taking the long way home. almost to the finish line.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

and because life is suddenly eventful again, i expect that these posts will all be a bit long-winded. so, the great african adventure has officially begun. i'll start by telling you all (all 3 of you) about our exodus from jordan. once i closed my service and was free of peace corps, jenny and i moved ourselves and our loads and loads of crap to the cheapest part of amman. we immediately flung everything we had out of our bags and onto the floor to reorganize over the coming 4 days. these 4 days involved a lot of packing, unpacking, throwing away and packing again in an effort to lighten our loads. as of yet, we have still failed in our attempts to make our bags reasonable. meanwhile, my time in amman involved a visit to the hospital as well as massive daily doses of benadryl because everynight at our hostel i was eaten alive by bugs that apparently found no one else in the entire place appealing. even my face wasnt spared and my eye swelled almost shut and gave me an unfortunate resemblence to everyone's favorite pugilist (rocky of course). the bites have not yet entirely gone away, but at least i no longer look contagious. i somehow feel as though this was only a warm up to the insect misadventures to come in africa.
we applied, while still in amman, for visas through sudan. this led us to delaying our departure to egypt for a day and sitting all day Sunday at the sudanese embassy. the first half of the day was spent in creaky plastic chairs saying nothing. however, as i stood there in my short sleeves (the horror!) i was approached by a jordanian man who turned out to be from my village. jordan is too, too small. when the group of sudanese men waiting for work permits heard us speaking arabic they came to talk to us to see why exactly these girls were living in jordan. one man even bought us sandwiches and pepsis because we had been sitting there all day. they all told us that sudan is much more beautiful than jordan and that we should stay as long as possible. 6 months, they said, would be sufficient to see all the good stuff. in the end, we were told that khartoum was processing our applications and we could most likely pick them up in cairo. we got this news around 4 pm and decided that we needed to get south as soon as possible. we made a mad dash to wadi musa, and the following morning opted to take a taxi to the port in aqaba to catch that day's slow boat to egypt. basically, we'd had enough of jordan and wanted out.
when we got to the prot there was a big scramble because we thought we were about to miss the boat. also there was some confusion about our passports and why we had been in jordan for 2 years and did not have ids (pc took them). and we went back and forth for what seemed like an eternity on the issue. in retrospect, it seems like they just wanted to find out what we had been doing in jordan and take up a lot of our time. we bought our tickets and got on the bus to the boat. the driver called out for the slow boat passengers to get off the bus and we scrambled off, luggage in two. however, all the other foreigners stayed on the bus, having opted to pay minimally more for the fast boat. we boarded the slow boat with all the jordanians and egyptians at about noon. in the time we had before our departure we explored the boat. this time turned out to be about 3.5 hours. as we picked our way through the men sleeping in the aisles we figured out that the slow boat had been, in its glory days, a dutch ferry and had various signs along the halls with words that had too many vowels or consonants in a row to make much sense to us. the boat took about four hours to get to egypt. that night we took a taxi to dahab which is a cheap little beach resort on the sinai peninsula. we are hanging around, burning our skin in the sun and swimming in an attempt to get the jordan palor off our skin. we will be here for a while. i expect that my next post may have a phone number for you all and maybe some pics. but for now i will leave you with a picture of jenny in our jaunty little sea hut. with no bugs.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

ok. so i lied to you all. the last was obviously not my last post from jordan. so, perhaps i will just stop speculating at all, so as to save myself from being wrong. which i hate. so, you may notice that i changed my page. i guess this is to make me less bored with it. but i think it also signifies a change. duh. so from every post (after this one which obviously still has to do with jordan) i will be telling yarns from our (me and jenny) fabulous world tour. and depending on the quality of internet i can find there i will try to pepper my words with some pictures. and finally, to be totally crass. you may notice that i have a link to paypal on here. that is only for those of you who have some sort of crazy disposable income and want to help us on our way. no pressure.
so, on to telling you about my last days of peace corps. my last week has been a blur of last visits and jordanian food and goodbyes. and yes, crying. i dont fancy myself to have been much of a cryer in the states. but here in jordan i have turned into tammy faye of sorts. i cry at everything. so my biggest goodbye was from my counterpart and my center. she told me not to come to work thursday, but instead to just show up at five for a surprise. the surprise was a bus with about 15 of my friends down to wadi rum. for those of you who dont know what wadi rum is, it is the big red desert that lawrence of arabia wandered through in his advance to aqaba. so we showed up and had coffee and tea in the desert. climbed some rocks. sang and danced and ululated. the most surreal part of it all was the bedouin dj in the desert. it was a real party. i could be totally wrong here, but i think the only "going away" most jordanian girls are used to is when a girl gets married. so all night they called me the bride and sang me bridal songs which go a little something like "andi is leaving the girls. stay a little while longer, don't go". they also bobby pinned a bunch of tissue to my head as a veil and played wedding with me. so, i got my jordanian wedding, sans groom. it was a great night and a really nice going away party. from what i hear, it was the best that any volunteer here got. but that is not unexpected from my counterpart. she always did extra for me. the side effect of my party was that i absolutely lost my voice. making it difficult to say my goodbyes. so now i am in amman, wrapping it up and able to put my experiences in the past tense. and i am anxiously waiting to hear if my poor poor previously drilled tooth needs a root canal. a root canal in jordan is not high on my list of goals. anyway, i am off for a final medical poking and prodding. and the next time i write i will have a partner in crime in AFRICA!!!

