I must warn you guys that i am writing this with the most difficulty. To start with, I am staying at a farm in the middle of nowhere. Secondly, Internet is a rare commodity in these areas and thirdly the keyboard i am using is a veteran from World warI. God bless it, for still working.  Fourthy, EVERYTHIN is in Spanish! So today my spelling mistakes must be forgiven!

The farm is a heavenly heavenly HEAVENLY spot! It stands on a flat spot and is surrounded by miles of green meadows. Ohh it belongs to my grandmother. It is nice to spend time with the family… they are all the same, but a bit bolder and bit greyer..

They have chicken and horses and dogs…in a nearby farm ( a few kilometers away) they have cows and pigs! We have to be quiet around pigs because they are sensetive. Around, you smell the smell of earth, mixed with shit and farmenting plants… Seriously,  What more chic was I hoping for?

I am so relaxed, I forgot all about the work, and the stress of serving 170  studnets on a daily basis… I now believe that Heaven must be a place where no phone nor computers  exist. I hope they have different ways of communication there. I am hoping telepathy?

By theway, I realized how spoilt we are in Amman, we are living in a bubble of materialism, consumption and services  that we forgot how to enjoy the simple pleasures of life… such as cleaning, and cooking and living…simply living.

Anyway, I  need to log off, my daily buisness is to get the frech eggs. It is almost time for breakfast  So  will try to write as often as i can.

One last thing… i have never seen so much water in one place (put aside big rivers and seas…) but in a home I mean. There is a small stream running in the farm!

Hens are calling so till later.

If someone wants to see all that un-cracked beauty, I should advise them to hurry south, and visit the area across the street from Movenpick Hotel without delay.

Now if you are expecting a romantic description of the beauty of the wadi, please go back to the first paragraph… because that was as far as my romantic side could take me… and please don’t read the rest of this post… since from this point on it will turn gruesome.

After I went back home from my trip, the combination of the hot weather, the cold water (as when we started I used to avoid getting my feet wet. By the time the trip ended I was walking in the stream, because it was cooler and easier) and the lobster that I had for lunch the day before was not kind on my stomach! I was gripped with cold and heat waves that kept alternating till today (3 days later)… and the pain in my stomach… Lord! How can something be this painful? This must be the promised hell!

At 2:00 AM in morning I was driven out of my bed by instinct to the bathroom, I am not sure how I found myself on the floor hugging the toilet and retching my heart out… and while I was doing this, my mind was focused on two things… I had not vomited since third grade, and what a fascinating process vomiting is!

I looked it up using my best friend the lovely Wikipedia… and now the only thought I have in my head is Subhan Allah! We are such complicated creatures……Even though we are mentally hurricanous (I just invented this word), when it comes to physiology… We are so perfect and we function so precisely…it is not even imaginable

Here is the process… enjoy… and my advice is don’t eat while reading this I specifically liked how the body tries to protect the teeth from all the acids… cool, eh?

I leave you with beautiful pictures taken by Ramsey  a few months ago of this beautiful place…

yup this is in Jordan

I am on a project here, and the temptation to discover  this side of the world was simply too big for me to refuse.  The weather is great here, even though I thought it would be -9 according to Google weather…. but nah…it is not at all…. it is about 13! (how could they get it so wrong?)

One thing I noticed about Yerevan is the striking difference between the communist era and the today era… i could safely say that the communist era was not kind to architecture in Yerevan.

                               the Cascade… it will be a collection of art galleriers when finished  

The other observation I had about Yerevan that it is not colourful at all! It is very grey / brown for some reason…I am not sure if it the weather, or the harsh desert-ish nature… but being here is like being in one of those black and white photos  that have one colourful element (the flower, or the lipstick…) in the picture… and usually this one colourful element in Yerevan  is my orange hat and burgundy coat!

 Food on the other hand is divine!  It is absolutely brilliant…there is Turkish influence (although I don’t feel I can say that here) Asian influence, Caucasian influence… it is full of spices, herbs and tastes… food really flirts with all the senses.

