Jerusalem and Some Book Reviews

Marhaba, So I'm off to Jordan for a special needs conference on wednesday and while there I'm sneaking over to Jerusalem for a night. It seems to me that growing up in the US as a Christian that Jerusalem has this incredible mystical aura around it. It is our Mecca. No doubt going to Israel is a risk, and I already backed down once for fear of loosing my job but the draw is too powerful. I've been reading "Eat, Pray, Love", and this quote seems to encompass how I feel: (side note: yes J, I do like the book and I can't understand why you didn't) "Traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless, newborn baby--I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to--I just don't care." Next on my list is a book called "Girls of Riyadh", which was recommended to me by a Saudi friend. The book was highly controversial when released in arabic here in Saudi and the writer is now living in the US until the dust settles. You all should check it out if you get the chance. I haven't been up to much recently. Mostly just working and tutoring. Last weekend I went to the Australian Ball in Bahrain with my ex-pat buddies. It was a great excuse to get dressed up and have a blast. I'm a little dizzy with happiness from how well my great adventure is turning out. I'm so happy I took a risk, I totally recommend it. :)

Condom Wine and Jordan Pics

I'm really starting to like Saudi (its nearly impossible to explain how such a weird place can be so awesome). I was so worried about my social life but I'd say it might even be better than it was last school year. It took me about a month and a half, but I feel like I've made the adjustment, which was harder than I had originally thought it would be. I think of myself as a flexible and adaptable person but I really had to change gears. For a while I was really pissed that it was so hard to keep in touch with people. Many of my coworkers said that my friends would forget about me but I totally didn't think it would happen. I figured they must have had shittier friends than me and with today's technology it would be easy to keep in touch. So I guess I was kinda pissed and hurt that some people wouldn't take 5 minutes to shoot me an email. I kept thinking 'I'm not dead, I just moved away! And if people can forget about me so quickly were they ever my friend?'. Some people have done a really good job, and for the others I know it's not personal but just, "out of sight, out of mind." I've heard its something everyone goes through out here.

It seems like I spend a lot of time talking about booze but you end up thinking about it in a dry country!! Today I learned the recipe for 'condom wine'. You mix the ingredients (yeast, water, sugar, grape fruit juice) up in a one of those huge water dispenser bottles then cover it up with a condom. Something in the yeast makes the condom fill with air and when it deflates (or is no longer erect) your home brew is done. I've got another friend that knows how to concoct just about any hard alcohol and we've been kicking around the idea of opening a bar on our compound. As if I haven't already proven what my thoughts are revolving around, I'll be heading to Oktoberfest in Bahrain tomorrow. Can you believe I got a huge discount on my hotel because my friend and I both are named Sarah?? ('such a good arabic name' the guy said) I wanted to tell them my mom named me Sarah because it means princess in HEBREW, but didn't want to lose my cheap rate!

Jordan

Hello from Jordan! My trip has been super interesting and full of contrasts. I spent the first few days in Aqaba with way too much time on my hands. I started to really over think things and was feeling really restless and homesick (for Seattle). I really got into this mood where I was hating the middle east. I took a walk around town and bunch of nasty guys made yucky comments to me and I was totally fed up. But Aqaba wasn't all bad, my friend Matt said my face lit up like a Christmas tree when I went to the liquor store (I even did a little jig). I also went scuba diving in the red sea and saw many creatures in addition to a huge wreck and a sunken panzer tank! I saw a really cool movie at my friend's work (he's a professor at the first film school in Jordan). The movie was called Offside was an Iranian film about a bunch of muslim girls that have to dress up as men to get into a soccer game. It really made me think because it is also illegal for women to attend professional soccer games in Saudi (I was shocked when my friend who coaches the local professional Saudi team said I wouldn't be allowed into the stadium, abaya or not). Just when I was ready to write my vacation off as a total waste, I went to Petra and did a 180! I don't think I can explain in words how magic the place is. We found a random Bedouin to show us around the perimeter of the city on horseback. It felt awesome running an arabian horse through the desert! We rode to the highest place in Petra and then climbed down through the boulders in the mountains down into the famous city carved in stone. It was amazing because no other tourists take this long alternate route into Petra. Our guide met us on the other end of the city and we rode the horses back to the parking lot. We'd been wanting to stay the night in the desert and really hit it off with our guide, so we were pumped to hear that he and his brother were willing to take us camping in little Petra that night (I love spontaneous adventures!). We loaded up the car at our guide's house and met many of the children in his extended family (they were amazing and so excited to meet the gringos!). It was dark when we finished weaving our way through the desert and arrived at the campsite. We lit candles in paper bags filled with sand and put them around our mat. We started setting up the tent and the guys began cooking the Bedouin style dinner but I was entranced by the sky. I'd never seen stars like that before. I ended up off by myself laying down looking up at the sky. I was just drinking it in when our guide's brother turned a song on his cell phone and handed it to me and walked off. It was just the song I needed to hear and I found myself hoping the guys wouldn't notice my watery eyes. I usually come to some type of realization when I travel but this epiphany seemed special. It's more complicated than this, but put simply, it was a sense of peace. We stayed up late, laughing, telling stories, eating barbeque and drinking tea. It was an enchanting night. I did end up practically freezing to death once I headed off to bed and I was awoken by a pack of dogs fighting and barking. The next day I woke up sore from sleeping on the ground and from horseback riding. We drove out to the dead sea and ate lunch at an over priced resort. I've been trying to figure out what exactly I'm looking for out here in the middle east. And it all started to come together for me in the lowest place on earth. I soaked my feet in the salty water because I heard that its supposed to have healing properties. Maybe this means I won't break them anymore! I chose not to get all the way in because I've heard it sometimes burns your 'special parts' (if you're a girl) and I just wasn't willing to take the risk. Tomorrow I head back to the Kingdom. I'm so excited to drink water and coffee in open spaces now that Ramadan is over!