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Well kids, I think this is my last blog from Jordan. I may be lying about that. But then again I may not. I am at T minus 4 days till I leave my village. I’ll hang around amman for a few days or a week and then it is off to Africa. Our general plan for right now is that we will take a boat from aqaba to Egypt. Then we plan to laze around on the beach and sleep in hammocks for an undetermined amount of time. You know, to get the Jordan off. We will travel freely throughout Egypt, dodging the overly pushy salesmen as we go. Will any of you be there to randomly meet up with? Anyway, it is after Egypt that we face our big problem. Where do we go without flying? Libya is out. Especially considering that the route would be libya, chad, central African republic and the DRC. Somehow, as adventurous as that would be, it lacks appeal. So our current options, as I see them, are to petition the Sudanese embassy to give us a transit visa so we can cross it, or to take a boat to yemen and then a boat to Djibouti. If all else fails, I guess we will take a plane, but we really don’t want to. So there you have it. Our initial plans, scant as they may be. If any of you have any suggestions, we are happy to hear them. Also, I will be keeping up this blog to update you all on my status in Africa, let you know that I am indeed still with you and give you pictures so you can see our transition into what will mostly likely be crazy. You can think of it as eccentric if you find crazy too strong a word.
So, on to wrapping up my life in Jordan. This last month has been a whirlwind of trips to amman for doctors and dentists and paperwork. I have been poked and prodded every which way. However, the most horrifying experience as of late was my visit to the dentist. I don’t know if I told you all about last years dentist visit. She drilled a cavity with not enough novocaine, and walked away to make a 20 minute phone call before filling it. fun stuff. This year I tried a different dentist. He started by asking me a couple of questions that I have gotten from doctors plenty of times, but never a dentist. Awkward. He found three cavities and threatened to pull a wisdom tooth. Again, there was not enough novocaine. But he told me I was tough, he wasn’t going to give me anymore and I just had to bear it. for three teeth. And he proceeded to hold me down by the forehead and drill away, happy as you please. He overfilled them and then had to drill down the filling so I could close my mouth. And somewhere in the process I got a minor burn on my lip. And as for the cleaning that followed the drilling (??) it consisted of grinding away at my precious pearly whites with that damned polishing tool. As my fellow volunteer put it, this dentist basically sandblasted our mouths clean. As I sat there, shaking from the ordeal I had just been through, he told me he just wanted one more thing. He wanted to check under my gums. Under?!? I considered, for a brief second, bolting. Dental bib and all. But my hesitation was my downfall. He proceeded to take his sharpest pokey tool and lift up each and every one of my gums. All the while he commented on how great and clean I keep my teeth and how he couldn’t find a single thing under there. But I could not tell him that maybe since I was so clean he could stop prying up my poor gums, because his fist seemed firmly lodged in my mouth. So that is the joy of dental work in Jordan. I doubt that I will ever again be able to visit the dentist (a previously benign task) without healthy doses of laughing gas.
So, like I said, I am at my last 4 days in the village. This week has been a whirlwind of packing and lunches and dinners and visits and last minute work at the center. My problem is, I don’t have enough meals to go around. I feel weary from all the chicken, rice and tea. Also, I tend to shriek a little bit at the back of my mouth when the tea comes out. All I can think of is sugar. Sugar and my poor poor teeth. My other big problem is this: how do you pack for a year of travel, when you don’t know where you are going. Could be 3 countries, could be 30. could be overland, could be boats or submarines involved. I just don’t know.
I guess I should say something about Jordan. Isn’t that what you do when you leave a place? It has been both awesome and slightly devastating, all at once. I will miss all my friends and feeling slightly competent in a second language. what I will not miss is being the obvious foreigner that also has to act like a local. But here I go, launching myself out of what has become comfortable and familiar and into a land where I am again a little baby. I basically will not know anything about what I am doing once I leave Egypt. Scary.
So, now I am going to wrap this up so I can go home, stare unproductively at piles of stuff I may or may not need, take a nap and go to lunch.