the citizen-viewer

The Frankfurt to Amman flight was wall-to-wall Arabs. It was terrifying. Annie Jacobsen would have died of fright. Nearly every seat was occupied by exactly the sort of person we are now well-trained to fear. Who would it be — the youngish guy next to me in the cheap green suit, with a thin, pock-marked face? Flower headscarf girl? Peroxide blonde tight-jeans lady? The little girl asleep in her mother’s arms?

They say that a 9-11 style hijacking can’t happen again because the passengers would fight to the death. But in this case, they would be fighting each other. A pitched battle for the cockpit doors among terrorists of all descriptions.

The flight attendants came by with the drinks, and I noticed that green-suit guy and his friends ordered strictly non-alcoholic beverages. That’s a sign. And the flight attendant had to individually remind them to wear their seat belts because of the turbulence — you see, they have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own.

We never think about this, do we, when we see those scary Arabs on the plane. In some parts of the world, the planes are packed with nothing but Arabs! Who’s screening them?

This is how we’ve been schooled in terror. But I saw the towers fall. I have a right!

I started to talk with the guy in the green suit, asking him the correct pronunciation of some words in my Arabic phrasebook. He was quite helpful. It turned out he was an Iraqi engineer on his way back from two weeks of training in Germany. He was transiting through Amman on his way to Baghdad the next day. He asked me where I was from. I told him, and there was an awkward silence for a moment.

“It’s bad in Iraq,” he said in his very broken English. “The bombs more. More people die.” I pointed to the word “fear.” He nodded.

After an hour or so of training in Iraqi Arabic, we turned off the overhead lights and went to sleep.

At one in the morning, the coastline of Israel came into view, dazzling with lights. A few miles in, the lights spread more thinly and a single very bright line bisected the nightscape, roughly north to south. On the other side of this line, the lights were suddenly dimmer, just bluish fluorescent ones and no street lighting. The plane turned to begin its descent to Amman. I could see the whole sweeping view from there back to the shoreline. There’s a lot going in a very small space.

Inside the airport, in the small entry hall, stood men with signs meeting passengers. One of them held a sign that said Blackwater. Another said DYNCORP. In fact the crowd was more varied than I’d noticed on the plane—there were Scandinavian students here to see the sights, contractors heading to Iraq, missionaries heading to Lebanon. Everybody rushed to be first in line, either at the Royal Jordanian transfer desk, the visa desk, or the money exchange.

After a few minutes in the visa line I realized that you needed Jordanian dinars to get a visa, and had to give up my prime spot to take a rear position in the money exchange line. So much for my travel expertise.

Here’s what I learned (and what will get all the google hits on this page): Change some money into dinars before you get here. Also, you don’t need a visa if you’re going to be here for less than 24 hours; show your onward ticket at the transfer desk and they will give you a free pass instead of a 10-dinar visa. Another bonus for the googlers: The airport bus runs at least until 3am.

Finally I got my unnecessary visa and checked in at the transfer desk, and made it out through passport control. The Black Water guy had found his liaison, a towering, burly, and confused looking American man. Weaving past the taxi drivers I found the airport express bus. The transfer desk guy had told me I could take the bus to the “sixth circle” in Amman and there would be hotels.

Green suit and his Iraqi friends and I rode the bus into Amman, passing in quick succession these signs; Iraq border - Saudi border - King Hussein bridge (to Israel) - Dead Sea - and one that said simply “Salt”. Each with its own little exit ramp.

Characteristic of the developing world, there were elaborate gas stations rising from the dirt, a complex with a brightly lit sign saying “New York Institute of Technology” and as we entered the city, a lot of what I call rubble development: ambitious buildings constructed and completed, with the leftover rubble simply pushed to the side, piled up forever outside the wall. It seemed quite comfortable and familiar, although in Cambodia I would not have wanted to be walking at the side of the road at the edge of town, carrying my luggage in the middle of the night.

We arrived at a traffic circle and the bus pulled over. “Sitta circle,” the driver called out. I left green-suit, who was passed out solidly, and stepped down onto the curb.

A few large buildings loomed out of the darkness, including the Crown Plaza Hotel and another fancy looking place. The bus pulled away, leaving me with a guy who just seemed to be standing there. He started to walk with me toward one of the hotels, asking where do I go, where am I from. I gradually figured out that he was not from one of the hotels, and wasn’t even a taxi driver. But he agreed that these hotels were very “high,” and suggested we walk further into town to find lower ones. Only maybe three kilometers.

His name was Faiz, and he was from Tefila, a town near Petra, Jordan’s famous ruins. We walked along the shoulder of the near-deserted road, weaving around rubble on and off the narrow sidewalk as cars sped by. As I started to wonder whether this was a clever thing to be doing, I saw a side street on the other side of the highway and made out a couple of smaller hotels in the near distance.

I told Faiz I was going to check those out. With a final “welcome to Jordan,” Faiz headed off toward downtown and presumably his bus to Tefila, and I turned back toward the overpass that led to the street with the hotels I’d seen.

Three-thirty in the morning, on about two hours of sleep since Saturday, and I was walking alone along the deserted streets of Amman, carrying my luggage. I realized, with a certain satisfaction, that no one knew where I was.

Next up: Beirut, with better pictures.