We started the day with the Movenpick
buffet. I wish I could have taken a
picture, but the place was so full of people that you couldn’t see the food
tables. Suffice it to say that there
were over 80 feet of food choices, and an outdoor omelet bar. Here you can see what Eva chose:
Luckily for us, she was wasteful and didn’t eat all of
that (and you know I'm not a fan of waste). I can’t imagine it would have sat
well on the long car ride to Jerusalem.
Eli went with more standard pancake and cereal fare, though I’m not sure
why I think a pancake is more healthy than a profiterole—especially once you
add syrup. Jason tried every meat and
cheese he couldn’t recognize, making him the most adventurous of us all. I just had fruit, yogurt and an omelet,
though the fruit did include some dates so I could show them to Eli. ‘Here’s what grows on pom-pom trees’. I tried to get him to eat one, but he tried
to extort money to do so, so I dropped it.
I did eat the dates and it’s amazing how different a fresh date tastes
when compared with what we get in the states.
My grandmother used to serve them filled with buttercream frosting,
which would have been a travesty with the fresh dates. Come to think of it, maybe it is with any
date. It makes my teeth hurt just
thinking about it.
After booking one day at the Movenpick for our return trip,
we took a taxi to the border. The border
crossing went something like this:
Show passport on Jordanian side
Go to window and pay 8 dinar tax to leave (~$11.50 each)
Go to another window and show them the receipt for the tax
and get passports stamped.
Walk between the Jordanian and Israeli sides, where there’s
a no-man’s-land for about 250 feet.
We’re all wearing backpacks and Jason’s pulling the roly-duffle. Eva’s got the cooler, which you can see here
in an earlier photo in the hotel lobby.
Remember that cooler (because we didn’t).
On the Israeli side it was more like this:
Show passports to soldier standing next to another soldier
with a machine gun who’s looking back at the no-man’s-land.
Walk to building and show passports again.
Wait in line to put all belongings through x-ray machine and
walk through metal detector—showing passports again.
Wait while certain items go through metal detector a second
time—my backpack, once the books and iPad were removed, as well as my white
noise machine (which really stumped them).
Jason had told me that there were lots of barking dogs outside of the
Institute where we’re staying in Amman, and so I got a small noise machine to
bring with me. Seemed to make sense to
bring it with us to Israel. I can’t even
imagine what it looks like on an x-ray.
They asked what it was, and then the follow-up question—‘how does this
help you sleep?’ It’s funny to think
about traveling with that when before we used to sleep on mattresses on the
floor in youth hostels. I felt pretty
ridiculous about bringing it along, especially since we couldn’t even plug it
in at the hotel in Aqaba. It got a 3rd
trip through the x-ray machine and then was swiped for explosives before they
let us go on.
We then went to immigration and got our passports
stamped.
I want to say people were equally friendly on both sides of the
border, there’s just clearly a different philosophy at work. The whole thing took about an hour, which was
great.
We then took a taxi into Aqaba to get our rental car. Jason couldn’t be a driver because of his
lost driver’s license (unlike in Jordan, a photocopy wouldn’t suffice), which
means I’ll be doing all the driving while we’re in Israel. As I’m doing the paperwork for the car, Jason
and the kids realize the red cooler was left back at the border. Just at that moment, one of the women who
works at the Israeli border station walked into the car rental place. She said, “Oh, hello again”, and I said, “Hi...I
think we left something at the border”.
She called right over there on her cell and they found it. Pretty amazing coincidence.
So on our way to Jerusalem we made a quick detour to the
border and Jason ran in and picked up the cooler. Again, the differences between us traveling
now and us traveling 20 years ago are pretty striking. Also striking is how much Eilat has been
built up since we were last there in 1997, when we were crossing into Egypt to
go visit Jason’s parents in Cairo. There
are huge resort hotels everywhere now, back then it was a small town with a few
hotels and discos.
The drive from Eilat to Jerusalem is much like the drive
from Amman to Aqaba, though with nicer roads and more places for tourists to
stop. One of them was called 101 KM,
though I’m not sure if it was 101 kilometers from Eilat or from Jerusalem,
though I think it’s the former. It was a
good place to stop for quick snacks, though it also has a somewhat worrying
animal zoo attached that we didn’t go to.
We did enjoy some of their sculptures though, including this penguin
eating a fish in the desert. That’s
funny stuff—until you think too much about climate change...
With stops, the drive was about 4.5 hours. Unfortunately, our map of Jerusalem wasn’t
the greatest, so we kind of spiraled in on our hotel. We’re staying at the Addar Hotel: http://www.hotel-rn.com/hw/a170739/index.htm?lbl=ggl
(p.s. our room looks nothing like the photos.
I’m guessing only one room does).
It’s across the street from The American Colony hotel: www.americancolony.com where we used
to stay back when they had an unimproved annex where archaeologists could stay
for super-cheap (we were grad students after all!). Then they improved the annex and priced us
out. Today the cheapest room during
regular season (not high season) is $390 a night! Eva would cost an additional $80 a night on
top of that. That’s about the rate per
day of our current hotel. We’ll
definitely walk the kids over there to check it out, but there’s no way we’ll ever
be able to stay there again.
After checking into our three star (and perfectly fine, if a bit old and worn around the edges) hotel, we walked down Salah Ed-din street to
the Old City. On the way, we stopped by
the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research: www.aiar.org where I had lived during the 1996/7
academic year as a USIA Fellow, with Jason joining me for the 1997 portion. Before Jason came, I actually wrote up my
M.A. comprehensive exams there. My
committee had e-mailed them to me, which was pretty exciting at the time. I remember having this tiny dot matrix
printer that you had to feed each sheet through by hand. I can’t remember if I e-mailed the responses
back or brought them with me in hard copy when I came back to Tucson mid-year
to defend.
More important than the M.A. exams was the time I spent in
the kitchen with Hisham M’Farrah, who still cooks there: http://asorblog.org/?p=90 If you’ve ever had my lentil soup, I learned how to make it from him. If you haven’t, we should
remedy that! It was fun to bring the
kids by to see him today--we haven’t seen each other since Eva was 6 months
old. I stood in his kitchen door until
he turned around and said, with a look of surprise, “Alysia!” He was literally about to serve dinner and so
we had a short reunion and will catch up with him later this week. Here’s a photo of me and the kids just
outside the Albright courtyard:
We continued our walk down Salah Ed’Din, with Eli yanking us
back to look at every Sponge Bob or
Smurf item he saw—which was more than you might think. It was probably pretty funny to anyone watching,
but not so funny to us. How do you
explain to a 5-year-old that you won’t buy them something they could get in the
U.S. (when we probably wouldn’t buy it in the U.S. either). He really got his heart set on a Smurf bobble-head
doll and there were many tears and proclamations that “This is my worst day
EVER” as our walk continued, Smurfless.
Rather than use the closest Old City gate, we walked on down
to the Damascus Gate. Even Eli was
impressed. He’s now calling the Old
City, ‘the castle’. We told Eva about
her sleeping on my lap by the Damascus Gate when she was a baby, oblivious to
the loud noises around her. Back then,
someone had been kicking a metal chair over the stones and I remember thinking,
this is one kid who isn’t going to have trouble sleeping as an adult. Bet she
won’t travel with a white noise machine!
After a pizza and falafel dinner near the New Gate, we
walked back to the hotel. It should come
as no surprise to anyone who knows her that Eva was very drawn to the fancy
dress shops. If I had the time and the
skill, I’d photoshop her head onto this mannequin:
"JASON!!!"
ReplyDeleteWhat a memorable husband you have. Loved that part.
Miss you!