“With its endless one-way streets, stairways, narrow lanes and jebels, Amman is confusing enough to get around anyway, but the ambiguous names for the streets and circles would challenge the navigational skills of even the most experienced explorer.”

-Lonely Planet, Jordan Edition

 Ready for a mystery of our own (un)doing?

I will talk about the grandeur of Petra later, but for now I am settling in with a beer at the residence of the Olmsted scholar of Amman. His blog is far more serious (and better) than mine, and as such I am sure that he would not be drinking a beer at 2pm at the height of Ramadan. Instead, I am drinking his beer in his home while he and his family are on vacation in Tunisia (merci, Mark!).

Here’s some obvious travel advice, no matter what country you are in:

1. Don’t take a small town taxi (population 24,000) and expect that the driver will know every street, three hours away in the capital city (population 2.5 million). Don’t do this especially if you have only been in his country of Arabic script for only two days.

2. If you are stubborn enough to choose this adventure, have a good map handy, not some cipher that looks like it was scrawled on a napkin at midnight while in a smoky bar, and then scanned and e-mailed to you:

Even Indiana Jones couldn’t have found the Grail with this…

3. Print out said napkin map, and then have it with you in the cab of the car. If not, you’re doomed to force your irate driver to perilously pull over at one of these mind-boggling circles while already in the capital city. What, you didn’t print it up? Great, now hop out of the car and dig your laptop out of your luggage. Bras and underwear are now strewn about the trunk of the taxi….

Back inside the car, you smile meekly and  boot up the computer. The battery is dangerously low on juice and we don’t know how long we’ll have the treasure map at our disposal.

4. Your taxi driver will say in broken English: “Why have you not show me this before?” Don’t  make him angrier than he already is after driving around the same shopping mall called “The Mecca” for 30 minutes. Instead, understand that his question abut the map is rhetorical and  works together to break the secret code:

Football: 1  Monkey: 0

4. The map is only helpful if you read it correctly. Lesson here: make sure you read it at least once before ever going near a taxi at your starting point. If you don’t do this,  you will spend a long time driving towards what ultimately isn’t the correct destination. The taxi driver is then on and off his cell phone with the building superintendent who says that the house is “just near the mosque”. Great. Cuz there aren’t many mosques in Amman….

We do finally get to our destination- alhamdoulilah. Our taxi driver did his share of “talking” aloud in Arabic to us (I can’t say for certain he was cursing us, but intonation does go a long way). All in all, however, he was pretty patient considering his state of fasting. Of course he didn’t offer any of us a kiss goodbye once we emptied his trunk of our luggage- all he said, after realizing that he had woven his way into a labyrinthine network of streets was,
“Now how I get back to Petra?”

Beats us, we kind of shrug, kind of stifling a laugh. All we know is that we’ve got nice digs to discover in Amman. [Note: we only feel less guilty about his fresh dilemma since we paid him extra dinar for being forced to deal with piss-poor planning Americans.]

Which brings me to right now.

Here’s the view from the kitchen (and not from the taxi)

…and here’s the view from the kitchen table. It shall be a nice afternoon, but I am not sure that I have fully learned my lesson after our morning of folly.

Just because we are given the label “Scholar” doesn’t mean that we are immune to needless bouts of stupidity. Just ask my Dad. 

I exist to entertain, and I am sure that I will have more tragicomic encounters in days to come.