the other world

I've told everyone that I'm living in Jordan this year, because really when you are somewhere for eight months out of twelve, your condo is rented, and all your mail is being forwarded to your mom's, where else can you say you lived? I lived out of the trunk of my car, on a friend's couch, a work-paid for hotel room, a tent for two weeks, random assortment of vacation rentals, and random campsites. It's the most stable thing I've done this year, being in a foreign country. And I'm still forced to change my mindset. The only two places I can look-up the weather forecast on the internet is for Amman and Aqaba, or I have to wait for the newspapers to describe the 'hilly areas.' Instead conferring a Time Out website, I have to confer the Jordan Times. When people give directions, they don't list street names, they list traffic circles (1st through 8th, and a few named ones), and describe second rights, third lefts. Although in the last eighteen months smaller residential streets have names and in the last year, buildings have acquired numbers (no more fourth building on the right after the third intersection). A new observable sign that Jordan is joining the rest of the world is a push for recycling, glass and plastic. Internet connection here is not the most reliable and the government can monitor anything. Still on any road trip, you will be pulled over at a random checkpoint to have documents checked, easy enough to do as an American. Movie times are still published in the paper, sales in stores are anybody's guess, and the main way of shopping for any service is through 'word of mouth.'

glacier hygiene

So there I am, on a glacier for the next twelve days. There are a lot of little things that one has questions about but are afraid to ask. Things like, how often do you change your underwear? How do you change out of contact lenses? How do you keep everything from freezing? Well there are little things that made it comfortable for me. The sacred socks were essential. That is a dry pair of socks to wear at night after I had soaked through the pair I was wearing all day. I was even more decadent and had a pair of sacred pants, that's right sacred pants. Pants that I would not wear for climbing or snowshoeing, but only for sleeping. Every night we went to sleep with EVERYTHING that needed to be dry and shouldn't freeze ... yes in the sleeping bag: sunblock, hand creme, toothpaste, contact lens solution, baby wipes, linings of the plastic boots, the wet socks I had already worn, the camera and batteries, the iPod (which should've been fully charged before I left town because the battery was empty the first night). For the next of skin of items, well I changed every three to four days, and the baby wipes were absolutely essential. Since water is precious and you can't actually wash your face or really want to get your hands wet, our instructors let us in on the teabag bath secret. Yeah, take the teabag you used for brewing the morning cup and wipe your face with it. Six straight days of slathering on SPF 70 sunblock six times a day gave me the complexion of a leprous zombie. It was suggested to me I take a 'teabag bath.' After doing a quick self portrait of myself with my digital and looking at the effect, I was aghast at my appearance. But otherwise, living on a glacier for 12 days was no sweat (except when we were shoveling and the ambient radiation of the sun reflecting off the glacier made it feel like we were in the Saharan desert while moving camp). What did I wish for? A way to call my mom (apparently old school cell phones can work once reaching certain peaks) and prescription glacier glasses for the days my eyes scream at me for putting in hard lenses.

enduring part II

Today is better. Mentally I'm accepting fate, physically my body is revolting. I got warm hugs and hellos and handshakes. I smiled at folks who barely changed or put on a few more pounds, or were paler than I last saw them, the healthier looking folks were beaming, and now I recall some of them were counting down days until they depart. Sometimes I wonder if I'm so mentally committed or even resigned to something that I distance from my true self. Like, when I started to heave the mostly liquid contents of my stomach, not even one kilometer from the airport terminal, and then once again when I left the shuttle on the circle to the apartment building that would be my home for the next four months. It was like my body was reacting to the indefiniteness of not being able to board a plane back home for another few months, and reacting again at the doorstep of my keep until then.

how to endure

One moment I was looking at the skyline of Manhattan, under the cover of evening clouds with sunbeams filtering here and there, thirteen hours later, I was pointing out to my seat mate the Dead Sea lapping at the West Bank. I already began putting count down numbers in my planner, this time I wasn't going to cross calendar years like before. My sister's birthday marks exactly the half way point. I miss my sister. Another four months, of me not being me. Of letting go of things I started towards in the last four, that felt like in their intensity zapped my time to a matter of four week, my first lead on ice, first leads on Gunks classics, my first time on a glacier, my first time camping for more than a week, my first time in Washington and Alaska, climbing in an ice park, my new car's first oil change, the first opera that I can clearly remember. I had things to look forward to here, longer dryer days, friends from before, possibly more outings. Possibly more interesting work. I knew my heart was divested before, but in the short time I had home, I managed to reinvest in those other ways to pass time, that have nothing to do with living in foreign country among expats, or sitting at a desk for over ten hours on most days. I sobbed in the apartment that I felt like I barely left. This time there were iron bars over all the windows. That sounds too dramatic, at least they had keys for opening their built in doors.