It Was The Best of Times, It Was The Worst of Times

Well I’m here after a marathon series of flights, 45 mins. Minneapolis to Chicago, 12 hours (with an hour delay because of computer malfunctioning Chicago to Amman, and finally 45 mins. Amman to Beirut. The flights were generally peaceful, interrupted only by the cries of what seemed like hundreds of babies, and the guy next to me on the long flight who had a penchant for singing along to his Arab-Pop music.

Speaking of children, there had to be one for every adult on that second flight. When they began pre-boarding in Chicago, they let “families with small children” get on first, ostensibly to save us all time, but what ended up happening was that the whole room (except for myself and a few others) got up and began queuing.

Interestingly enough, both the first in-flight selection played and the first thing that showed up when I turned on my dorm-room television was “الاصدقاء”، or “Friends”. I don’t know why the middle easterners love it so much, I’ve always hated that show.

When I got to the Amman airport, I sat down to wait for my flight right across from a Starbucks (they also had Cinnabon, which i thought was much funnier), and I began to screw around with my phone, eventually deciding to put it into French mode so that if anyone seemed hostile to the idea that I was an American, I could just pretend to be French, and show them my phone (very likely scenario). Anyways, so I’m sitting down and this guy comes up to me, 20-25 ish, muscular build, well dressed, and asks me where I’m from, I tell him that I’m from the United States and that I was taking the next flight to Beirut. He was too and said that if I needed anything he could call me, he gave me his phone number, I put it in my phone under the entry “Amman”. And there it will stay.

Of course my luggage was lost, so this will be a mess trying to get it back. I have to call the Royal Jordanian ticket counter at the Beirut airport, but since my Arabic is no where near good enough to do it myself, I need to find someone here who can call them for me.

So all I have is the clothes I’m wearing pretty much.

I wish I had taken a picture of it, but on my way from the Airport there was this really cool LG advertisement for a Huge and i mean HUGE refrigerator. The ad was on the side of an apartment complex, it was that big.

Things are different here, but they’re also familiar. I need to go to breakfast, but I think I’ll finish watching Boy Meets World or Mel Gibson’s The Patriot first.

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