“‘anza wa law Tarat.”
Loosely translated: Still a goat, even if she flies!

They tried, they really tried. But no matter how hard they worked, the Embassy just could not pull off a 4th like I am used to. Even those years when I had to work and just joined my mom on Riverside Drive for the fireworks, it was more “magical” than it was this year, stuck at the Embassy, trying desperately to enjoy the dunk tank and chewy beef hotdogs in kaiser rolls.

But again, they really tried. The kids seemed to have a blast, running from the water balloon toss to the pool to the dunk tank to the shawerma line. But for the adults, there wasn’t much to do but grab a beer at the Marine House and watch the kids running around. Oh, and gossiping. Standing around is always condusive to gossiping.

I exaggerate a bit though. It really was not such a bad time. Even considering that Bubba got called into work by a guy who just happened to stop by the office on his way to taking his kid to the big inflatable slide and saw that the server needed fixing. Nice guy, ended up getting Bubba 5 hours of overtime and the tail end of a fantastic dinner party.

After the community party at the Embassy, we made our way to Dan and Duffy’s for some good food and good company. We were hoping with their wraparound balcony that we would at least catch 1 or 2 fireworks displays (from the weddings of course), but alas.

One of my favorite memories as a kid was getting into my footie-pajamas around 8:30 and looking out the window for the fireworks. Mom would say, its not time until you hear the windows boom (this was due to the cannons from the symphony’s version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture that they were playing across the river). Once the booms started, we would pack all in our red flyer wagon and ride down to the corner, where we would watch the fireworks over the James River, oohing and ahing the whole time. It was great, to be out in the buggy humidity of a Richmond summer, watching the fireworks over the river with the whole neighborhood.

While the whole day was fun for me (not for Bubba who had to work), it certainly was no river fireworks and footie pajamas.

About two weeks ago, Bubba and I succumbed to yet another dog, a gorgeous masked husky, who we named Maya. She had been found abandoned on the side of the road and had spent a month cooped up in a small kennel awaiting a new home. She was thin and wretched, but she had a heart of gold. She would smile at you with her big bear of a head and you couldn’t help but fall in love with her.

We spent one night with her before taking her back to the Humane Center for a routine spay. After the spay, unsupervised in the Humane Center, she ripped open her stitches and did damage to her internal organs. Everything was supposedly fixed. After a week in the ICU, we were finally able to take her home on Thursday. This evening, after a fun afternoon chasing the ball, she died in the yard, probably due to her internal injuries.

Maybe it was fate’s way of saying that three dogs is too many, or maybe it is God’s will that we be the home she remembers before dying. We only knew you a short time, our dear girl, but you affected us more than you would know. We hope you are feeling better now, and know that we love you.

They say memories are golden
well maybe that is true.
I never wanted memories,
I only wanted you.

A million times I needed you,
a million times I cried.
If love alone could have saved you
you never would have died.

In life I loved you dearly,
In death I love you still.
In my heart you hold a place
no one could ever fill.

If tears could build a stairway
and heartache make a lane,
I’d walk the path to heaven
and bring you back again.

Our family chain is broken,
and nothing seems the same.
But as God calls us one by one,
the chain will link again.

So, I think I mentioned before that in December of last year, we adopted a mangy husky from the local humane center. I haven’t really introduced her as a member of our family yet. The truth is, we weren’t really sure she was going to be permanent, but it looks like we are stuck with her. Her name is Sasha.

The first time we met her, she looked awful. She looked like this:

She had no fur on her face, on her legs and on her rear section, and the bald sections were scaly and bloody.  We had to rush her across the border to Israel to get emergency vet treatment when one of her sores started bleeding and wouldn’t stop. After many medications later, she looked like this:

You can see the bald spot on her butt and where she didn’t have any fur on her tail. She was quite mangy.

