Turkey!

I'm so excited! I am leaving in two days for Turkey with one of my Turkish roommates. There are several reasons for this trip:

1. My roommate asked me if I wanted to go with her to Istanbul for a few weeks.

2. Of course I want to!

3. My visa expired a few weeks ago, so I have to leave the country and come back in anyhow.

4. The tickets are less than two hundred dollars round trip.

Adding together my roommate's small amount of Arabic and my better Arabic but nearly nonexistent Turkish, this should be interesting. We gesture a lot when we talk and carry around dictionaries, but we do manage to say quite a bit.

She told me yesterday that we would get to Syria by bus in the middle of the night, and asked if I was willing to wander around Syria in the dark with her (or something like that, in a combination of Arabic, Turkish, facial expressions, and gestures). Would I be too tired, or in too much pain? I told her, no, it's fine, I'll just load up on coffee and chocolate and more sugar and painkillers, and I'll be okay. It'll be fun!

On the visa front...the official at my college in charge of visas has been telling me tomorrow, tomorrow, insha'Allah for a good month now, and I don't think my visa application has ever left his desk; he wasn't even aware it was in there, until he asked me for something I'd given him weeks ago. He told me yesterday that if I pay a special tax the police will extend my visitor's visa my another three months, but I'm not supposed to be studying on that. I suspect he will just pocket my sixteen dinar 'tax' (about twenty five bucks) and continue to do nothing, but it's worth a try. At least then I would have a visa to show the Syrian police, who are well known for refusing people entry, or dropping them off at the nearest border, whether it's the most convenient or not.

Sometimes I wonder if I worry too much, or not enough.

Visa trouble

Once again, I’m in this country illegally; my visa expired four days ago. This has happened twice before, despite my attempts to avoid it. Bureaucracy in the Middle East is rightfully famous for being labyrinthine and slow.

During one visa-less period, my roommate’s mother was told by her neighbour that the police would come to our building and arrest me, and bring shame upon the whole family. My roommate’s mother was extremely unhappy with me, and I worked for her and lived in the apartment two floors below her, so I was also very paranoid and worried that I would ruin the reputation of the family that had been so kind to me; reputation is everything here, and people talk.

When the time came to go to the police station and find out if the intelligence service had decided to renew my visa, I packed a carryon and got in a cab, fully expecting to be jailed and deported. I checked in at the women’s guard post, went in through the women’s entrance, and waited a long time in line at various windows, so worried and nervous and hot that I thought I would vomit right there in the middle of the police station. I was one of the few women there, and all the others were waiting in chairs while their husbands crowded in front of the windows trying to shove their wives’ passports at the officials. I eventually realized I would just have to be aggressive and push my way through the crowd of men, or I would be there all day. Much to my surprise, the police made no mention of my being in the country illegally for a week and a half, and didn’t ask to see any of my supposedly required documents. They stamped my passport with the new visa, and taxed me two dinar. I asked one of the female police officers, “Is that all? Can I go?” and she confirmed that yes, they were finished. I was so surprised, I walked out through the men’s entrance in a fog, startling a lot of men. Never having known any foreigners, our neighbour had no idea how the visa process worked.

This is the third or fourth time in six months I have had to get a new visa, and I decided that this time I would make sure everything was ready well in advance to avoid being here illegally again. A month before my visa was due to expire, I plunged into a maze of bureaucracy, trundling back and forth to different offices to get the documents I needed. The official at my college was constantly telling me I would have my visa soon – tomorrow, even, but he never did anything with my application. Every time I went to see him, he told me something different and required another document; everyone I talked to told me to go see someone else. A month passed, and I felt like I had been dropped into a Kafka story.

On the day my visa expired, the school finally issued the certificate I needed for a student visa, confirming that I was enrolled with them. I tracked down the person who had it, and gave the certificate to Ustath Abdullah, the school official, who said I would have a visa the next day. Four days later, still no visa.

I was told to go get new passport photos taken, because my Canadian ones weren’t quite right (why did it take a month for him to decide that?). I squeezed onto a public bus and rushed to the souq one hot afternoon after class, and found a studio that would have the photos ready in an hour. I had to walk by a police building near the souq, and the guard fiddling with his gun and staring at me from two feet away as I passed was unsettling.

I submitted my stack of papers and photos just before the school closed for the day. Ustath Abdullah finally confirmed that I had all the paperwork in order, and asked me why I was in such a hurry to renew my (very expired) visa. I told him I was afraid of the police and leaving for Turkey very soon, and both he and the head of the school burst out laughing. The Ustath told me, “there is nothing to be afraid of, you can go anywhere you like and the police will not do anything. We have many students here who do not have visas.” It seems they also have many students walking around without passports either, judging by the bundle in his desk. He wanted to keep my passport again, but I wouldn’t give it to him.