 People are super nice, but this is the default human condition, when you meet them in the same context I do. I mean, we spend our days in meetings and workshops… so it is intense intellectual brainstorming and spend our evenings playing games (it is usually my touch… I love games… they really are fun and bring people closer). However, I thought they were not very nice at the airport… but I later realised it was only because I came from Turkey…and Armenia is not on amicable terms with either Turkey or Azerbaijan.

I truly liked meeting people from Georgia and Lithuania… it just brought a new dimension to my life. It opened doors to a new world of knowledge, history, traditions, food, issues… it is just brilliant!

I liked the trip very much… especially yesterday, when we went to visit two historical sites Garni and Geghard, we got to play with the snow

 this is one of the pagan temple

in this one people offer personal items to mother nature… and their wishes come true

…but  seriously after a few days… I really miss the mess of Amman…. and the colours and the sun and my bed.

 I was walking in the streets, pondering my fortune. I realized this is the Feria, a festival where the French try to pretend they are Spaniards for a few days… even though they failed to import the soul of Spain to France, I still had fun.

Well…we went to the Corrida, where they let BULLS LOOSE IN THE STREETS! A few bulls galloped rapidly down crowded, narrow streets surrounded by hundreds of alcohol and adrenaline-fuelled revellers…. the atmosphere was saturated with music, dancing, and festivities….and GOD it was exciting!

Here I am standing innocently in front of the bull with my Camera… It is not the best video ever, but i am learning how to use a camera.

Moving on to the second part of this post. Bullfights

I have always disliked this part of my Spanish heritage, but it is cultural, and because I pretend to be open minded, I feel I can’t get away with judging it… but truth to be told, I will never go to a bull fight because I realise how brutal these things are and because I am so disturbed by the way these animals are murdered that I can’t focus on the artistic or cultural aspect of it… 

In Spain being a matador is one of the highest paid professions, it is also one of the most respected… the matadors are the most loved celebrities; they end up marrying super models and living their super modelish lives in bliss.

It is one thing to watch the corridas in the street, but another thing all together to watch a bull fight inside the Les Arenes de Arles… so I was not watching the bull fight inside with those who are strongly pro the cultural history of it all.. but I happened to be standing outside, with those who were strongly anti the horridness of it all.  We caught the outside show, a few moments after the bull’s death….  There, I got my confirmation to why I should be anti- bull fights…

if you are against it, or if you are weak at stomach… please don’t watch, because it is beastly…but if you are curious to know what happens after the bull dies… please be aware that those trucks belong to restaurants that serve the most refined cuisine in Arles… restaurants that passed from father to son and that the date way way back… if it up to them, apparently it would be dating further than Adam!

Ahhh and remember curiosity killed the cat….

True to my expectations, it was simply standing there… by the way the shooting did not take place in the real building it took place in a neighbouring building…it looked better in front of the cameras.
 

I will wander a bit here, and am being so unfocused… but I just thought of a The Map of Love by Ahdaf Suief. Where she said in the words of an English lady who was in Egypt at the beginning of the century, that the English came to Cairo and mixed only with the Egyptians who worked for them, and she said imagine someone going to France and mix only with the maids and servants. Since they never mixed with the other, the real , everyday Egyptians, they never knew what they were missing on. Now to connect that to what I was saying earlier. My friends fell in the same trap, They wanted to be in certain areas, with certain people… not realizing that they were missing on the real , human, everyday London.
 Back to my story, I was walking there, when an older gentleman stopped me to ask me about something. I did not know, I smiled politely and started to move on. But he stopped me again, and started telling me right there about me, about my life! I was completely taken aback, but of course my curiosity won over and I ended up spending a while standing there talking to him and asking him questions!