After a time, after a bath one night, we brushed her and all of her old fur came off. After months of treatment and good quality food, she had grown a short layer of “baby fur,” very downy and soft. She looked bald, like this:

Shortly after she lost all of her hair, it gradually started to grow back. It won’t fully grow back until the winter, when she really needs it. But for the time being, she looks like this:

We really want to thank Dr. David Cohen and the staff of the Vets 4 Pets veterinary clinic in Herzylia Pituach, Israel.  We never could have done it without their selflessness, perserverance, kindness and knowledge.

Now, we are proud to introduce Traveling Dog #2 to our family. She is like the crazy little sister that no one wants! Or she is really akin to the kid in your elementary school that ate glue. Today, we had a doggie play date, and while all the other dogs were chasing their balls, Sasha was in the corner…..eating dirt.

“Law bidha tishti laghayyamat.”
Loosely translated: If it was going to rain it would have clouded over

Today, I joined my friend Sarah for some girl time in Jebel Amman. Jebel Amman is one of the more historic neighborhoods, with old buildings, churches, narrow streets, and lots of personality. We walked around Souk JARA (an outdoor Friday market), grabbed coffee in an English-language bookstore, and ate chinese food while watching movies. While at the bookstore, I picked up two fantastic books of Arab proverbs, which feature some of the funniest and most mind-boggling sayings, the English equivalents of which leave a lot to the imagination. Keep it tuned here for more proverbs like the ones above.

Anyway, Sarah, who has lived here for many years (4 maybe more) and I got to talking about what it’s like to be in Jordan. The question that I get asked the most by my friends and family is, “How are you doing over there?” And the answer is always “great” or “fantastic.” Everyone wants to believe that we are just loving it over here and having a great time every moment of every day, as if we are on a big, glorified vacation.

Fortunately, I am married to the world’s most positive man. He is a fantastic husband, caring, sensitive, sweet, but he means the most to me because he is eternally positive. He always sees the good side of everything, making it easy for him to reply,  “Everything is great!”

But sometimes things aren’t great. Sometimes things are just ok. Sometimes, we step out on our porch and feel lucky that we are in such an interesting place, with so many neat opportunities for us to explore. But sometimes, we step out on our porch and its hot, and we are tired, and another day in this place makes us long for home.

This trip hasn’t always been roses……Within the first 3 months we had been here, I had the respiratory flu twice and the stomach flu twice. I’ve had food poisoning 7 times, I’ve been dehydrated twice, I have had a bacteria, fungus on my head, and the flu 5 times in one month. And I’m not the only one. My friend upstairs, Stephanie, has been sicker since she got here than she has every been. We could blame the food, the water, our lifestyles…….but the fact remains that most spouses report that their families were so sick the first 6 months of their first tour. A new country takes getting used to. Its not a vacation, one where you spend two weeks and then can recover in the comfort of your own home. This is our home.

The thing is, we love it here. Jordan is an amazing experience, putting us smack in the middle of a very holy and ancient region, with lots of stories and things to learn. It’s a very positive place for both Bubba and I in terms of us growing up, taking more responsibility, and developing our relationship.

But not every day is as fantastic as you think…..

Sometimes it’s just ok.

You might have noticed a slow down in the writing. This isn’t out of a lack of love for you, dear TravelingMarshalls audience, but more out of a lack of creativity about things to write. So, I decided to write a blog standard: the updates list. Here is a list of things that have happened to us in the last month or so:

• We got a grill! No summer is complete without a grill. And since grills here are cheaply made and not so cheaply priced, we decided to flex our diplomatic pouch muscles and order a grill from the states. And what a grill it is! We decided on the Weber Q 200, an inexpensive, portable alternative to the gas grill. Its amazing! We had the maintenance guys here rig it up with a regulator and we were ready to grill. It fits a lot of stuff, and it is a great size for being able to move it easily. We also got a cart for it that acts as a stand or a roll cart, should we decide to roll it down the street (oooh goat bowling!). 

