Saba Imtiaz: Everyday is a winding road..

All quotes shamelessly taken from conversations with teammates. I did tell them last night at 3 AM that I'm going to blog these. Oh well..

"Oksana is turning into a night person and Momani's sleepy at night. Great, tomorrow I'm going to wake up and be in a different country..
..wait, I already am in a different country."

"Sharing is caring"
"But sometimes, caring is not sharing!"

"How can you play a game with bottles? Aren't they supposed to be cans?"

"Whats a kettle?"
"What do you call the thing you boil water in?"
"..the thing you boil water in...?"

"Oksana, pretty spreadsheets make us happy. Don't you want us to be happy?"
"The point of your job is to deliver results, not to be happy. "

Exchange according to Oks:

"AAAAAAAAAAA. This resume.." (repeated at 10 second intervals)

"The difference between EPs and SNs is that SNs are bad quality and EPs are good quality.."

"EP's past job description: 'doing the secretary'...wait.."

Labels: jordan journal

These have also not been an easy few weeks, because many long forgotten memoirs have popped up. Of Eids gone by, good, bad and worse, of old relationships, the pain and happiness of which I thought I’d forgotten, of old friends who I no longer keep in touch with and vice versa, and of seeing my parents in and out of hospitals for most of my life. I think what upsets me the most is that I have no control over my mind. I thought I was stronger, that I had effectively blocked so much out of my head and heart, that I would never be troubled again by the years gone by. Yet, the moment I am alone for a protracted period of time / the infrequent nightmares / the events surrounding my friends’ lives / the song lyrics that mirror events in my life / – I stop and I can’t take it anymore because it all comes back.

I want the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind.

Labels: random musings

So for the past 12 days I have been acting as tour guide/bad translator/Eid grinch and have been showing my khaleeji friend Alex, around Jordan - and also seeing all the sights and sounds of Jordan that I have not visited so far (mostly owing to keeping weekends to catching up for lost sleep and/or waiting to get resident status)

Over the past days, I've visited Petra, Wadi Musa, Madaba & Mount Nebo (again), the Dead Sea, Aqaba (again, YAY) and Wadi Rum..

..hopped on and off to enough buses to last me till another sight-seeing spree begins, stared despondently at an open road for a bus/cab, bargained with cabs, translated painfully, befriended the tourist police..

But my favorite memory of the past few days is sitting on a bus enroute to Shuneh (a stop on the way to the Dead Sea) and talking to a Bedouin farmer who spoke to us with the same open friend. Suddenly he gestured at us to look out the other window and said one word - 'Jordan'.

The most breathtaking scenery - mountains and valleys, an unending landscape that falls before the border between Jordan and Israel and Palestine..and a clear blue sky. I wish I had a picture, but nothing beats what the memory I have in my head.

I thought a lot about that moment afterwards. Sometimes long drawn out sentences about picturesque settings are not important. I have been in Jordan for exactly 5 months and 6 days today...in this time I've grown to love this country, to have it feel like home, to feel miserable at the thought of leaving, to feeling shocked on realizing such a long time has passed and it still feels like yesterday when I excitedly hopped off a Royal Jordanian plane - even now, when a phone call from home about how 130 people died in Karachi on Saturday* makes me feel like the world has slipped out from under my feet.

8 more months to go - and then who knows where to next?



*this is the last i will say on this. being away from home does not give me the right to be a pseudo-intellectual commentator on the state of affairs at home given my only source of news is myriad news websites.

Labels: jordan journal