This man was a Buddhist monk; he told me that I have a lot of positive energy, and he told me that somehow when I smiled, he felt that we connected. He started explaining that we all have hallows of energy around us. This energy has 7 energy points in our bodies. One at the head called the Crown Chakra, which controls consciousness, the second one is on the forehead and is called the third eye and it is the chakra of time and awareness of light. The third one is the Throat Chakra and is communication and growth. The fourth one is the heart Chakra which is for higher emotions, love , compassion…etc The fifth one is the near the intestines and is responsible to transform the base to higher emotions. The sixth one is near the ovaries or testicles and it is related to the base emotions or sexuality, and the last one, is between the area between the gentiles and the anus and is called the root or survival instinct. It was all very fascinating, very enlightening and very shocking.

He started telling me about people in my life, by describing them, and telling me about how I felt about them, and how they affected my life…he stold me about some of the things that i am really good at. He told me that i am curious and that love learning and knowledge… and when I asked him how he knew, he said that energy travels. And we do take some of the energy of some of the people with us. We finally came to the conclusion that my third eye and my survival instincts are under active. This is probably true! Since I barely started to learn how to trust my instinct, and I did allow myself to take a lot of crap from people, till I reached a point of die or survive! Of course death means can mean a lot of things. The point is, I never trusted my instincts to tell me run, I just hang around till the very last possible minute!  Of course the cynical me was thinking he is a liar and doing this for the money… the fact that i was reading about body language the day before and how we can tell a lot about people through reading their body language, and how fortune tellers know a lot because they read the body language… so I tried to offer him some money. He was very upset!  damn!

This could be a load of bullocks! But at some level, I think we are not only material energy… our bodies, the money we own, the house we live in, the cars we drive…  we have other parts to us, the mental energy and spiritual energy… our ability to love, to give, to empathize with others. In proof, happiness is completely independent from money and materialistic matters. In fact a lot of rich people lead empty, lonely and wretched loves….and a lot of poor people are miserable sods. But also a lot of rich people are happy and lot of poor people are happy as well…. Why? maybe because they do have a healthy balance of all the right chakras? Or in other words the body the brain and the soul….

I think this could be my new toy… learning more about all this.  I really am a nerd!

Anyway, it is very beaky outside; the sky is grey and overcast. I am still in bed, the first thing I did when I opened my eyes was to look into all this Buddhist philosophy…. One last note… my dream for a long time has been to spend time with Buddhist monks, learning from them… this was something that started when I saw a movie called the Razor’s Edge with my dad when I was very young. The book was given to me later in my life by F. who had no notion how he awakened a very old desire in me by giving me that book. The other movie that got me to think about this is called Beyond Rangoon. I saw it with my friend R. when I was in tenth grade. I truly loved R. and it brings me so much sadness that she is not part of my life today.

… it is raining now.

Yes I copied the title from Lina…but I can do this, since I happen to be in Muenster in the very same place at the very same moment! …I am sitting in the Internet Room with one of the Jordanian team members and he is telling me in wonder ‘ Praise God, listen to how many languages we can hear in 4 square meter room!’ .. he has every reason to be surprised, we are hearing Spanish, English, Rumanian, Russian, Arabic in two dialects, Polish,  French and Hungarian… aber scheiße how could I forget Deutsch?!!!

This has been an experience for  all the team members, including myself! Yes, Lina and I have different modes of functioning as team leaders,  We both find it difficult to draw the line and balance between being strict and being loose. Sometimes I feel like slapping some of them… for example when they show up forty five minutes late, and force the whole group to work an extra hour!  and sometimes I just want to hug them… for example when they acted the Jaha bit!! Man the boys were MARVELLOUS!! True sheikhs! Jordan will be proud! . And while Lina  tends to more hands off, I tend to be more hands on… but I think this difference is really positive,  because we do complement each other in our own ways.

By the way having Lina around has been wunderbar, we have been talking a lot and discovering how much in common we have, especially during the walks from the Behnnohaus back to our hotel.

