Eid

I spend the first few days of our break with my host family in Irbid. My host mother's mother lives there, as well as my mom's brothers and sisters. The first night, Friday, all of them came over for dinner. The sisters are all married and have kids, most of whom are in the same age range as Yazan and Sadeel, so the apartment was loud and could be dangerous to walk around in. We ate on the floor, from a large spread of shared dishes, picked up using pieces of pita (although I was given a plate so they could try to force extra food into me). There were kebabs of various types, meat cooked between pieces of bread, cucumber and tomato salad, pickles (the only thing I was permitted to do to help out was cut the pickles), and juice, which seems to be the Ramadan drink of choice. None of them speaks much English, but with my limited Arabic and Hamada as translator, I managed to tell them, when asked, that I liked Jordan, liked Obama and not Bush, and was not currently looking for a husband.

Niveen's brothers are the youngest in the family, I think, around my age, and still live at home. In Jordan, children typically are supported by their parents while in college and in fact live with them until they get married. Niveen's mother wears the hijab (Niveen seems to be the only one in her family who doesn't) so when they have friends over there is a specific room where they can hang out. I was confused when I arrived about why the apartment had two doors right next to each other, but it's so that the boys' friends can come and go without ever going into the apartment proper – the door between that room and the rest of the residence is, of course, kept closed.

On Saturday evening, it was announced that Eid would begin the following day, causing great jubilation particularly among those who had been fasting. And to make good news even better, later that night I had the opportunity to learn the Arabic word for rain – the first precipitation since the spring.

As generally happens when people have no morning obligations, we had been sleeping in late every morning of the holiday, and this pattern was continued even on Eid. Even when we were all up, for a long time the day didn't seem like anything special. The only real difference was that the men in the house, who had been the only ones fasting, could now eat with us, which for me just meant more people shoving Eid cookies (we ate practically nothing else that day) at me and ordering me to keep eating.

Finally, late in the afternoon, Niveen's mother and brother got dressed up and took Yazan out visiting or maybe to ask people for money – Eid is kind of like Halloween that way, except that kids ask for cash instead of candy. A little bit later some other relatives came over – those of us who were home were still in sweats and pyjamas, this being typical garb in Jordanian houses, but apparently that was all right. Finally, after they had left, Hamada and Niveen and Sadeel put on their nice new clothes and I put on the nicest clothes I have here and prayed it would be good enough, and we went out visiting.

We went to Hamada's brother's house, where his sister in law had made her Eid cookies by hand. It started raining again while we were there, which made all the kids super excited. Hamada's brother in Oregon called while we were there, so everyone, including me, got a turn to talk to him. His daughter, who is a sophomore at PSU, is thinking about coming to Amman with CIEE next year.

We went back to collect Yazan, now armed with a brand new toy gun that someone had unwisely given him, before going on to see Hamada's other relatives. There were a lot of people at that house, and I never really figured out how all of the were related to each other and my family, partly because I had barely been introduced to everyone inside before I was kidnapped by a group of younger girls and allowed to escape outside. Unfortunately, they were just as insistent about feeding me chocolate as the older women, but it was fun trying to talk to them. They spoke in a mixture of English and Arabic, which actually made things harder sometimes because I couldn't tell what language they were trying to talk to me in. I spent the last half of my time there walking up and down the street with a chatty 12-year-old, which was upsetting for Sadeel because she didn't want me to leave but she really didn't want to go too far from the house, either. I only understood about half of what was said to me, but she and I had a very nice conversation.

The next morning, Hamada went with me to the bus station so I could take the 10:30 bus back to Amman in order to get the bus to Aqaba at 2. Rachel (the girl I was traveling with) and I spent that night in Aqaba and, since it was finally allowed, went out for drinks with some other friends who were in Aqaba for Eid as well.

In the morning, we went down to the ferry dock and spent pretty much all day taking the “fast” ferry to Nuweiba and then getting a service to Dahab. The ferry ride itself was just about as advertised, just a bit over an hour, but after it departed late and we were then forced to wait on the boat for ages waiting to get off in Egypt, the whole experience from the time we got on till when we could finally leave took probably around five hours. Once on the ground in Egypt, we had to walk into a small air conditioned pyramid and back out the other side. Nothing happened inside, and there were no fences or barriers of any kind to prevent one from going around it, but for some reason passage through that pyramid was completely mandatory and we were all herded through, the few tourists and the masses of workers returning home. (For whatever reason, Egyptians are willing to do all the menial tasks Jordanians are too proud to do, and so despite high unemployment among young Jordanians, there are massive numbers of Egyptian workers in the Kingdom.) We managed to get a service with a bunch of other tourists, most going to Sharm el-Sheikh, and the ride to Dahab was mostly without incident. We did have to pass through several checkpoints, which presented no problem for any of us except the three Syrian men in the taxi, who had their passports checked every time.

