Amman and back

On my first trip out of Beirut since I've been here, I went to Amman (the capital of Jordan, just because I have been asked this question before :) ) from Sunday to Tuesday to finally meet my colleagues at the regional office of the Naumann Foundation (my employer). To get over there I took a shared taxi from Beirut which takes about six hours, including getting in and out of the car a bunch of times because you have to get your passport stamped to leave Lebanon, then to enter Syria, then to leave Syria, then to enter Jordan..... my passport looks very colourful now with lots of stamps in it. The Syrian border guys forgot to charge me $8 for a transit visa because they thought my multiple entry visa from a year ago was still valid. This was much to the amusement of my fellow passengers who were happy to see the Syrians look incompentent, with the general verdict being that Syrians are stupid and "unable to understand anything" anyway. This bit of racism aside, they were very friendly people and saw to it that I, as the only foreigner, did not get confused by all the passport stamping and one of them would always accompany me to the customs counter.

After crossing Syria and passing through Damascus (horse-drawn carts and motorcycles going the wrong way on the highway), which made me feel very 'homesick', seeing it buzz under its usual cover of exhaust fumes, we got to Amman and a colleague picked me up and took me to my hotel. All hotels and restaurants in Amman now frisk everybody going in, but women only get searched if there's a woman frisker on duty which is not always the case. So listen up, female suicide bombers out there! Ok, I know it's not funny, but this policy makes no sense at all.

Basically, I spent most of my time there either at the office - everybody is very young and nice and seems to have a great sense of humour - or the Grand Hyatt Hotel which was bombed four weeks ago. Not that you would notice - it looks exactly like any other grand hotel of that sort, complete with a stylish Christmas tree made out ouf stacked wood painted purple in the lobby. Impossible to fathom what the scene looked like only a month ago...

The point of being there was a conference organised by the Naumann foundation and the Arab League on reforms in the Arab world. Very interesting. My favourite was a guy from the ruling party in Egypt who took 15 Minutes to basically state that there was a crucial difference between 'reform' and 'change'. You don't want change because nobody knows which way it'll go. Instead it's much better to have 'reforms' and to clearly limit what they can do. Well, at least he was being honest... But cynicism aside some of the discussions were quite good and everybody seemed happy at the end. I also thought it was pretty cool one Palestinian delegate in his fifties was wearing khaki Chucks. And the food was great!!

I also went to all of Amman's trendy bars (2 - two) in one evening - I guess that's why it's also called "The Hashemite Kingdom of Boredom" by a friend of mine... But Jordan is supposed to be really beautiful and you can do lots of hiking in the mountains or desert. I think I'm going back sometime.

On the way back to Beirut there were no direct taxis, so I took one to Damascus (with a couple from Turkey who were taking a bus to Istanbul from there, takes about 2 days...) and changed there to take a taxi to Beirut. This process took about 8 hours (more stamps) and was kind of tiring because I hadn't had time to eat anything all day and had to spend the ride to Beirut practically sitting in some teenager's lap and with a very unfriendly taxi driver. But I got back in one piece no problem and full of new impressions.