Ahhhh running out of money in Jordan!

Sixty five dinars (about 100 bucks) have left my pocket since the last post. That's more than half of the budget I planned for. Wow.
I can withdraw cash, of course. It's survivable. And Jordan, in fact, is a relaxing place so far. I'm in Aqaba now, and it's a bit like Eilat except it feels less like a shopping mall. It has many small chain stores (a Quiznos!) lining thin streets with islands of trees in the center. There are many fancy houses colored pinkish-tan with balconies overlooking curved swimming pools, which I believe are owned by rich Saudis. And the guys in the internet cafe are decent to be around. And the place is only 1 dinar an hour, which is slightly less than the Israeli price (in Israel it's about 4 bucks an hour, 1 dinar is under 2 dollars.), so I won't be an Arab peasant by the end of the day.

It all started when I got to the Jordanian border. I was told by many people that, from the border, it would be easy to find a taxi going to Petra with other tourists to share it with. Also, according to the Jordan Jubilee site, there was a bus from Aqaba to Wadi Rum ever day. So I went in figuring somehow it would work itself out.

I met nobody at the border besides two Canadian women. We walked across the empty border crossing and took each other's pictures. They both were picked up by a friendly Jordanian driver. He offered to take me to Wadi Rum for 30 dinar. I knew that was bad, but I felt lazy, so I did it, and I figured I could be stingy later on.

I'd heard that at the Wadi Rum visitor's center, it's easy to find a jeep tour to hop on, since Wadi Rum charges by the jeep, not by the passenger.

That's true, but the driver didn't drop me off at the visitor's center. He dropped me off at an office of some Bedouins and told me I had to get a jeep tour for 35 dinar. I argued with him until I was exhausted and gave in. I ordered the jeep tour. I got in the jeep and it took me to the visitors center, and, from there, to the rocks of Wadi Rum.

I felt like I was once again a victim of the notorious sleaziness of this region, but I let it slide. I focused on the Lawrence of Arabia vistas. Wadi Rum is only subtly different from the rest of the desert; it takes a little while before it hits you how cool it is. Like the Sinai desert, and the Jordanian desert between Wadi Rum and Aqaba, it consists of monochromatic, stark, jagged rocks. But Wadi Rum is different. It looks as if large pieces of the Sinai desert crumbled into orangey sand, leaving pieces of the rocky desert behind. In the rest of the desert, you can get tired of seeing stark rocks, but in Wadi Rum, it's different- the desert around the rocks makes them a lot more impressive. I think it's best described as a mutant child of a sandy desert and a rocky desert.

The interesting, but sometimes boring thing about a rocky desert is that the massive amount of jagged rocks can distort your spatial orientation. They all blur together into one big, intimidating moon of biblical rock. The Sinai always intrigued me because it's scary (because of how it looks and how the rocks are interrupted only by the occasional truckload of religious pilgrims, frequent checkpoints, and nice beach and diving resorts) but Wadi Rum has a majestic, sublime quality to it. The rock formations have smooth sides that help you to appreciate how tall they are.

Close to the visitor's center is the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which looks a little bit like a hand or an oyster shell. More than those things, it looks like a giant, wide rock.

The driver took me farther into the desert until a formation called the canyon. It's not a canyon as much as a giant rock which you can walk into for a good distance. It has both Arabic and Nabatean inscriptions on the wall, which is cool as well.

In the canyon, I met two German guys. One was a diplomat in Israel and the other was visiting him. Winfrid and Tom were there names. Tom had a nice camera, and when I told him about the destruction of mine, he snapped a few pics of me in the canyon and said he'd send them to me. I asked them where they were going later, and they said Aqaba. I told them that if I didn't find a taxi or bus to Petra, I'd go with them.

I went back to the visitor's center before they did, and looked around for a taxi. I ate a few candy bars and got offered a few more jeep tours. I found out that you can stay in Wadi Rum for 3 dinars a night, but I realized that I really didn't want to spend that much time there. It was the kind of place that I knew could lose its magic if I stared at the Seven Pillars for the next five hours. It'd be cheap but really boring. So, when the Germans came back, I went with them to Aqaba.

Now, I have to decide if I'm going to stay here for the night and attempt to find fellow taxi riders to Petra tomorrow, or to spend the absurd 40 dinar to Petra tonight.

Eilat again, Goodbye Neot Semadar

Last night, I said goodbye to everyone at Neot Semadar separately and then spent some time outside after everyone was asleep. I ran into Asaf, a cool guy who was only at the kibbutz the first few days and last few days I was there. He's writing a children's album about a machine that makes you fly when it hears good music and he likes Spinal Tap. Needless to say, our conversations are good.

We went to the dining room because he wanted a midnight snack. In the dining room, we discovered the electronic keyboard that they use to accompany the songs on Fridays. I turned on the organ sound and played "Organ Woman." He liked it. He gave me a pencil wrapped in paper tape that said "Keep on rocking, Asaf, Israel, 2008."

We weren't high, and, in fact, Asaf doesn't like drugs at all.

Hanging out with him was a good transition between the comfortable, insulated world of Neot Semadar and the rest of the world, I think. In Neot Semadar, I hang out with people for days and don't say much to them, and I play the upright piano alone in the practice room/library on the kibbutz. In the rest of the world, I talk for hours about Spinal Tap with people I've just met all the time, and play them organ songs as well.

I didn't get the sense that I was going back to the real me, or the world where I belong, or anything so dramatic as that- no, it was just a good transition.