In Dahab, we met up with Kris, our third travel buddy, who was already in Dahab getting dive certified. Actually, as Rachel and I were wandering about asking for directions to our hostel and looking lost, Kris and some of her diving friends happened to be strolling down the street. We spent the next two days lazing by the beach, splashing in the ocean, drinking milkshakes and $2 beers, and eating amazing, if expensive (for Egypt) food. It was really relaxing – Dahab is a really nice little town, despite being a huge nest of drug smugglers. (Because of the weird legal situation with Israel concerning the Sinai, Egypt doesn't do a lot of law enforcement in the area, and drug traffickers take full advantage.) One of the nicest things about it was that, though it was obviously a vacation town full of non-Arabs, most of the expats I met were actually living in the region (several were actually from Amman) and we met several Arab Jordanians as well.

On Thursday night, after a satisfying day of doing nothing, the three of us took a trip to Mt. Sinai. We departed Dahab at 11 PM and started climbing at about 1:30 in the morning. The monastery at the base was closed on Fridays, and that's apparently important to a lot of people who visit, so it was just the three of us and our guide on the path. We took a back way up, so once we got close to the top and met up with the main trail up, there were more people and some camels, but we were pretty close to the front of the back and kept working our way forward – I think the three of us were probably a bit younger and fitter than the average Mt. Sinai climber.

The last stretch up to the peak is entirely stairs, supposedly 750 of them, though I would like to ask whoever counted them how exactly they determined which rocks were stairs and which were just large irregularities in other stairs. We got to the top at 3:30 or 4 in the morning – it is entirely possible that we were the first to arrive on that particular day, aside from the Bedouin guides and coffee vendors – and had about an hour and a half to wait until the sunrise. It had been nice and warm hiking up (climbing hills will do that to a person) but once we had seated ourselves on an appropriately scenic rooftop, the chill and wind really started to make themselves felt. The three of us huddled together under every piece of clothing we had brought – our guide was smarter and rented himself a blanket and two mattresses – and tried to rest despite the cold. Somehow the time passed and eventually we sat up and discovered that we were no longer alone. There weren't huge crowds, but definitely more than there had been when we lay down. Now wearing literally every piece of clothing I had with me (FYI, if your ears are ever freezing and you lack a hat, a t-shirt with the sleeves tied behind the head makes a great hijab/kufiyyah-inspired head garment that does a great job of protecting not only your ears but your neck, forehead, and even nose, if need be), we finally got to see the sun rise, which was lovely. By this point, however, sleep deprivation was making us giggly and a little crazy, so we spent as much time taking photos of each others' bundled up forms and making ninja shadows on the rock wall behind us as enjoying the traditional view.

Eventually we did have to walk back down, which would have gone faster if we hadn't been stuck behind a large family of German tourists who were for some reason very cautious about descending steep uneven stone stairs. We had to wait a bit for the bus to take us back to Dahab, and we were all pretty much falling asleep by the time it got there. I remember almost none of the ride back. We ate lunch in Dahab (a tip if you ever go: for an excellent cheap lunch, go early enough to order one of the breakfasts – the Egyptian breakfast, for instance, includes pita bread, hummous, and enough other things to be plenty filling, and its much cheaper than getting one of the actual lunch dishes) then back to Nuweiba to ferry it home to Jordan. Again, the waiting around (to get on the boat in Egypt, on the boat in Egypt, on the boat in Jordan, to get our passports back in Jordan) was what took the longest time, and it was getting pretty late by the time we were ready to go anywhere. Luckily, our hotel did serve dinner. While we were eating we made the acquaintance of the group of South African pilots drinking at the next table, and ended up staying up a bit later than we had intended. As it turned out, they all lived in Amman, so we exchanged numbers and agreed to meet up again back home.

Only Rachel's cell phone was still with us and charged at that point, and somehow in the transition from Egypt to Jordan it had acquired the wrong time, so we missed our bus in the morning. This turned out to be a good thing, because the JETT buses run from Aqaba to Amman every two hours and now we had time for breakfast. We were back in Amman by 2, just in time to get started on homework for school the next day.