Saba Imtiaz: Everyday is a winding road..

This week..

Went to Mt Nebo and Madaba! Thankyou Huda for taking Rachel, Erika and me on such a fun, girly road trip! :D I finally got the much-awaited for moment of overlooking the Promised Land. I felt quite imbued with spiritual energy afterwards, and made many a spiritual comment to show my newly gained wisdom. See sample conversation below:

Emad: I dun have a defense
Me: you dont have to defend yourself
Emad: im not going to
Me: I am all accepting and all goodness
Emad: of course
Me: i am imbued with much spirituality today

Newly gained spiritual energy did not make me feel angry at annoying sister telling me I should not be so excited since the Promised Land was not meant for me. Hmph.

Had hours of guilt-free morning sleep. See, I live with Oksana - who I love to bits - but is annoyingly enough a very efficient morning person who wakes up at 6 or 7 am to start working. And hence I feel guilty enough to drag myself out of bed at 8:30 (sometimes I try and work from underneath the comforter by speaking to Oksana but that never works. She can barely understand me and hence I am forced to see the sunlight by emerging from cocoon of said comforter) But with her gone - I sleep till 10 AM! Woohoo.

Thought I was going to have relaxing weekend after spiritual trip. Instead ended up working through the weekend (but with great excitement as EBs did a kickass job all week and were writing to update me!), meeting the SG..thought Sunday would be calmer but then..

Get call from Grant Manager. Need to send in 4 pages of introduction to revised grant application before next morning. Spend so much time at Books@ working on it that I was convinced I'd have to spend the night there, and the servers thought it would be funny to confuse me when I finally got up to pay my bill. Was not amused. All spiritual energy was replaced by singalong music infused energy, combined with free coffee refills at Books@.

Also have convinced myself that God has sent all cats to my house as a sign to cheer me up when I come home all tired. Dad says cats have a sense for sniffing out fellow cat. I'm going to stick to the God theory before I start talking in meow-speak.

More later..

Labels: jordan journal, random musings

I hate rush hour in Amman.

Seeing that I come from a city of roughly 13 million people, and that I had a 20 minute commute to university daily, which often translated into an hour, I should have become resilient and adaptable.

But Amman is a totally different ballgame.

Firstly, the city is flooded with tourists from the Gulf countries over the summer - which means that the streets are deluged with 4 wheel drives

Secondly, there appears to be a shortage of cabs in this city. Seriously.

A few days ago..

Oksana and I leave a business meeting after a kickass meeting (I met the woman I want to be when I grow up. ) It is mid afternoon in Amman - around 35 degrees Celsius..

Oks and I stand for 20 minutes looking for a free cab. There appears to be none.

We decide to start walking, and get to the main intersection

Oks: I think we're going to have to walk home
Me (thinking in my head): She can't be serious. We'll find a cab before it comes to that. Home isn't anywhere close to here

Oks and I keep walking. .
..and walking..
..we try to flag empty taxis, but they pretend we are apparitions..

Helped greatly by the fact that I'm wearing a suit and heels, and Oks and I are both carrying laptops..and have no water to drink, we keep walking. While I feel bad that she has to go through this with me, I'm glad for the company and the fact that we can both bitch about how bad the transportation system has gotten.

30 minutes later, we find a bus that Oksana realizes is headed for a stop 10 minutes away from home.

We get into the bus, have a very brief respite from walking as the bus drops us off 2 minutes later at the stop.

We resume walking, get water, and head home.

Oks heads to her second meeting (God bless her soul!) and I fall asleep only to wake up extremely disoriented four hours later, wondering if we actually walked for 45 minutes straight, or got home 1 hour and 30 minutes after we ended our meeting..

Summer lovin', indeed.

Labels: jordan journal

I cried more than I possibly have in the past four months which, even though it was not related to my personal life and well being, or my work, was a good excuse for me to actually take out all the conflicting emotions of the past few months. I found an absolute inability to cry that had stemmed into my soul and I found it quite therapeutic, though I can’t say the same for my teammates who had to deal with me sobbing through the day. I love you guys, just in case you didn’t know. I also should thank Alex for listening to me whine online non stop this week and advising me to listen to Travis, or my sister for telling me I should stop listening to Oasis’ Stop Crying Your Heart Out, for that was “highly shushpishous”

I moved apartments – we now live in a gorgeous place in downtown Amman, more details/pictures/videos soon; but I walked into the house the day we moved and felt like I had come home. It a nutshell, it is incredibly warm and cozy, has grape, lemon and pear trees outside, a gorgeous porch where we entertain friends, drink tea and stare at the sky.

I went exploring our neighbourhood with Rachel. We ended up at crossroads at a loss at where to go (quite like the scene in Castaway), in a lovely art gallery/shop called Love on a Bike – where the owner/artist gave us a gorgeous postcard, a bottle of bubbles (yay!) and CD of music, which I have been admiring/listening to nonstop, and then at a rooftop café to drink fruit juice and smoke arguileh, enjoying a spectacular view of Amman – watching fireworks take off from different neighbourhoods to mark weddings or celebrate the tawjeehi results, which is the final exam Jordanian students take at school.

I spent time chatting away with friends of friends/housemates about politics and the Middle East and religion – did I mention our house is perfect for entertaining and having great conversations? =)

I finally bought Iraqi currency from the days of Saddam which are sold by pavement vendors with great gusto. I now carry about 600 in worthless currency in my wallet but I know everyone wants a note with a despot’s image on it. I also think they'll make excellent gifts..

I spent an enormous amount of time poring over Excel sheets in an effort to do myriad Finance related work. Honestly, while I love my work, I do find it a tad bit lonely when on a Thursday evening you have friends signing off Google Talk saying they’re going offline and wishing you a good weekend, while the Finance survey you’re trying to complete seems to have no end in sight. It is obviously also unfair of me to take out my angst on housemates/teammates by beating them repeatedly at games of Uno..which we've been playing nonstop since we moved, courtesy Momo's housewarming gift.

I met a CEO who actually understood what it means to get work done the very instant it needs to be done (quite a rarity!), and a taxi driver who spent 5 minutes telling me how Musharraf was a very bad man, after I prompted a conversation on Pakistan following a news item on BBC Radio, a staple favorite of taxi drivers. Has to be a step up from when a taxi driver said “Pakistan…mosques and swords” after I told him I was Pakistani.

I spent a lazy afternoon with my teammates, coming up with nicknames for each other, creating imaginary friends and nagging each other, and am now sitting here wishing that the weekend was not coming to an end..sigh.

More ramblings sometime next week...

Labels: jordan journal, random musings