Wadi Rum, Aqaba - the Red Sea

Some things i wrote in a hasty email to brett yesterday:

This week i'm gonna see if im needed at Relief International, an NGO that helps Iraqi refugees. i'd be an English tutor. did i tell you about the Iraqi girl i met at the Palestinian rap/rock concert on thursday night? she works there and was excited to know that i was interested. i still have to ask spencer if its ok cuz its in east amman...we're not supposed to go to that part of town, especially alone. i know others who would want to go though.

this past weekend was amazing amazing AMAZING. i slept 2 nights under the stars in the desert. the stars were indescribable. lots of shooting stars. our little weekend group of 6 was so spontaneous i LOVED it. This was the plan in fact, to not plan anything more than 30 min ahead of time (at least to some extent). First, after church on friday (which included singing in the choir -love it- and a branch council meeting cuz im in the auxiliary RS presidency) we took a crummy bus to aqaba down on the coast of the red sea, ate, saw one beach, then took a small bus back to wadi rum, about an hour back up the road. it was midnight when we got on the bus. we planned on just gettin out and sleeping on the desert floor and then entering the park the next morning for our reserved jeep tour and night stay inside the "park". the thing is, we got to a security check point at about 1 am when we were the only ones left on the bus, and they said it was forbidden to divert from the main road so we wouldnt be able to sleep anywhere for free. no sleeping for free on the ground!!! geez, it took forever to finally give in to that one. luckily, the "friend" of the guard (everyone is a friend around here) that came to pick us up and bring him to his place of accomodation turned out to be really cool. we only paid 5 dinars each for the night, and most tourists pay about 50 each. it was an INCREDIBLE deal, prob cuz they didnt know what to do with us. so we rode in his truck to a bedouin camp and couldve slept in tents but we slept outside. in the morning i saw the spidery ants that the guard was trying to warn us about (they try to convince you that sleeping on the ground is not desireable because of insects, but we aren't just ANY tourists). but im actually really glad i didnt see the massive ant things until morning because i probably wouldn't have slept well. either way, we didnt get to sleep till 3 am cuz we sat around the lantern light with our bedouin friend and his fellow camp workers. there was a girl there from spain who didnt speak much english or arabic...we pretty much assessed that she is a prostitute or something of the sort because the man she was with was old, ugly, and had an injured back so she babied him the whole night. she's only here for 2 weeks. it was def fishy but she was fun to talk to in spanish. anyway we sat around eating watermelon and telling jokes in arabic and english while the other main tourist group slept in their tents. in the morning we had b'fast and then our falcon-training masculine bedouin leader man (hehe) gave us a ride to the village at the entrance of the park so that we could meet up with our guide. we met 2 german kids our age too, and invited them to join our group cuz we had a cheap price and they were sittin around waiting for some opportunity to go with a cheap guide that prob wasnt gonna come.



our guide was so cool. hammid. he spoke pretty good english for the most part, but we all spoke a lot of arabic with him too. we went around the whole day in wadi rum, through the desert, stopping along the massive rock mountains to climb (a lot, and high), look at 2,000 yr old engravings from caravans, eat soup that hammid made on a little fire, and take pictures. i got to drive the jeep too! stick shift in soft sand...yikes. but it was fun! sitting in the back of the jeep was pretty much bliss as well. wind, spectacular view, friends. we slept that night in a small camp set up in the wadi. hammid made a big dinner dish of vegetables and chicken with a pot of rice. he does pretty well with such skimpy provisions. turns out that we stayed there with an aramco couple! we talked a lot about Saudi and aramco. actually, i think if i were with non-cultured students that weren't studying the middle east, it would've been fine chatting with these folks, but eh... middle eastern studies and international relations majors are informed, and look at things differently. so it felt strange. i never thought it was cool to be an oil brat persay, but i did like living in saudi and i felt that i got a lot out of it. but lets just say i get more and more hesitant to say i was an aramcon. Besides talking about ron paul and foreign policy during lunch, a friend of mine also said that the UN is corrupt and ever since the US joined it, our congress is worthless and we pretty much have the UN directing our affairs, which isnt always the best for our country. man, i like ron paul but i just have so much conviction that a world power like the US is obligated to help in any genocide or humanitarian crisis in other countries...but this generally means that we have to side with someone, and that can mean siding with the bad guy. my friend reminded me of this when i mentioned darfur. he mentioned WW2 and how the US sided with Stalin, but he killed more people than Hitler did. i dunno what to think. i'm not very informed at all. i always wanted to work for the UN, thinking it is an organization of neutral aid and sometimes NOT neutral when it needs to be. i'm just not aware of the politics as much as i should be.

