Three weeks ago began my spring break. I decided not to go to Egypt as I had originally planned. Instead, I arranged to meet some other Georgetown people in Syria after their trip to Lebanon. Syria is cheap and you don’t have to fly to it.
The first few days of break, however, I was alone in Amman. It actually ended up being really fun and relaxing. I got some research done, hung out with some of my Jordanian friends, and FINALLY went to Mount Nebo as I had been meaning to do for about 2 months. It’s hard to gear myself up to travel alone. I wake up and say to myself, “Really, do I want to be stared at all day and have to deal with a hundred strange men who all want my number? I could just stay here and eat hummus!” Ultimately it is more fun to go out, so I sprang from my bed, ate some pita and traipsed my way to the North bus station.
The bus to Madaba takes about an hour from Amman. I walked around the cute little town and went to the famous church that has a huge mosaic map of the holy land on the floor. There were a lot of mosaics in one place there…if you like mosaics, I suggest going there.
Then I went to get coffee and of COURSE the man there gave it to me for free in exchange for a conversation and GUILT! That is what they do so that you talk to them. OVER IT! Whatever…I actually give them my number because it’s faster and easier to get away. Then I mark their numbers with soccer ball icons and ignore all soccer ball calls. This doesn’t always work since the average Jordanian has 2.5 cell phones for some reason (this is just my estimate, not actual data), and thus it is impossible to always know for sure who is calling you. It doesn’t matter…I only have this number for another month, and their text messages are too hilarious to pass up. I only gave my number to two people during my trip to Madaba. Relatively successful. I mean, one guy paid for my entire bus trip home and escorted me back from Mount Nebo to Amman in safety. The only creepy thing he did the whole time was write “you are beautiful” on his phone and show it to me, then ask me repeatedly for an hour if I was mad at him for doing that. I took his number graciously in exchange for his help, and carefully added a soccer ball.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Mount Nebo!
I took a service taxi from Madaba and it dropped me off four kilometers away from the mountain, so I walked a most beautiful and solitary walk, eating these amazing Turkish cookies I found that are cardamom flavored. If 1001 Nights were a cookie instead of a book, it would taste like these. They are so good.
The stretch of road had beautiful views of the countryside, and I listened to random songs on my ipod shuffle to encourage my imagination to run alongside me and stretch its legs a bit, since I had some free time. I wish I knew more about history, legend and religion, and how the three all fit together. Maybe I would get more out of going to these sites. Or maybe not. Actually, I’m starting to think sometimes my imagination does a better job filling in the gaps than actual facts would, but I would still like to know what I was talking about sometimes. As I walked, I just kept thinking “like OMG this is totally where the BIBLE happened!” I mean, all of Jordan is I guess. Am I the only person whose mind is blown by that time and time again?
But the REAL mind-blowing thing was this: as I neared Mount Nebo, the RANDOM song-choosing mechanism in my ipod SHUFFLE that I had RANDOMLY filled decided to play “Let My People Go” from the Prince of Egypt soundtrack! That was such an insane coincidence that I almost went crazy because I was alone and I had no one to tell about it. What are the chances of that happening!? I mean, I have 3043 songs in my iTunes!
Then came the view of the promised land from the top of Nebo, a very interesting and thoughtful place to be in my opinion.
I love traveling alone. I see more, I talk to people more, I notice more things, I can listen to music and I can walk as slowly as I want to, which is usually pretty slow. I can stand at the tops of mountains in my own cloud of thought as German tourists mill around me, and I can try to understand and accept why a place that means so much for so many really has very little meaning for me.
But despite the fact that Mount Nebo is little more than a nice view and a nice story as far as my immediate reality goes, my imagination is never far away waiting to do his job. As I face unglamorous facts, he whispers into my ear that there is still more to it, that I don’t really know where I came from and what lands my people loved. The beauty of being American is being unsure exactly who you are related to in the grand scheme of things. I have no tribe or thousand year history to dig down into. As far as I am concerned, anyone could be my distant cousin. I can never be sure.
“If your heart tells you this mountain is significant,” my imagination told me, “then it is. People have walked these paths in love and in mourning. They have looked out over the world around them and felt closer to the heavens, just as you have today. That is why we respect mountains, Virginia, and follow them upwards. No such place could ever be meaningless for us.”