• Our first BBQ! After purchasing the grill, we had to have a BBQ, it’s the only humane thing to do. We invited a few friends over for some test burgers. Bubba attempted a garlic butter burger from the Deen Bros. cookbook, while I attempted an “Ultimate Burger” from my favorite Jamie Oliver cookbook. Reviews were mixed. Bubba believed that the instruction manual said that it was better to grill with the lid up. WRONG! Upon a second reading, he realized it said “do NOT grill with the lid up” so all the burgers took over 30 minutes to cook and they were still raw on the inside. Like your beef still mooing? The butter burgers did not really take on the flavor of the butter and were highly dissapointing, while the Jamier Oliver burgers called for too much coriander, and so they tasted like vegetables. Or something like that. So much for those recipes. Since that BBQ, we have also BBQed hotdogs (excellent, for Jordanian hotdogs), chicken (too tough) and ribs (also too tough). We need to perfect our BBQing talents I think.

• Its leave season. The summer is leave season, when families pack up the kids and take them back to the states for weeks-months on their gov’t-sponsored R&R trips. Its a good time to go as the kids are out of school and the workload is lighter. So far, our good friends from upstairs have left, our friends from across the street leave friday, and our dinner club companions are all leaving in July. It has meant a lot of adjustment for us as we go from having many party companions to none and back again. It has meant a lot of TV and video games, which I think Bubba doesn’t mind, but leaves a lot to be desired for me.

• Bubba is top of his class in arabic. Bubba was given permission by his boss to start taking arabic during his lunch break. His class was originally 6 people, and is finally down to just 1. Him. And he is so brave for sticking with it, even though he doesn’t like being put on the spot. Our teacher compliments him often…..he has good potential in arabic, even though he has never taken a language before. He is moving very quickly and everyone, including me, is very proud of him. Mabrook, habibti!

That’s really all that’s new. Life seems to move quickly here, however, we seem to be repeating our actions……work, dinner party, sleep…….work, dinner party, sleep. It keeps us social and active, but does not create much fodder for the blog. I will try to do better

We started a dinner club. It’s an amazing dinner club, full of amazing people with amazing ideas and even more amazing cooking skills. The founding principle behind our dinner club was that the club would be innovative, a place where creativity in cooking is embraced and not judged. Each dinner club has a theme, picked by the host, and meals are created course by course around the theme.

The theme of the first dinner club, hosted by us, was “St. Patrick’s Day”, fueled entirely by Bubba’s desire to have corned beef and cabbage. Accompanying the corned beef was a cold curried zucchini soup made by Steph and Hanan (fits the theme because it was green) and a yummy Irish potato and onion tart, created by Duffy. As part of the rules of the club, you are allowed to invite guests to round our total participants to 8 or 10 (any over 10 and we run out of chairs at our embassy-provided dining tables).

The second club had the theme of “Food From Countries the US Has Fought Since But Not Including WWII.” The club, effortlessly hosted by our neighbors upstairs, included a Hungarian torte for dessert (Cold War), Vietnamese lamb chops, Cuban black beans and rice, and an Albanian/Kosovo peppers dish called Tirana Vergese. My favorite dish of the evening was Ben’s contribution, the “Bay of Pigs” soup, which was split pea soup (the bay) with bacon (the pigs). Our friends Ali and Pasa were the honored guests and brought several fantastic dishes from their home country of Bosnia.

The next club, which will be hosted at Dan and Duffy’s, has the theme of “Justify Your HHE.” HHE is the 7200 lbs. of crap that the government will ship to your next post free of charge. Often if you don’t have a house, like Bubba and I, or you are too lazy to figure out storage options (thanks Mom!), you often pack all of your worldly goods and then either pitch them or find a hiding place where they will inevitably be forgotten. Dan and Duffy’s brilliant theme means you have to cook something using a kitchen appliance or utensil that you packed but have yet to use.

Bubba and I were assigned the dessert course, which is perfect as we have a fondue pot that we haven’t used since we got it for our wedding 3 years ago. So, we have decided to do a trio of fondues (one in our pot, two in borrowed pots).

This weekend, we decided to do a test run of the recipes, since I am always afraid to cook things for other people that I haven’t cooked for myself first. It’s always a nightmare when you invite people over for dinner and then completely botch the main course. Do your guests make a run for it? Or just make faces and never invite themselves back? Or do they politely suggest take out?