Hopefully, I will have a new visa in a week, but in the meantime I am still nervous. It is illegal to be here without a visa, but it is hard to know which laws will be enforced. Jordanians can go to jail if they are caught without their government ID cards, but as a Canadian I have a certain amount of privilege.

I am going to Turkey in a week and a half, insha’Allah, and the person I am going with (Rukiye) is concerned we will have problems crossing the Syrian and Turkish borders if I’m an illegal alien. Syria is notorious for not letting people in, and I have a ticket for a bus going through it. Insha’Allah, Ustath Abdullah will do his job for once (if I pressure him enough); everyone I have talked to constantly has problems with their visas, because of him.

I’m looking forward to spending a week and a half in Istanbul, insha’Allah. It will be nice to get out of the dorm, and not to be so darned hot all the time. Rukiye speaks Turkish, a little Arabic and no English, and I speak some Arabic and a little Turkish, but somehow we understand each other. This should be interesting.

Is it morning yet?

I woke up at two thirty this morning to some guy playing with the loudspeakers on the masjid minaret. I'm not sure what all he said, but I heard "Helloooooo! Kayf halokum?!" The Arabic equivalent of "Hey, how's it going everybody?" The loudspeakers are loud, they're audible for miles, designed to wake up people who don't want to wake up for prayers at dawn, and directly above our dormitory. He carried on for a while, but I didn't hear any sirens.

Everybody else slept through it; you learn quickly here to sleep through the athan. I tried to sleep, prayed witr, made every du'a I could think of, recited Qur'an, tried to sleep again, had a snack (bread and zatar), oiled my hair, and wrote a lot of emails. I'm still awake, darnit, and I have a tajweed class today. And a very hoarse throat still.

Figiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Spitting Camel.

I can never think of post titles. I don't think we should have to have them.
(Thanks to CrazyNewt for suggesting an awesome, eye-catching title. I have a huge mental block lately.)

As quickly as the Turkish group arrived, they're gone again, after only two weeks. The college is closed for the next several weeks, and there are only three or four other people in the dorm. It is blessedly quiet, for once, and miraculously the internet is also turned on. Good thing, because the college library is also closed, so I can't use the computers there.

I have a week of intensive classes with one other student, and then a weeks' vacation before the next semester, when another Turkish group arrives. Our college is planning an umrah trip to Mecca during the last week of the vacation, but we don't know yet if it will happen. It is very difficult for single women to get into Saudi Arabia.

We went on a lot of bus trips around Jordan while the Turkish students were here. We visited all sorts of neat places - Ahl al Kahf, Petra, Wadi Rum, the Dead Sea, the Roman ruins at Jerash (actually just the gate, the girls wanted to go shopping instead), Ajloun Castle (one of Salahadin's castles), the shrines of three Sahaba and a battle site in Karak, tons of masajid and shrines, and other places that I can't remember right now. I am too tired to write about it now, but I did ride a camel, and almost fell into the Dead Sea (luckily someone caught me, and it isn't very deep around the edges).

I miss the Turkish girls, but I am very tired, and I am glad for the quiet. Alhumdulillah.

Pictures of Our Dorm Room

I tried seven different school computers and finally found one that sort of works and will let me upload pictures. No wonder there are so many, most of them don't work. So, here are a few pics of our dorm room. Yes, it's a mess, but four of us live there and only two of us are tidy. One of my roommates is Turkish, and the other two are ethnic Turks from France. None of them speak English, but luckily I remember enough French to use when I don't know how to say something in Arabic. Except the Turkish woman only knows a little Arabic (the Turkish girls speak Turkish together), so someone usually has to translate from Arabic into Turkish for her.

The room really is not big enough for four people, the table only seats two, and the closets are very small, but it's okay. We have a minifridge, although the school provides two meals a day, which is a good thing because the food is awful and expensive that I can't eat it, it makes me sick.

We are fortunate to have heaters in the rooms, and not to have to worry about the electric or gas bill. My roommates like to keep the room extremely hot and dark, and I like to have fresh air and daylight, but we tend to sleep at opposite times, so that works out okay. They stay up most of the night and sleep in the morning and afternoon, and I get up before dawn and go to bed early. I get rather cranky when people come into the room at all hours of the night and try to talk to me.

Here is one of our electric heaters, complete with roasting sweet potatoes. They are frequently used for heating bread, but people are always forgetting about the bread and setting it on fire.

