First Impressions of Jordan

Alex is full of thoughts again today, so I'm givin him some air time again!  

5 hours in Jordan, and the jury, unsurprisingly, is still out for me.  First half hour was not the most pleasant.  After purchasing two visas for 40JD and collecting our packs from baggage claim, we exited customs to find that the taxi we had arranged with the hotel in Petra was nowhere to be found.  I asked the unfriendly man at “customer service” if I could use the phone and was pointed across the way to the tiny convenience store inside the terminal.  “You buy card to use phone” – excellent English; not sure he gets the idea of customer service.  I bought the 2JD calling card for 3JD, which is the beauty of a structural monopoly – if you are the only game in town, you can blatantly gouge the foreigners.  Long story short, our driver arrived shortly thereafter and things went uphill from there.

Our driver turned out to be Houssein, the exceedingly pleasant friendly brother of the man who runs the hotel.  For the first 45 minutes of our 2.5 hour drive he took it upon himself to teach us a bit of Arabic.  Then he turned on the tunes: mostly what sounded like American hip-hop remixed with an Arabic flare.  The best moment of the ride was when he pulled off on the side of the road at one of the hundreds of little ramshackle shops that dot the side of the Desert Highway.  He returned with a lit cigarette in his mouth and three little plastic cups of steaming hot tea with bits of sage floating in them.  Houssein finished his smoke and we drove off at 120 km/hr with the Yin-Yang Twins blaring.

At this point it was 9:00 at night, and Casey and I were both hungry and tired.  We declined his offers of dinner, but asked him to stop somewhere we might pick up some fruit to snack on instead.  He stopped at a little vegetable shop, where I selected some apples, oranges, and a pomegranite.  I placed the pomegranite on the scale, and about 15 seconds of Arabic was exchanged to my right.  I looked at Houssein for an explanation: “He says it is free, and welcome to Jordan!”  “Shukran!!  I have to learn a more complete way to say “thank you”.

So, why is the jury still out?  Jordan looks really rough, at least from the window of a cab on the highway.  It feels like a place that has first world infrastructure built over a third world country.  The highway is excellent, the filling stations look immaculate, and the police are everywhere.  Yet the houses and shops on the side of the road look almost bombed out.  Time for me to read a bit more 20^th century history and find out why things feel the way they do.