The Jordanian team is a very interesting mix this year. We can completely spot the contradictions Jordanian youth have to live through, especially the girls. The society holds women to higher standards and some of them constantly feel they need to act to keep this standard. In moments of letting go, when they act like normal kids in their age such as being silly, giggling, playing…they start feeling guilty and feel they need to emphasize how virtuous they are and constantly explaining to me and to the others what they said and what they meant and how and why they said it…. I keep saying it is ok, you don’t need to explain… I really really understand! But I am thinking it is ok because they really really are just normal human beings!

We had the usual amount of tension in the first couple of days. the tension of discovering the dynamics of how the team functions,  adapting to the new place and the work we are doing, testing the waters with each other and with the other groups, deciding who is a friend and who is not .. one of the girls kept giving the guys sideways looks and stupid  comments when she catches them standing with girls! and they just REJOYCED catching her talking to a  guy… they are still making fun of the poor girl! But it is ok… maybe she will learn how to keep her mouth shut when she should… I personally hope she does because she was absent the day  they taught tactfulness in school! I had long talks with all the team members during the last 2 days and today everyone has finally relaxed, it seems like we all know where we stand, and all the negative feelings have finally come out. I completely adore the youngest member in our team, a 17 year old boy. He only has to open his mouth for of us to crack laughing! He throws very witty comments in such a serious manner… we can never tell if he is joking or just is like this

Since I lived in Germany couple of years ago,  spending the time with this team is giving me moments of joy, I don’t get to live every day. Which is to remember how things feel the first time! I just love to see the absolutely innocent and childish pleasure  in their reactions when they try things for the first time… things like drinking  a certain juice for example or eating a certain type of chocolate, or seeing a lake for the first time or even living the long hours or the changing weather, or the shopping… basically the beauty in all the small things that I tend to take to take for granted…. And in moments like this I just feel joyful.

Got to go Dinner is being served and i am starving!

As few of you would know, one of the things I enjoy most in life is organizing youth exchange programs, to get young people from Jordan to travel and learn something new. I work with people who are over 18 years old, convincing myself that they are adults and legally, culturally and religiously responsible for their acts. Those last two weeks proved that actually they are children, and socially if anything happens I am the one to bear all the responsibility!

My team was very mixed, I am not going to give any names, but we had the conservative, the hypocrite, the ultra liberal and the unexposed, and of course the responsible and open minded. I am so grateful to have 2 young people in my team, a great young lady whose open-mindedness and responsibility will forever leave a mark on my heart, and a guy who would be most probably considered a social outcast in Amman and who the only words that would express my feelings towards him are love and pride a little bit like am other maybe! Together we were the best team; we impressed the hell out of everyone with our language skills and intellect, and all the gorgeous leaflets and posters and presentations the team prepared… and of course the little items of food we brought with us.. JORDAN RULES!

When it came to the social aspect, and individually I thought few of my team members needed kafen 3ala il dayer in several occasions! To start with, few are not more than spoiled brats, who live in a world of their own, honestly the way some girls in Amman talk and behave is sickening and repulsive and completely unimpressive… yuck!!! I was ashamed and disappointed of the dala3,constant stream of naghasheh, silly feminin games and the extreme obsession with makeup and hair and high heals, even when we were in a farm in the middle of nowhere! But this is no where as shameful as the fact that these super intelligent twenty something girls are so dependent on their dadies’ pockets, that they are clueless to the fact that they are adults and have to solve their problems on their own. They actually think that their dads would help them whever they are, it makes me wonder how would they ever survive without papa?! As for the guys… yeee don’t even start me with the double standards and the hypocrisy.

It made me wonder whose fault is that we are a third world, the hypocrisy of men of the air-headedness of women… No wonder, men think we are less than they are… we do our best, actually we go out of our way to let them think act like that.

