Usama and the Fourth of July at the Dead Sea

Two weeks ago I went to one of Jordan's most famous touris attractions: the Dead Sea. The week before heading off to the Dead sea, about a quarter of the program was scrambling around looking for other people who were interested in going to the Dead Sea. Typically when we do independent travel it's bet to travel in a group of four people since that's the limit taxis can carry. Fortunatley I found a group and we decided we would leave Friday morning (Friday is like a Saturday here in Jordan). It wasn't till about 11:15 PM Thursday night that I was told the other people in the group had arranged to meet a private taxi and 6 AM Friday morning. I was thrilled. Ma Sha Allah, I got my ass out of bed at 5:30 AM and was on time for the taxi. It was so hard to get up up at 5:30 because I had stayed up till 2 talking with some Arab friends in the cafe the night before. In addition, the 4 AM call to prayer was noticably louder and longer that morning. I think they must have read from Surat al-Buqara (the longest Sura or chapter of the Qu'ran) since the Friday morning recitation lasted for about 45 minutes.
We got on our way around 6:15 AM to Amman. Our private taxi driver dropped us off at this bus station in Amman because we had a bus ticket to go from Amman to a beach on the Dead Sea. At the bus station we met a group of women from California. We talked to the for a bit and found out that it was a mother and her two thirty year old daughters who were traveling together with their dad to Amman. Their Dad was an Iraqi American who had immigrated to the States thirty or so years ago but he had a lot of family living in Jordan. We ended up talking to them about grape leaves and other kinds of Arabic food and Iraq during the 45 minute bus ride from Amman to the Dead Sea. The daughters didn't know any Arabic (even though they were half Iraqi) so I told them how to say what's up in Iraqi slang (Shako Mako), when I said that one of the men sitting behind us smiled. I started to talk with him and found out that he, his wife, and his daughter were all Iraqis who had fled from Baghdad to Amman because of the Iraq war. His wife spoke excellent English since she had studied English literature at a University in Baghdad. I assume Baghdad University. That would make sense. I grew very fond of this family from Iraq because when it was time for us to get dropped off, our bus driver proved a bit impatient and did not understand where we wanted to go. The Iraqi man helped us work directions out with him.
After working through some initial confusion on where we wanted to get dropped off, we ended up at one of the Dead Sea Resorts that we had planned on going to. Even though we had no plans spending the night at this resort, we paid them some money so that we could use there private Dead Sea Beach and pools. Ths was a good idea since we had access to restaurants (however horribly overpriced), a bar (the other guy and gals in the group were dying for a beer), and umbrellas. By this point it was 9:30 AM and my mood was rapidly declining since I had eaten little that day and the Sun at the Dead Sea was the most intense I had ever experienced. I went to get something to eat and drink at one of the bars then returned to make preperations for a 50 yard descent from the pool area to the Dead sea.
Having broken two pairs of sunglasses I was sans sunglasses. This was unpleasent because of the sun's intensity. I came up with a brief and failed attempt to solve this problem by wrapping my red and white kuffieh around my head in terrorist fashion (i.e. the way the terrorists wrap their scarves around their heads showing nothing but eyeslits). That worked for 30 seconds. We walked out of the pool area, which was rapidly filling up with screaming children, and made our way to this resort's private Dead Sea shore. We placed our towels and shirts on this bench by the water and stepped in.
Approaching the Dead Sea is like stuffing your nose into pile of salt. Salt has a very subtle yet distinguishable smell which I smelled. That would make sense since the Dead Sea I think has the highest concentration of salt anywhere on Earth. I walked in my first twenty steps. I didn't like the feeling of the loose sand and gravel so a plunged in after those few steps splashing one of the girls in the group. The Dead Sea feels like the world's largest baby pool; it has this strong warm feeling like you're sorrounded by a bunch of little kids all peeing at the same time. That was my first thought when I plunged in. All of us went out from the shore a couple yards and lost touch with the bottom. Because of its incredibly high salt concetration, it's impossible to sink in the Dead Sea. I tried to touch the bottom a few times but the water always strongly pushed me back up.