anyway, back to happy trip of goodness in the wadi rum: at night it was super dark cuz there was no moon and we sat up on a rock ledge and listened to the rowdy foxes right in our camp. every now and then we'd shine the flashlight on them until they'd run away. hammid put bones out so they'd get close. they were fooling around all night. i had no idea that foxes sounded so weird. they bark like little dogs but they also make other shrill and clickety noises. anyway, gini, daud, and i slept up on another rock ledge thing that night under the stars.

then the next day we went back to aqaba in 2 taxis with our german friends. they took us right to a secluded beach where we snorkeled and lazed around till late afternoon. it was fantastic. the water was cold! wonderful. i got SO sunburned on the back of my body...i didnt have swim shorts on so my white upper thighs are now SO red, they almost seem purple. that makes sense, considering i didnt put sunscreen on my legs (der), it was at least 100 degrees! i spoke arabic with the snorkle gear guys there too. they prob hung out with us under our palm frond umbrella because i offered them my dates and crackers.

we took taxis around 5pm back to the city of aqaba, met up with breanne and lauren (2girls traveling with another group) and ate before getting on a 7pm bus back to amman. while we were there though, gini, cory, and i went down to the rocks that enclose the harbor and jumped into the water right next to the guard shack haha. daud and isaac were distracting them so we got to swim before we were kicked out. i thought it was hilarious.

On the bus my seat assignment was next to chris furtado (he happened to be on the same bus as our little group), the older married guy in our BYU group that owns his own translation company: linguistic solutions. we watched "paradise now" on his ipod without english subtitles (he had to help me understand sometimes cuz he's seen it before) and then we studied vocab with flashcards he put on his ipod. language learning on ipods? this will be huge, and i dont just mean podcasts (which i've used already for beginner chinese - it rocks). then we talked the rest of the way (couple hours) about his job, me possibly interning for him in the future (who knows!), what programs and sites he uses for translation, his years of teaching english (tesl for more than 20 years!), networking, and books and people i should know. he seriously is such a wealth of information for me! oh, and speaking of networking, the saudi aramco couple gave me their card and said if my dad wanted a job back in dahran, he'd likely get it. thats what we've already heard though, but dad chose the job in SLC instead. prob a smart choice.


Ok thats the end of the email!
ps- you need to see "Paradise Now" if you havent already. -but only if you want to understand what it could be like to be a suicide bomber.

Now that i'm back in amman, having to sit on sunburned legs in class and do newspaper translations again, i want to go back to the open desert. It is Tuesday and here's my plan for the day:
1. get showered and go to the university of jordan with my roommate gini.
2. find our bags we left in the language center yesterday
3. do news translations in the library and go to classes.
4. hang out with my 2 muslim friends kharud and amal for an hour or so. this helps me get my daily 2 hours of speaking in, and it helps them learn some english every now and then.
5. go to the ladies gym. gini and i got memberships last week. ooh, can i tell you bout the gym? = not enough ventilation, no one wipes things down, girls talk on their phones while doin the treadmill, they take smoking and hubbly bubbly breaks in the cafe through the back door, and i was the only one actually running on the line up of treadmills. apparently when a man comes in to fix the AC, everyone clears out. haha, such interesting experiences.
6. home for warmed up dinner and possibly a walk with Jordanian sister tamara. this also helps me get speaking time in.
7. if there is time before bed, homework, but generally this never seems to happen.

Well, i hope you could read through all that! i love hearing from anyone who writes comments or emails me. thanks guys!