Diving the Magic Kingdom

I went scuba diving with two of my friends from the british school, Liz and Julia. We went with the British Scuba club and caught a ride up to Jubail with two of the instructors. Once in Jubail we boarded a boat, abaya clad and were told not to drink or eat anything under any circumstances. During ramadan muslims cannot eat or drink from sun up to sundown. I didn't realize this applied to me at all until I was told that I could be deported for merely taking a sip of water in public! I was also told that sometimes they will whip men who don't follow this rule. Something tells me this is a bit of an exaggeration though.


Because we are women, Julia, Liz and I had to pretend we were just along for the ride because it is illegal for women to scuba dive in Saudi. So we took a nap on the boat while the guys checked in with the coast guard. Once out of the harbor we ripped our abayas off and broke out snacks and drinks. It took about an hour to get to Jana island and we went right through a huge oil field, cluttered with hundreds of oil platforms. But oil platforms get dull quickly so I spent most of the trip working on my ability to sleep in awkward places.

Jana island is completely uninhabited, covered in sand and surrounded by bright blue waters with a decent reef. Sometimes the dive club does overnight camping trips to the island which sounds like a blast to me so I'm really hoping to tag along the next time they go! We made three dives and I saw some incredible stuff! I swam with big black sting rays (the same that killed Steve Erwin), saw a school of barracudas, big bat fish, the poisonous lion fish, and plenty of moray eels with their scary looking teeth. I was so happy that I ended up singing Little Mermaid songs into my regulator! Our final dive was at a sunken ship called 'the g spot' and our Saudi boat captain said we could 'penetrate the g-spot' and he turned about ten shades of red as we cracked up. I nearly peed myself after his slip up but I was so excited to do some wreck diving for the first time. The boat was in excellent shape for something in such warm waters and I went down into the hull (going inside the boat is referred to as 'penetration' in wreck diving) it was a tight squeeze and I cut my finger but I really could have cared less!

Once out of the water my scaredy cat friend Julia decided to go for a swim. Then someone shouted, 'whale shark!' and in a split second everyone was grabbing masks and leaping into the water to see the thing that some divers wait 25 years or more for. I couldn't get in the water fast enough but Julia started tripping out, screaming and swimming away from the immense plankton eating creature until she was practically standing on the life preserver. The whale shark stayed with us for about 30 minutes and seemed just as interested in us as we were in her. I held on to her dorsal fin and swam along side with the hundreds of sucker fish that clung to the shark's body. When we were all out of the water our Saudi/muslim boat captain was so moved by the experience that took about ten minutes to pray to alah (he had been diving these waters for 24 years and had never seen a whale shark). Just when I thought the day couldn't get any better, dolphins showed up and swam and jumped along side our boat on the way home. What a day!

My Tattoo

A few weeks ago I got a tattoo, pretty much randomly. Its a heart shaped lock and my favorite word. A lot of people ask me what it means and its hard to describe. Saudade (a word in Portuguese) is pronounced "Sow-daw-gee". Its a feeling that is essential to Brazilian culture. You might say, "tenho saudades de voce". Which means I feel saudade for you.

I suppose a simple definition would be that it is a feeling of longing for something that is gone, which may or may not return in the future.

What is great about saudade is that it has so many layers of complexity and its meaning changes based on the context of the situation. I like that it has no direct translation to English because feelings shouldn't be easily described in words.

Saudade can be a simple, "I miss you" but it has the capability to go much further. The difference between the English word nostalgia and the Brazilian saudade? Nostalgia solely exists in the past and has a fatalistic tone. Saudade is living and breathing, a creature residing in the depths of your heart and soul. It permiates every thought, every fibre of your being. It pulsates love, regret, longing, hope, sadness, and happiness. Until even the tiniest parts of you are screaming like a child that wants his favorite toy back.

