No Black Iris

Well then. The week started off ominously as I couldn’t sleep and the Khamseen dust storms came back to pay Jordan another visit. The dust storms here are more amazing than I imagined as they envelop the city in what seems to me like a matter of minutes. I just wish that Amman had an air siren they could use to warn me to take my contact lenses out before they adhere to my eyeball. I hate that sucking sound I can hear sometimes when I take them out and my eyes are really dry. Ick.

But that’s not what this Easter’s post is about. Today I spent Easter with The Man and Crazy Neal walking around Ajiloun. CN has an eerie similarity to Dr. PJW; I mean they both wear all-denim outfits and seemingly subsist only on beer. Anyway, I mentioned earlier this week that I wanted to see the Black Iris if still possible. CN said he’d just been in Ajiloun that day and the flowers were great. He was headed back in a few days, and I was invited. I volunteered The Man to go as well. We took the bus up to Ajiloun and then a taxi up to the castle. CN needed to meet someone who turned out to be in Petra, so we did actually go into the castle for a bit. The Man had never been, I guess. I really love that castle anyway, so I didn’t mind. Ok, really, I should just admit that I wanted to go inside because I remember that there was a man who sold coffee outside the gate. Thank God he was here this morning. CN and I had coffee, and then we went inside. I didn’t take many pictures since I’ve been a few times now. CN promised “Byzantine shit” so I wanted to wait and take pictures of the shiz.

We headed south-west from the castle on a dirt road. There were zillions of flowers all over the place. I’ll save you the suspense: there was not a single Black Iris to be seen. There were a lot of cultivated purple Irises, does that count? Still, I was not disappointed. The flowers and the weather were perfect. I saw lots of ruins. I tried to listen to The Man and CN talk about this, but since it doesn’t involve Naviform core technology, it’s obviously not that interesting, so I’ll spare you the details. So, this stuff is old, got it? And it’s close to the castle, and they are clearly living structures and accompanying water systems. I don’t know what the difference between a well and a cistern is, but there were big-ass holes in the ground that were plastered on the inside. Those were there. We saw one mysterious cave structure, and one quarry. You can see all of this on the slide show. We walked a zillion miles, and then finally headed to lunch at a hotel. Us three and another two were it for Easter lunch. After a lengthy lunch we caught the bus back to Amman. It was really restful, and CN is actually really cool and hilarious in a PJW-way.

A restful day was needed for many reasons. Among those reasons was the excitement here on Friday night. I invited myself to the cook out up at CBRL. A graciously made me a St. Frances (we’re going with the feminine spelling, ok?!?) and I was sitting out on the patio with a bunch of white people when we heard shots fired. We figured it was getting to be wedding season. Well, it turns out that the guard here shot himself. It was pretty nasty. I heard that the kid was sad because he wanted to marry a girl and his dad said No. Ten shots were fired. When we returned there was broken glass, blood, and tree bark all over the driveway. I hear he got himself in the leg and bled a lot. He’s ok. This is Jordan, so when a man is bleeding to death there are not a lot of options. Our neighbor evidently came up and finally thought to grab the guys radio and use that to alert his boss. The guard spoke no English, but was apparently asking that no one be called. Yikes. Miss A, always a wittier writer than I, wrote about this on her blog. Check it out. What a night! But, other than the bark, blood, and leg, the cook out was great!!! This followed uneventful, but delicious Indian food co-cooked with The Man on Thursday. It was fricken good. We got all the spices freshly ground down at the Souk, and the dinner was great.

Lets hope for a week that’s just as delicious, but less bloody.