One of the things that happened, was that we usually try to mix the girls from all countries together in the rooms, and we do the same with the boys boys/girls are strictly forbidden to the disappointment of some of you! so what happens is an Italian girl connected with a French guy, and to my chagrin went back to the room to hang out with her, where two of my most flirty, spoiled girls stay. I wish this happened with the other two girls who were more conservative and would have definitely carried themselves and handles the situation better
We had this huge hysterical, dramatic reation, where my girls tried to get the boy outprobably not very nicely and when he did not want to leave because he thought they were rude. She came to me threatening me with her dad’s influence.

Obviously the boy left the room and obviously it was a cultural misunderstanding and difference and obviously it is expected to face things like that when people leave their safe environment and obviously they could have solved the problem smartly if they were experience and obviously with dad or no dad the problem would have been solved anyway, because actually no one there knows who dad is and no one cares… as a matter of fact this became a point that was taken against Jordanians not having personality of our own, and being so corrupt!! and obviously I was so damn irritated that I had to be not so nice the girl!

What was really funny is that when dad’s position was mentioned, one of the Egyptian guys said “ eh ya3ni, 7adritik bint afandem wi i7na wlad kalbi ya3ni?!!” and an ironic game started about who dad is, when one of the guys in my team said the most intelligent thing ever “abouy insan” which means my dad is a human being! Which awarded us a massive cheering from all the other teams! and closed the door for good.

The project was fun, it was interesting, and it was definitely very educational. But most of all, I learnt we would be better off, when we use our intelligent brains instead of daddy’s postions. So if you happen to be in one of my teams, and your dad is important dont tell me, because that would not impress me at all!! actually i would think you are silly and without personality!

The day finished with watching a parade… this weeks is called ´la semana santa´ or the sacred week, that accompanies Easter. I have to admit that i am buffled by this parade… people who are wearing these pointy hats and have the faces covered just like the attire of the KKK movement, they have opening for the eyes and when they look at you, you feel these are not people to mess with… they were holding trumpets and drums, followed by hundreds of people holding candles in silence… . Many of them are bearfoot and other are crawling on their knees as some sort of sacrifice… and I really dont know if this is part of christianity or it is some tradition that came hundreds of years afterwards… templars or Crusaders… or God knows what…actually i am very curious to know more about this… the point of all this, a thought hit me while watching these old ladies crawling on their hands and knees with all the blood and cuts and that is if it is really worth it to do all these physical sacrifices in the name of God or religion… or whatever school of thought we would belong to…

On a happier note.. Santiago is fascinating.. i have been having so much fun watching these young people cruising through the city holding hands and totally in love… Santiago beside its christian place in spain is also a very fanmous campus… and part of how i have been feeling is that i fell somehow in the land of peter pan where everyone is young and enjoying life… and since every year the older ones graduate and leave and a new wave of young people join this campus… it really never grows old… it has this perpetual youth…

Anyway… I need to sleep now, i will start with yet another Isabelle Allende book… beside all the extra terrestrial, vampires, star wars and time traveling … i have passion for isabelle allende!

It really was not a bad experience at all… as a matter of fact, it was very interesting. I met so many nice people, and have been through so much this year…. one thing for sure, i have learnt about the concept of solitude, as for the first time in my life i was faced with so much free time, and i had to use my imagination on how to fill it out. But everything comes to an end and this is the end of my idle days.

I will actually miss few things here…mainly:
1- the warm water in the swimming pool… i hate cold water, and swimming in the very warm water in Jeddah at night feels like floating in psace.

2- I will miss the constant feeling of challenge and thrill that i lived here when walking in the streets, for i never covered my hair, not because i have anything against hijab, on the contrary i really respect women who reach this high level of looking beyond materialistic stuff ( if they actually wear the hijab out of conviction)… but i refuse to do anything so personal that is imposed on me by anyone, wether family or society or laws…

3- I will miss the great frienship bonds that form in this country, because everyone is in the same boat, everyone is a stranger with no family, and so they substitute that with the support of their friends… it is something that i have never experienced anywhere else

Anyway… a new page opens in my life…what is next…. only God knows!