Saudade does not listen to reason, when everything logical says that you have lost what you love most it carries on with an idealistic belief that what is being longed for might return. Even in the worst case senario it is a rush of sadness coupled with joy derived from acceptance of fate. The hope of recovering or substituting what is lost with something that will either fill the void or provide consolation.

We cling to the joy in our lives but nothing is perminent. Our greatest loves, our most treasured moments, are eventually stolen from white knuckled hands. I hear a lot of people say that they want to be happy someday. As if they will one day arrive at destination "happiness". How can this be possible? Life seems to be filled with varying degrees of pain and boredom punctuated by enchanting moments to be treasured. I believe that making the best out of the shitty situations and recognizing opportunities will bear more blissful memories to look back on and feel bittersweet saudade for.

Last spring I was whining to my friend Angela about never having had what I would consider a "real adult relationship." She wasted no time in taking full advantage of the opportunity to shine a mirror on my complexities. Which pissed me off. I wanted to be simple, straight forward, hopefully hiding the big ball of gooey sappiness that resides at my core. I didn't want to hear about the duality of goofy topnotes that mask a truely serious person who "will not fall hard until someone takes the time to understand her depths". And I wonder, who is this person who would want to deal with my reflective BS? Which reminds me of the embarassingly romatic poem I wrote in Forteleza on the beach two years ago.

Be patient,
Right now you are nameless
But I know you nonetheless
One day I will let you cradle my heart
Gentle like a new born baby
And I will put you in my pocket
Like a favorite word collected for my verbose text
And you will become intimately common
My beloved colloquialism

who the hell knows

I've got ten days until I turn 25. This year has hit me for some reason. Like I should be responsible and mature. I should have direction and not make all these crazy mistakes. I also feel old for the first time but not ready for it. Like a five year old trying to wear her dads shoes.

I'm almost done with this poop shit job and I hate it and I suck at it. I'm not sure if I never had a memory or if the stress is affecting my memory and ability to perform. I certainly feel my life force being drained on a daily basis. My principal worked real friggin hard on Friday to make me feel like a piece of poop because I fucked up some WASL stuff. Whatever. I just want this nightmare to be over. I want to just roll over and give up and start truely not giving a shit and doing the worlds most pathetic job. But that wouldn't go along with my new mature age. Damn it! I really hate perfectionism and worrying about every silly detail. It just annoys the crap out of me.

I want this job to be over but I want to still be able to believe in myself and my ability to do my best at whatever job I have. And when this job is over I'm leaving. It makes me sad and a bit nervous. I'm going to miss everyone so much. And I guess the desire to travel is my only direction in life.

Blech, another week starts tomorrow.

The Lost Day

I left for Thailand at 11:15am on Thursday April 3rd. I walked out of work early and of course they just couldn't find a sub for me. So of course they made my para work by herself, which makes me feel bad and stresses me out. I had barely finished lunch when I got a call that one of my lovelies had gotten into a nasty fight with another tough girl and ended up punching my para in the chest who was trying to get in between them. I hadn't even been gone for 30 minutes!

I misplaced Friday April 4th en route to Bangkok. Damn that international dateline! The day is gone, poof! Amazing that every long grueling international flight is exactly the same. I spend most of my time thinking of inappropriate things or deep subjects. Boredom. Some things never change and I'm still afraid of the loud delayed flush of an airplane toilet. I also get grossed out thinking about how some people do it on planes. The mile high club is not sexy, it is claustrophobic disgusting-ness. Also I always seem to get bloated on flights, which I hate, and then I burp, which I usually don't do on land. Yuck. I spend most of my time watching the large map screen change from screen to screen that has random statistics and our plane's global position. Ten and a half hours of staring at it from Seattle to Tokyo. Plus I had an extra bonus this time. I sat next to Mr. Snuffles who is perhaps thee most annoying quirky man on the face of the earth. He snorted air out of his nose in rapid fire succession the whole friggin trip! It was so bad that snot hit his personal tv multiple times and he had to wipe it off with his napkin. I couldn't stop fantasizing about killing him. I, at most got about ten minutes of sleep even with my new self inflating pillow, eyemask and ear plugs. This is in contrast to me zonking out for 90% of the 8 hour flight from Tokyo to Bangkok. I attribute it to sitting next to the sweetest older Laotian lady. Well that and the fact that I took hella strong pain pills instead of the anti-inflammatory that I intended to take for my achy sprained foot. I was high as a kite the whole damn flight. I started day dreaming about Asia, how amazing it is, yummy Thai food and of quitting life and becoming a wandering but very happy vagabond. My pain pill high eventually ended in me feeling like I was about to puke. But I lucked out and didn't have to experience the doggie bag for the 1st time. I took another lovely big fatty nap and woke up to the realization that I did not bring the hotel address. Woops!

