The three-week excursion to the Middle Eastern country of Jordan began a little bit ahead of schedule. A huge tornado storm knocked out the water and the power to Covenant College and forced it to close early for the semester. As a result I went home to Annapolis for a week before departing for Jordan. After a relaxing week recuperating from the semester and catching up with family and friends, I hopped on a plane to Atlanta to meet the rest of my group.
After about an hour and a half in the air reading The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell (which I mention here because I am a shameless promoter of the man’s writing and because the flight was otherwise uneventful), I landed in Atlanta and immediately got a phone call from Sara Schaaf, our group’s second-in-command (who’d grown up in Jordan), making sure I had arrived and wondering if I was near the South Terminal.
I lagged one step behind the rest of my group all the way through check-in and security. At the check in desk, after struggling futilely to get the check-in kiosk to read my passport I finally got my boarding pass and proceeded behind a very confused Russian woman through the security checkpoint.
After helping my harried Russian comrade-ess through the process of American airport security I emerged into the food court of the Atlanta airport, where I met my group. After a surprisingly good airport lunch we all gathered around the wrong gate for a meeting. Three gates over from the gate we were to depart from, we discussed last-minute details of the trip (we chose this gate because a flight full of people was about to depart at our gate and there were no seats near each other.) Our conversation was peppered with loud comments from the nearby television about such diverse topics as the likelihood of Donald Trump becoming president and the reaction of a French woman to her son’s victory in a bicycling race in Kentucky.
Amongst the things we discussed were several issues of cultural sensitivity. We learned, for instance, that letting the bottom of your feet point at a person is the same thing as flipping them off, that western-style sit down toilets are not ubiquitous, that using your left hand to do anything important will probably offend someone, and that complimenting objects in people’s houses will result in the awkward situation of them attempting to give it to you.
As the time for our plane to board approached we moved over to the correct gate and gathered around a semi-intelligent garbage can, which sorted recyclables from regular garbage and made a very satisfying buzzing sound as it did so. At this point we very nearly got off to an extremely bad start when we came close to leaving group member Sam Bowman behind, as he had fallen asleep sitting several rows away from the rest of us and no one had realized he wasn’t with us. Fortunately the last call for boarding woke him up and he was able to rush into the plane just before they closed it.
The flight to New York was rather uneventful, besides playing a trivia game built into my seat against other passengers on the flight. I soon gave this up as hopeless, however, because the touch screen in front of me would only select the answer I wanted it to if that answer happened to be wrong. Otherwise it would select answer C, thus denying me my points and sucking the joy out of my life. Instead, I settled in with my book and a cinnamon cookie given to me by the airline to await our arrival in New York.
As we deplaned in New York, we discovered that by the most outstanding stroke of luck our domestic flight had in fact parked at the international terminal, and had actually let us off at the exact gate we would be departing from three hours later for Amman, Jordan. We grabbed sporadic meals as we waited and tried very hard not to curiously peek at the Jordanians waiting for the same flight. Curiosity got the better of us from time to time, and we’d shoot a glance at these thoroughly interesting people.
It struck me as completely bizarre that here we were, sitting in an airport waiting for a plane, and right across from us were people who were so vastly different (and whose culture we were just starting to understand and realize how radically different it really was) sitting next to us doing the exact same thing and probably thinking similar thoughts about us weird Americans.
We witnessed our first taste of the feast of culture clash that was our flight to Amman when the boarding process began. As soon as the airline workers announced that boarding was going to start all of the Jordanians mobbed the ticket-checker. We realized that since, in Jordan, the concept of “lines” is more or less non-existent, that they were expecting to just be let through in the order they ended up nearest the teller. After 15 minutes of watching the attendant unsuccessfully explain that people had to board the plane in the order listed on the tickets, we just decided to join the mob and get on the plane.
Once on the plane I encountered a woman that Brenda Nelson (another member of the group assigned to the seat next to me) and I would come to know rather well over the course of the 11-hour flight. At the moment, she was in my seat and showed no signs of wanting to move. After the attendant explained to her that she had to sit in her seat and not mine, she moved over to the end of the row on the other side and I took my place on the plane. Throughout the boarding/takeoff process, this purple-shrouded Jordanian matron kindly and cheerfully drove the flight attendants crazy as she kept jumping up and walking around the plane to talk to people. The attendants would calmly find her, bring her back and make sure she buckled her seatbelt, but as soon as they left she was off. About halfway through the flight she disappeared and I didn’t saw her again until we had exited the plane. I honestly don’t know where she went or how she escaped the patrolling flight attendants.
After we took off I decided to check out the in-flight movie selection to kill some time since it was too dark in the plane to read. I watched The Green Hornet, gave up on Due Date after 20 minutes of not thinking it was funny, and watched about half of an Egyptian spy thriller called Welad Al A’am, which I think means “Son of the Public” or something to that effect, thought I could be wildly wrong about it. It was weird to watch a movie where all of the villains were Israeli and the main character was an Egyptian woman who happened to be married to an Israeli spy. Since it was late and I’d been up for a long time I fell asleep before I found out what happened in the end.
Since I didn’t actually have a clock, I only know that I slept for about an hour flying over Nova Scotia, woke up for a while and putzed about the plane for an hour or so. Then after two hours of regretting getting a caffeinated drink with the in-flight dinner, I finally fell asleep over Brest, France and didn’t wake up until we were flying over Cyprus.
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