A Tale of Two Kings

After the speech at the university, we went to have lunch at a local restaurant. As I enjoyed a mezze of humus (chickpea and tahina (sesame seed paste) ), tabooli (cracked Bulgar wheat, parsley, and tomato), baba ganoush (eggplant and tahina) , roasted eggplant, and pita bread, my friends ate a chicken, rice and yogurt meal. (A friend e-mailed me and asked how I knew the ingredients of all the food. Well, I wish I could tell you that I am just so amazing that I..., but the truth is that:

• 1) I know what most of the mezzes are made of because I liked them so much the last times I was in the Middle East that I learned how to make them and...


• 
  2) They tell us as they are putting them out on the table.)

While we were eating, we heard a lot of noise and commotion outside on the street. There were a lot of people lining the streets and blockades going up all over the place. It turns out that King Abdullah of Jordan and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia were having a meeting together and were expected to drive by at some unspecified time.

Everyone on in the seminar was so excited that they gobbled their food and ran outside. "Two kings! Can you believe it?!!? I've never seen one king, let alone TWO kings before!??!?!" we all screeched to one another as we stood on the sidewalk waiting...

and waiting,

And, waiting.

Then Jafar, our local guide for the trip had us move to another spot. This one had a Bedouin tent with cushions for us to sit on. As we walked up a group of Bedouin musicians saw us and started playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" We laughed and clapped, amazed at the fact that these men not only recognized the country that we came from, but knew a song from it. As we all said, if the converse happened in the US, most people would have said something like, "Jordan? Is that in New Jersey?"

We sat in the tent for about an hour. Some of us played with the little children running around, others teased the teen boys who always come to check out the "Americans", while still others sat and gossiped about Janell, the girl who didn't make it back to the airport in Frankfurt. It turns out that when Garay, the man who is running this seminar, called her husband, he told her that she told him, that the person in charge of getting us our visas messed up and four Americans never made it out of Chicago. Garay had the bad luck of having to be the one to tell him that,

1. No, nothing was wrong with the visas.
2. That his wife had actually gone to Frankfurt.
3. That she left the airport stating that she was going to visit a friend and/or her old professor.

The next day he received an e-mail from Janell with no apology what-so-ever. All she said was that she was in Denmark and since she wasn't attending the seminar, she wanted her money back!

Finally, we heard horns honking! The band started to play! Everyone ran to the sidewalk. More than one Jordanian person offered their spot to me - a foreigner, so that I could see the their king better. (I politely declined- not that I didn't want to see their king, but it was their king, after all, not mine. They should be the ones to see him perfectly, not me.) A helicopter with machine guns armed and aimed, (well, I assume they were armed), flew overhead! And then a car with two men in kafias, (White Arab head dresses), drove by. Everyone screamed, waved Jordanian and Saudi Arabian flags, and took pictures (Sadly none of mine came out- they were all blurs.) everyone screamed and yelled, grasping hands and congratulating each other on seeing the kings.

As I have said before, people are people.

I just wish we got along better.