In any case, our first attempt, based on The Melting Pot’s Flaming Turtle fondue, was fantastic. Bubba did not light the house on fire (151 proof Bacardi….wooooo!) and both of us ate ourselves into quite a chocolate coma. The second attempt tonight, however, did not go as planned.

Tonight’s recipe was Amaretto Explosion, also based on a Melting Pot recipe. Our first problem was the use of what I believed to be white chocolate, but could have been something totally unrelated. It smelled like chocolate, but it also had bits of brown stuff in it, definitely not nuts, but something in the spice family. In any case, Bubba made a nice melt with the chocolate.

The next step was to add 1 tablespoon of Amaretto liqueur, and then a half cup of ground macadamia nuts. Sounds yummy, right?

Wrong.

When Bubba added the liqueur, the consistency of the chocolate went from smooth and creamy to mashed potato. I’m serious, if you didn’t know it was chocolate, you would have thought we were making bread dough. To remedy this, we added some cream. It went back to a somewhat normal consistency, but it was still awfully dough-like. Then in went the macadamia nuts.

Bubba called me over to try some. It smelled ok, so I dipped my strawberry into the dough. And it was ok…..but with the dough-y texture of the chocolate to begin with and the addition of chopped up macadamias (almost into dust), it tasted like a cookie with the texture of drywall.

Bubba’s thoughts:

“It tastes familiar……maybe like a white chocolate macadamia nut cookie. Yeah, that’s it. A cookie.”

pause

“Well maybe halfway between that and grits.”

After our tiring trip to Masada, the fam drove to Jerusalem for a day of religious fun. We certainly picked the wrong weekend, as it was Orthodox Easter, and the entire city was filled with Russians paying their respects. I couldn’t believe how many Russians there were…..perhaps the whole city of Moscow. And half of them were staying in our hotel, including the high priest himself, or at least it seemed that way as he was always surrounded by nuns blessing themselves, their food, the street, their hair, the shower, the toilet water, etc.

The hotel was located in the Muslim section, off a dirty street, with a tiny parking lot and an even tinier dinner buffet. I like to compare it to convent food. Dinner usually consisted of beans, salad, some sort of circumspect fish or chicken and a disgusting looking pasta dish. It was edible, but at $20 a person, it certainly wasn’t worth it. The only thing that was worth it was watching the looks between the more conservative Russians, constantly praying over their desert forks or their water glasses, and the “hooker”-looking Russians, with their very revealing clothing. If only you could see the evil eyes being passed.

Bubba and I walked around on our own in the morning. We hit most of the sites of the Via Dolorosa, the street where supposedly a lot of cool Jesus things happened, or perhaps where they believe a lot of cool Jesus things happened. We saw the Wailing Wall and the pristine Jewish quarter, and we bought many a souvenir from the incessant sellers in the Muslim quarter. We even got trampled by a parade of Armenian Youth Scouts in the Armenian quarter that were so tiny and carried such large drums.

The Old City is beautiful in many respects. Some sites are clean and beautiful, some are not. With the influx of pilgrims for the holiday, there was an increased presence of Israeli policemen and soldiers, making it virtually impossible to turn a quarter without seeing a large gun. We got ripped off by a “tour guide,” and we (with the help of my dad) bought a beautiful rug to begin our collection of Middle Eastern household goods. We like to admit that while it is an amazing city to visit and we are glad to get the opportunity to visit, we probably won’t go back again. Its too dirty, the people were not all that accomodating, and its an experience better done once.

Since we live in the Holy Land, it’s always important to visit as many of the fantastic religious sites as possible before we leave. Recently, we made a trip to Israel and decided to visit the amazing cliff-top settlement of Masada.

Masada, meaning fortress, is the name for a site fortifications in the South of Israel on top of an isolated rock plateau, or large mesa, on the eastern edge of the Judean Desert overlooking the Dead Sea. Masada became famous after the First Jewish-Roman War (also known as the Great Jewish Revolt) when a siege of the fortress by troops of the Roman Empire may have led to a mass suicide of the Jewish rebels when defeat became imminent.