After the first five minutes of discovering the water, we went back to shore to lather up in the famous blackish Dead Sea mud. All lather up, we took pictures of each other and then went back into the water to float around. I had put a lot of mud on my face since Dead Sea mud is supposed to be very good for your skin. Hoping to maximize its benefits to my skin, I began washing my face with the Dead Sea's salty water. Not bright. Some of the water began to drip into my eyes. To give you an idea of how salty the Dead Sea's water is, I tasted a little on my finger. The water is so concetrated with salt that it tastes corrosive. Well, some of that gut in my eye so I couldn't see. I decided to swim back to shore so that I could wipe my eyes off a bit, having my eyes closed I actually began to swim further out. One of the girls named Lynze pointed me in the right direction which helped at first but I eventually got off track again and began to swim parallel to the shore. Seeing my dilemma, Lynze took my hand and walked me back to the shore and the showers 200 feet away, hand in hand the whole time while I stumbled around. A bit humbling.
We experienced the Dead Sea then walked back to the pool area to sit under umbrellas. The other guys drank beers which are impossible to find in Irbid. I slept, lulled by the ever growing chorus of screatching kids.
We stayed at the Dead Sea until 5 PM when we had arranged to have our bus pick us up and drive back to Amman. Once we got to Amman we arrived at the Hotel Farah, which is a popular hostel with our group, got changed and headed off to this bar that one of the guys on the program had recomended; Amigos. Unlike Irbid which because of its more conservative and Islamis identity has no bars, Amman is more liberal and western influenced so finding bars there is not hard. Just sitting and listening to people in Amigos revealed this difference between Amman and Irbid since Muslims were drinking alcohol and Muslim women were sitting and talking with men while smoking; all of these are forbidden or taboo in Arab Islamic day to day practices. Everyone in the bar was speaking English. I was shocked while waiting to use the bathroom. The Men's room sign had a picture of a man holding out his penis over a toilet while he took a piss. Definitely not the most conservative peice of art in Jordan. Ranging from slightly buzzed to mildly wasted , a bunch of us went to a roof top cafe-restaurant nearby. I went with this group and ended up smoking a lemon-mint flavored argeela. The feel of this cafe was also completely different from a cafe in Irbid. Like the bar, women and men were open flirting with each other at a table next to us. The wide screen TV screen on the wall flashed images of celebrity women wearing sexy dresses and college girls dancing in bikinis. In Irbid, the small, slighlty staticy TVs play soccer games and Arabic music videos. My Argeela was six dinar in Amman while in Irbid I can buy an argeela for two dinar. Contrasts were apparent everywhere.
Once I finished my argeela, a bunch of us walked around Amman to get to another popular cafe called Books at Cafe. Initially I was puzzled about why a cafe would have a name like that but once I got there I realized why; the cafe's first floor was an English language bookstore. I tried to speak Arabic to the woman behind the counter but she replied in perfect American sounding English. The Jordanian elementary school kids who were leaving as I walked in also spoke American sounding English. I asked them if they had ever been to the States, they said no but told me they went to an American school in Amman. It was actually challenging to get the Jordanians here in Amman to speak in their Arabic!
I went up to the cafe's second level which was where people from the group were hanging out and chatting. There were some Arab men chatting away with some of us. A bunch of us had wanted to go clubbing to celebrate the Fourth of July. Apparently these Arab dudes had connections that could get us in for free into one of Amman's night clubs. I introduced myself to one of them, he told me his name was Usama, Usama bin Laden. I didn't take the bin Laden part seriously since this guy had a cross dangling from his neck. I knew that Usama is actually a pretty common Arab Christian name since I had met an Egyptian Coptic back in the States whose name is Usama.
Usama ended up driving a bunch and showing the rest of us where this popular night club was. Till about 2 AM we ended up dancing to Arabic dance tunes. The singing to these dance tunes had been dubbed over with kareoke since it was kareoke night at this nightclub. That was our night in Amman.