I got on a bus to Eilat this morning, and it was full of Israeli kids going to school. They were watching a computer-generated kids show with a fat ogre, a slick-haired vampire/'50s bad-ass, and a red-haired princess with a light blue dress. It was my first contact with the world outside of Neot Semadar- the world where you pay people to take you far away and mass culture is a regular thing to encounter. It was sufficiently far out. I soon stopped thinking about how sad it was to leave the place. I also was happy not to have a camera with me. I noticed times when I would have attempted to get the perfect picture, and felt relieved that I didn't have to.

In Eilat, I've still enjoyed not having that extra burden of pulling a camera out of my pocket, but I've seen several camera stores and been tempted to buy a new one.

The thing that tempted me the most was this: a McDavid's and a Chief Sandwich next to each other. Two hilariously pseudo-American Israeli fast food establishments. And they were right next to each other. I thought of buying a disposable camera just for the occasion but I resisted. If I'm not going to have a camera, I'm going to try to go all the way.

Well, I will be asking people to take pictures of me. But it's the burden of carrying it around that I'm going to avoid if it's possible. I'm either in serious hobby photographer mode, or I'm in camera-less traveller mode, and the serious hobby photographer in me doesn't want to take pics with a disposable.

Flash forward: in two hours, I'll be in Jordan.

Reflections on Other Things I Lost While Travelling: The Chamsa

Earlier on this trip, I lost a much less expensive and much more easily replacable thing. But I like the journey it made between the time I bought it and the time I lost it.

I bought the Chamsa necklace for 15 shekels in Tsfat during the Birthright trip in February.

The Chamsa is the famous Middle Eastern handprint. Jews, Arabs, and I believe Druze and Christians have all used it at one time. I definitely saw Chamsas all over Israel and Egypt- in jewellery, on walls, in cars, in buses. Some of them just look like five-fingered hands ("chamsa" is "five" in Arabic), but most have four straight vertical fingers with a thumb pointing distinctly to the side, making it slightly resemble a chicken. Most also have an eye in the middle - it's to protect you from the "evil eye," I've been told.

The first time I saw a Chamsa was at the Hebrew Academy. It was while we were learning about Sephardic (Spanish) Jews. We made chamsas in art class by tracing our hand, then making a design, and then transferring it to a sheet of aluminum. I think the aluminum chamsa I made in elementary school is still on my parents' wall. Other than the art project, I don't remember much else about the lesson except that the teachers made an example of Aaron Levy, who was the only Sephardic Jew in the class.

Usually, when someone in the family travels, my mom gives them a chamsa with the traveller's prayer written on it in Hebrew and English. In English, it says that you will be protected from the "perils of the road," but unless you look at it closely, it looks like it says, "penis of the road," which is fodder for many corny jokes.

Enough anecdotal background about the chamsa. I found a nice, small chamsa necklace in Tsfat, which is one of Israel's holy cities, where many kabbalists have lived and studied. Much of it was built by Spanish Jews in the 15th century while Israel was a Turkish colony, and the city looks a bit like both Spain and Old Jerusalem (which was built by the Turks). It's on top of a mountain and is built mostly of tan bricks, and all the streets are cobblestones. Unlike Old Jerusalem, it's a quiet sort of tourist town. It's full of jewellery and art shops but you can relax while you browse them.

I bought the necklace pretty painlessly. I just sort of saw it, and decided it was good, and then gave the shop owner fifteen shekels, which is less than five bucks. I put it on and it just felt normal.

I also remember walking through the tourist area and looking at necklaces with Ido one of the soldiers who joined the Birthright trip. He found one of the popular Israeli bullet necklaces. (If you haven't seen one before, that's really what it is: a bullet. In Israel, bullet necklaces are sold alongside Jewish stars, chamsas, and Hebrew letters at all tourist shops.) We made fun of it together. "Israel, tough! We shoot Arabs!"

I don't usually wear necklaces, but sometimes I do. I don't wear jewellery in general, but some necklaces just seem to fit me. I bought one made of obsidian in Guatemala, and I wore it every now and then.

In Haifa, when I stayed with Ariel and Hagai, who I met on couchsurfing, the Guatemalan necklace suddenly broke into pieces in my pocket. On the surface, it seemed symbolic: I came to Israel, bought a Jewish necklace, and then the old Central American hippie necklace broke.

That night, I confessed to Hagai that I stole my towel from a hotel in Haifa. The water was cold in the shower and the hotel was both expensive and in a bad location, so I didn't feel bad, I told him. "That was very Israeli of you," he told me.

In retrospect, I think I did start to feel a little bit Israeli in a harmless, superficial, funny way.

In Israel, when people saw it, they said, "Oh, you're Jewish?" Before I went to Egypt, I was afraid it would give me away to people. Once I got there, not only did everyone who figured out I was Jewish not care, but in Cairo, a female student saw it and said, "You're looking very Egyptian."

I got the idea to tell people a story behind why I wear the chamsa necklace: I decided I would tell people, if they asked, that I wear it because it's a symbol that's part of both Arab and Jewish cultures, and it reminds me of how close they really can be. I definitely didn't think about that at all when I bought it, but it seemed like a good story to tell.

But I never really told that story. I mostly told people the truth: that I liked it because it looked cool. It was silver and had a turquoise stone in the middle.

I nearly lost it at the Sun Hotel. I spent a few hours one night looking for it, and then the next morning, I woke up and found it next to me on the bed. I wore it the rest of the time I was in Egypt, and brought it with me to the kibbutz.

One day at Neot Semadar, I realized I hadn't seen it in a few days. I haven't seen it since.