walk alone with a strange older man in the middle of the night in a foreign country is, I suggested I take a cab ride home and ignored his calls the next day.

The free food is so tempting, but I think I just found my threshold.

Yesterday I went to the sleepy town of Salt, which was once a rival to Amman as the capital of Jordan. Then everyone dumped loads of money into Amman, and left Salt alone to be a small community with old Ottoman buildings still standing.

Old Ottoman building.

The entire trip cost me JD 1.40. That was the cost of the buses there and back and a cab ride home. Museum entry was free, and some old dude insisted on paying for my lunch. I am on a roll here!

Salt used urban planning to create open space and benches on the streets. Apparently Amman never got the same memo.



PETA this: Chicken shop in Salt.


The infamous Arab squat toilet. Please note the lack of any paper. If you can zoom in, you can see the fetid water on the floor. Peeing in this is a real challenge; you have to roll up your pants of the floor and down off your butt and balance your bags on yourself so they don't touch the disgusting floor. On the other hand, I just heard of a guy who used to take off his jeans while trying to go. This is in the Salt municipal building.

Big news: I have a research topic. The municipalities of Safi and Tamar, in Jordan and Israel, will be cooperating this summer on reducing or eliminating their housefly populations. Most of the flies are coming from Jordanian farms that use chicken manure and don’t treat it properly, thus inviting a huge fly population. These babies cruise over the Dead Sea to the Israeli side and annoy tourists. They also spread diseases that cause eye infections and diarrhea.

My article will focus on why Jordanians in Safi have chosen to be on board, and how the politics makes them view their cooperation with Israel. The next step is finding a translator to help me communicate with the farmers and residents of the town. I don’t think I am going to tell him/her about the high chance of spending the day walking through chicken shit.

There is quite a happening expat scene here, and I have gone with some Americans and Brits to see Pirates of the Caribbean II with them (terrible) and dished about politics. Unfortunately most of them are soon going home, but then again, I am going to be wrapping up my tenure at FoEME soon myself and traveling.

There continues to be general dismay in Jordan about what is happening in the region. Yet Jordan is so interesting because all these people – millions, even the lefties in my office – are pissed off as hell, and yet NOTHING HAPPENS besides some protests and a lot of angry blogging. There is also an ever-tighter rent market; I know one guy whose landlady hiked the rent 300 JD with two weeks notice, probably because she knows a Lebanese refugee will take it.

And as Condoleezza Rice put it, we are seeing the “birth pangs” of a US foreign policy statement on Israel. I had mistakenly thought Bush was going to step in and call for a ceasefire and negotiations. Instead, he expedited an emergency shipment of weapons to Israel and implied that the IDF gets another week to chase mirages across southern Lebanon and level Beirut.

This is a real departure in our traditional foreign policy, which has until now entailed the US putting forward the face of an honest broker for peace – Carter guided the Egypt-Israel treaty, Clinton the Jordan-Israel one, and he tried hard for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement as well. I will admit however, that even that former stance involved arming Israel to the teeth. At any rate, the US is clearly taking sides here.

One interesting point, though, is that no one else is stepping up to the plate on this issue. Not Bush, neither Tony Blair, despite massive protests in London. Where is any other leadership to actually call for a smart solution to this stupid war? According to sugardaddy, Europe’s foreign policy is nonexistent, because everyone just wants a quiet, cushy little life punctuated by foreign accents and cheap imports.

And finally, I would like to nominate these people at Hashem's in Amman for a prize for the best cheap hummus ever.