How to do a French Christmas dinner

We came back to Paris for the holidays this winter to be with Elodies family, but more importantly it was time to gorge ourselves on the french christmas dinner. After living in the desert and eating nothing but reconstituted dried beans (hummous and fhool) and Papa Johns Pizza (our Nigerian American housemate LOVES that stuff) we were just DYING to come home to France and go the distance with their famous 5 course meals (7 courses if your really looking for punishment).

Normally Elodie's parents go overboard so we have to tell them to go LEGER (light) with the food, but this year we gave them the green light to give us a food coma. There is nothing ultra gastronomic about our family dinners in terms of technique. Its simple cooking with a use of quality ingredients. Whats more important is how its presented and staged to accent the food and your appetite at each stage.

The first stage of any important meal is your aperitif. An aperitif is a sweet or light drink that you begin with to open up your appetite. More importantly I find it ties in with the french philosophy that families should socialize and focus on spending time to talk to eachother. The children have juice or schweppes, and the adults have vermouth, porto, or champagne. In our case, we were served a very nice bottle of Charles Lafitte Champagne that Elodies dad had been saving.



After the bubbly is finished, we all sit ourselves around the table and move onto the next course, which is a plate full of giant slabs of foie gras. This is the homemade stuff y'all. We sit around a table in november and blend goose livers with all spice and cognac to make this divine artery clogging dish.

To start, you basically take a knife and you spread it on a fresh slice of bread while washing it down with a sweet wine. Traditionally with a Sautern wine but in our case we went with a more 'minerally' white Condrieu wine.


After all the oohs and ahhs from the foie gras, champagne, and Condrieu, at this point the Christmas dinner is going full steam and there is no stopping it. Everyone is completely focused on the food and what was once an immense plate of goose liver is now being scraped with a knife to catch those last remaining morsels.

By this time, the conversations are broken up around the dinner table to different sections. Elodie and her parents are engaged in catching up on her life in Jordan. I'm sitting next to the grandparents so they are talking about stuff that old people talk about.

The next stage moves onto something more substantial so we are treated to an excellent dish of sauteed scallops with apples, cinnamon and créme frâiche. The Condrieu is still working its magic at this point so we stick with it up to this point.



In Paris, you would be surprised as to how there is a butcher in every neighborhood. In America for example, you do have butchers. But you don't have one in walking distance from every neighborhood. I have one right below me and maybe 5 within walking distance. Sure, you can buy a cheaper roast at the supermarket, but the French seem to uphold a tradition that what you put in your body should be of the highest quality. Our friend Caroline even has 5 side by side next to her house!

In my opinion, to make something for the french dinner table you keep it simple with a high quality main ingredient and combine it with something seasonal. Maybe enhance it with some wine or a special spice to get a little fancy. Take the previous dish for example. You sauté a couple of fresh scallops with a seasonal fruit like apples. When they are close to being finished you add créme fraiche, fresh ground cinnamon, salt.. pair it with a nice wine, and BAM.... Bob's your uncle.

In my Korean home, when you have a big meal you just drop every main course on the table and about 15 side dishes to go along with it. Finding a place to put your chopsticks down can sometimes be a challenge!

With these dinners, it is quite possible to have a few entrees and a few main courses served out in stages. In this case, Elodies family wanted to take it up another level and serve something Antillais Caribbean. The French have former caribbean colonies within the Republic and there is a deep appreciation for their cuisine. Here we have a peculiar dish made with lamb, plantains, curry powder, onions and caribbean chile (similar to mexican jabaneros). Since this dish is quite strong, Elodies dad chose a bold Chambertin wine from the Burgundy region which was gladly welcome as we needed something strong to wash down the heat from the chile.


Normally if I had eaten this much food, I would have stopped at the scallops. But this is Christmas.. NO WAY!! GOTTA CHARGE ON FORWARD since we are only at the Halfway point... Thats right.. you heard me.. HALFWAY(!)

Now you might think that we are total pigs for moving on forward but the truth is that at this point, you take 'La Pause'.. which is basically a short break on the meal. Some folks get up to walk around the yard or play with the dog. Elodie's brothers both succumbed to food coma and flopped onto the couch. I'm still with the old guys who are talking about their medical conditions and I'm busy trying to finish off the rest of the Chambertin when no one is looking.