Passport Part II

Why don't Americans own passports? Only 20% of Americans have them. This is compared with 40% of Canadians, 64% of Brits and 90 % of Germans.

The usual exuse of Americans for not traveling is that there are so many wonderful things to do and see in the 50 states that there is no reason to ever leave. And when Americans do leave they rarely make it past Puerto Vallarta. That trip to Mexico is just about as much as their fear filled ticker can take. They obsess over drinking nothing but bottled water and never stray from their gringo catering hotel villages.

We have been poisoned by American propiganda that our country is the only safe and worthwile place in the world. We believe that all other nationalities pine for our life, for just one chance to come to the wonderful land of red white and blue. But what is going so well here?

The middle class is dissapearing, the gap between rich and poor continues to grow, our country is in debt, unemployment rates are up, the dollar is on par with the canadian dollar, uthe housing market is in a slump, young college graduates owe 100,000 dollar loans with high interest rates but can't find a good job to pay them off, lets face it, we're in a recession.

I can't stop myself but to go into the war and our unfounded hatred of all middle eastern, arabic and muslim people. We want to say that we are not a racist people but we put a little astrik next to all who beleve in islam. What's worse is that most Americans can't even tell the difference between a Hindu Indian and a Muslim Arab. Our ignorance is deafening! Those of you who would like to continue wars in the middle east please at least figure out how to find these countries on a map!!! We've spent 572 billion dollars on the war last year, thats eight times what we spent on education. The average American paid $1800 dollars toward it. Don't tell me I don't care about soldiers. They are heroes. Many come from low income homes, have their service time extended, don't get the treatment they deserve when they come home and make multiple tours in a short period of time. The average army private in combat makes $25,942 compared with the average income $9,095,756 of a military contractor CEO. No, I do not give a shit about Robert Stevens, he can suck my big toe. I can't believe that there are now talks of a possible war with Iran. How long must this go on?

Now that everyone is all fired up and pissed at me.... I just wish that my people would take their heads out of the sand, we are not ostriches. Americans are wonderful people, some of the kindest, most interesting, entertaining, creative and diverse people in the world. I love the United States and many of the things and places in it. I meet many travelers who hate their own country but I'm not one of them. I just wish Americans would get out of their comfort zone and throw away the fear and see that the world is actually a exciting, warm and welcoming place. That things do not begin and end "from sea to shining sea" but extend much further.

Passport

So I lost my ID, my drivers licence while out drinking last weekend with the other crazy teachers. Monday was St. Patrick's day and there was no way I was going to miss out on that one. I had a light up hat, ring and sparkley shamrock sunglasses. So I figured I would use my passport to get into the bar. But it wasn't in my normal spot. My friend and I tore my place apart and no passport. I was losing my mind and about to cry, my St. patty's day foiled. We eventually gave up and went to Good Time Ernie's, the dive bar where they never card us. So I drank my sorry away. I'm leaving for Thailand in less than three weeks so all last night I couldn't sleep and today I spent freaking out about it as well. Researching how I was going to get a new one. My friend and I went to go pick up my contract from DHL and then it occured to me. I had to scan my passport to prove to the Saudi government that I had actually exited their country. And just as I had assumed, there it was when I got home, waiting for me in my scanner/printer/coppier combo machine. My scant, microscopic thread of sanity was saved from extinction.

Sunday Night

There's something so sad about Sunday nights. Actually I should say that it is not sadness but rather dread in the pit of my stomach. The problem with Sunday is that Monday follows far too close behind. I'm trying to focus on my upcoming trip to Thailand, but globetrotting bliss seems so very far away. Three weeks may as well be eternity as far as I'm concerned. My work is like being drug behind a Ferrari on a sandpaper road with many large jagged rocks for months on end. The whole experience is painful, but seems to be moving at a fast pace. However, 10 months is long, no matter how quickly it passes. So to pass the time I obsess over my future travel destinations (Egypt, Australia and one TBA), play mindless video games and follow a strict diet that includes beer at the top of my pyramid.

Oh and things weren't really looking that far up as I stated in my previous post. They started looking like poop the day after I wrote it. My horrible clueless boss dropped in into my room the following morning. No sense in rehashing that expirience though.

Things are looking up...

Despite the fact that I was in the throws of death about a month ago, ready to go into work and completely flip out (I would go into the vivid details of how I see this theoretical release of anger playing out but people might take me seriously and believe that I actually have the capability to be violent). So, all in all, things seem to be looking up. This might be due to the fact that I don't give a shit about anything anymore. Call me all the names in the book and hit me over the head with a two by four and I'll walk away smiling and chipper. Anti-Anxiety Medication. I can't praise it enough.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CwEXc9ymAY&feature=related