The amazing thing about Masada is that when you get to the top, either by cable car (my choice) or 45-minute hike (Bubba’s choice), you can see the ruins of the Roman settlements on the ground below, giving a very real portrayal of what it might have been like to know that death was imminent, or on the reverse, what it must have felt like as a Roman to behold such a powerful mountain.

Masada is a real settlement. Bubba and I visited the water cistern, an enormous hole in the earth where water was kept to fuel the site. You are able to climb down into the cistern, which is an amazing feat, but climbing back out affected my legs for the rest of the journey!

We also visited the Northern Palace, which is built literally on the front edge of the mountain. Imagine you are King Herod and you walk out of your front door and you are immediately on the edge of a huge cliff. The view must have been amazing. The most interesting archaeological detail was the paint that they were able to restore, which really “painted” a picture of what the palace looked like thousands of years ago.

After a cable car ride back down (for me) and a 45-minute hike (for Bubba), we left Masada, full of barbecued-flavor matzo fritos (it was Passover, after all), in awe of Masada’s magnitude and glad that so many amazing sites happen to be in this area.

A few weeks ago, I participated in yet another concert of the Amman Symphony Orchestra. And yet again, it was quite the experience. In honor of the opening of the Middle East Institute for Music Therapy, the Dutch Embassy and the National Music Conservatory put together a gala celebration at the Four Seasons Hotel.

Now, this would have been nice, had they scheduled it differently.  We had to play between each course, making it virtually impossible for me to eat my 5-star hotel meal with any leisure. So it was sit down, eat a lettuce leaf, get back up and play some stinky piece, sit back down, eat a morsel of fillet, play some piece……etc.

But there were many other interesting things about this evening as well. I shall present them in bulleted form since that is my style.

1.  We had Luigi as a conductor – It wasn’t enough that we had a guest conductor, but we had a Dutch guest conductor with one of the highest voices I have ever heard. When he started off a passage, he was known to say “And a one-ah and a two-ah” and it always hearkened me back to my N64 Mario Kart days, when Luigi would yell, “I’m-a da best!” if he won the race. But since Mario nor Bowser nor Wario was dominating this evening, I would prefer if Luigi wouldn’t also make an appearance

2.  We had to play two piano concertos — One was certainly enough. Besides, who wants to sit through three movements of a Bach piano concerto? After four measures, you can pretty much figure out what’s coming next.

3.  The auction — Not only was there a raffle and a silent auction, but there was a live auction as well. They had a lady from Christie’s in Amsterdam to preside. It would have been okay had she not been doing the whole auction in Euros, and then saying “Oops I meant to say JD, now thats 500 JD to you sir, 500 Euros, 500 HUNDRED Euros….any other bids?” I was pulling my hair out.

4.   They did all the speeches in Arabic — Wha they say?

5.   They made the mashed potatoes into fruit– In a surprising move that has shocked world governments recently, 5 star hotels in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan have started a trend in shaping mashed potato towers to look like pears, by forming the taters in a pear-like shape, and sticking a small clove in the top to act as the stem. While clever, I don’t think its going to bring about world peace.

I was fortunate that my dad was in town to join in the festivities, but I felt bad as his table was in the farthest corner from the stage, and while he and his friend enjoyed the meal, it was definitely a bit much to handle!

Why do I put myself through these crazy events month after month? I have no idea, but if anyone else has an answer I am willing to listen!

This year, Jordan only had 2 weeks of spring. I’m serious. It was nice, sunny and in the mid 70s for 2 whole weeks, and then suddenly it was 95 and stifling hot. Summer had already hit.

During those blissful two weeks, Bubba and I were pleased to note that we have two pink rose bushes in our front garden. Certainly not the gardeners, we weren’t sure what half the plants were in our yard. Sure enough, spring comes along and we appear to have two rose bushes, a honeysuckle tree (or something similar) and several bulb plants that resemble tulips but have no blossom.

We took the chance to take some pictures of our flowers and were right in doing so, as when the summer temperatures hit, the roses wilted away. Here are some photos to get you in the spring mood, while we move blissfully (and sweatily) into summer.