We are lucky that there are only four of us in the room, most of the rooms have between five and eight or more beds. I don't think the school will be able to cram any more people into our room, which is why we chose it.

I do frequently wish that people would just leave me alone and quit asking me personal questions, it is one of the reasons I get up hours before sunrise. It's the only time I have any privacy.

Essential Items for Travel

Okay, not really essential, but things I always have to pack.

Toilet paper (top left).  Bathrooms generally do not have it, even in some homes.  They do have spray hoses, but it is nice to be able to dry off.

Hand sanitizer (top right). Bathrooms usually lack soap and towels. Luckily there is a market for little personal bottles of hand sanitizer, the large stores have whole aisles of them. I haven't heard any protests from Muslims here about alcohol jelly being haraam. It's haraam to drink or otherwise ingest intoxicants, and we're not drinking our hand sanitizer.

Chocolate. In case of low blood sugar, obnoxious men, or general chocolate deficiency. I managed to find actual M&Ms, made in the UAE.

Qu'ran and misbaha (bottom right). For long waits, bureaucracy, air turbulence, and terrible drivers.

An extra niqab. I forgot to include that in the picture. I can't count the number of times I've gotten coffee on a light-coloured niqab and walked around for ages without realizing it.

I should have packed an extra pair of glasses. Mine have been sat on, mangled by small children, and dropped repeatedly.

What are the little things that you always pack?

Winter in Amman

It's strange to hear people in Canada talking about Christmas and snow, while we have dates and olives ripening, flowers opening, and clear blue skies here. It's sort of a combination of spring and fall right now. The leaves on the grape vines are turning yellow and rust-coloured and falling into crunchy brown piles in the corners of the courtyards, the big hand-shaped fig leaves are wilting slightly and their verdant green beginning to leach away, and the nights are getting colder. Along the roadside, the top halves of the silver green olive trees are dotted with black fruit, the lemons are turning from green to yellow, and the orange trees are loaded with brilliantly coloured globes. A glance down shows parchment white narcissus budding, rose bushes covered in coppery emerald new shoots, and pink cyclamen flowers rearing up like fireworks among the fallen leaves.

When it started to rain in October, everything green was roused out of dormancy. The city is dotted with plowed fields tucked in between buildings and roads, sparsely skimmed with the pale green of new grass shoots. We have a lush patch of edible greens, mint, and thistles which appeared miraculously a month ago out of the previously dry, cracked, bare ground by our door.




These cyclamen are actually pinker than they appear here, my webcam does not deal well with daylight. They are native to Jordan, and sprout up all around the edges of our yard. For some reason, the kids don't stomp them like they do the narcissus.

I have no idea what this one is, but it does smell nice. (Edit: it's an eskeddunya tree)

The first image below is bougainvillea climbing an olive tree next to our gate. My roommate's mother calls it 'crazy flower,' but we don't water ours, so it doesn't get too crazy. I see it billowing over the walls of the rich people, who can afford to water theirs. The second is a photo I did not take, showing the actual colour. My webcam bleaches everything.

Perfume Shops

There are stalls here in Amman, often just a cubbyhole in the side of a building, lined with sparkling glass jars of perfume oils.

The essential oils can be mixed to order, diluted with alcohol to the desired strength, and packaged in whatever bottle the customer chooses. These shops can mix oils to imitate major brand-name perfumes. They cost only a few dinars, much more affordable than designer perfumes. Here's one my roommate's father had made for her, it's an imitation of a Saudi Arabian perfume called Daloo'ah:

I can sometimes smell people's perfume from across the street. There is even a perfume section in the baby aisle.
A very old perfume shop in one of the downtown souqs went up in flames only a month before I arrived here. It was probably an electrical fire; unfortunately the oil combined with cloth in neighbouring stalls burned very well, and the souq was largely destroyed. Here's an article from the Jordan Times about it.

Yay for Halal Food!

I got a little baggie of halal gelatin candies from a corner store today, they cost half a dinar (about 75 cents). I don't like them as much as the salty herring-shaped Swedish licorice I used to eat before I was Muslim, but they're pretty tasty.

One of the things I love about Jordan is being able to eat anything, without having to inspect the ingredient list for non-halal animal products. So many foods in Canada have gelatin, glycerin, animal flavourings, or alcohols hidden in them. Mentos, for instance, contain gelatin, as do many chewing gums. Ice cream contains flavourings with small amounts of alcohol (vanilla, for instance). Canned soups contain animal broth or fat. Most cheeses are made with rennet, which comes from cow's stomachs.

It is possible to find pork products here, as there are quite a few Christians, but I am told they are not very common and are clearly labelled. I have not yet seen any myself.