Once the table has been cleared, its time for the cheese. This plate of cheese is quite simple, but they can get real fancy at times. This is just family, so yes, believe it or not this is just a selection of supermarket cheese. You don't always have to go expensive to have a great french meal. I as a foreigner however, have to go for the stinkiest and moldiest of the cheeses to win their respect. I read in some stupid Polly Platt book about integrating with French..'always cut the cheese in a way to retain its shape and beauty..' I have NEVER seen a French person follow this rule.. They just cut the cheese in any which way and nobody gives a damn.




French food is funny in that with every bite of artery clogging cheese or foie gras, your heart is screaming for help. And then you wash it down with wine and its saying.. ahhhhh... now that's relief.

Here you see my moldy goats cheese... my favorite. Its sharp and creamy and always washes down well with red wine. Once again Elodie's dad went crazy and opened a 1998 bottle of Sarget de Gruaud -Larose (Bordeaux) for this time around. Its been sitting in his cellar collecting dust. The label looks all nasty, from sitting in a dark room under the house for the past decade. Naively, I got laughed at when I once tried to wipe a bottle clean. Evidently, the dirtier it is, the more prestigious the bottle. Dumb americans...



Time for dessert, or should i say dessert(S). You gotta have the 'healthy desert' (because its good for you) accompanied with the 'danger of becoming a diabetic' desert. The healthy desert is a simple bowl of preserved peaches and fruit, covered in an extra dose of sugar syrup (just to make sure it tastes good). Once we pat ourselves on the shoulder for being so health conscious, we attack the 'danger of becoming a diabetic' cake like a pack of blood thirsty sharks.



The cake in question is called a Carolo, a very local specialty from Elodie's hometown. Its a brittle meringue made with almonds and praline cream. Can anyone say sugar rush??? Man, keep this stuff away from this kids. Better yet, give them some and they will love you forever and you can avoid that whole teenage 'rebellion' stage altogether. Its a good thing we served it with candied chestnuts to balance out the sugar in the cake.

By this time, I normally feel guilty as hell but how can you say no? .. Its just SO DAMN GOOD! I mean, I have been eating for three FREAKING hours by this time and yet.. there is still space?!? Which brings me to another notion about the french meal. When you eat slow, and take your time... you can somehow manage yourself through a huge meal. At some meals, you'll get something that will help you digest and move to the next stage.. an example would be a 'Trou Normand' which is basically a shot of distilled apple liquor that helps you digest and get to the next meal. I've had a Danish guy serve peppermint schnapps. You get the picture.

Anyways, by this time we have all but decimated the plate where the Carolo once stood and we are ready to wash it down with something. Some people like to take at this stage, what is called the 'digestif' which is basically a strong alcohol that will burn that lump of food just sitting in your digestive track. Take a shot of cognac, whiskey, amaretto, rum... you name it. If it burns, then its just right for the job of clearing out those pipes.

None of us are the digestif type.. I still have a four year old bottle of whiskey at my house that never seems to get touched..so we move onto coffee. My friend Gerald Wu visited us in France for a year when he did his study abroad and he was pissed off as hell when he saw us drinking nescafe at the end of each meal. WTF??? In seattle (his homebase), you have all these francophile snobs that mock your instant coffee at home. They tell you that in France, they would never dream of doing such a thing because they believe in the ritual of good coffee and using a french press. Yet here we were, drinking nescafe out of grandmas 30 year old coffee chalices. I have YET to see anyone use a french press (except for that one time we went camping), and pretty much everyone drinks the powder stuff and everyone knows George Clooney the nespresso salesman. The end.

So there you have it folks. You can have a french christmas meal with all the french recipes and ingredients, but remember its as much about protocol as it is about the food. If you were to serve all the food at once, you wouldn't get to appreciate all the high notes of the food without the appropriate wines to match. Plus, you would probably burst in about 15 minutes.

Crushed noses at Al Pasha - $30

The middle east is famous for Hammams, but surprisingly Amman has only one. Al Pasha is a turkish style bath house that provides a steam, scrub down, hot bath, and a massage. If you are amongst the lucky ones (like me), you got a crushed nose thrown in for free.



My back had been aching for two weeks since my trip to London and I did everything I could to get the knot out. I even had Elodie drop WWF style smashing elbows on the offending spot to loosen it up but it didn't really get me anywhere. I finally threw in the towel and resigned to go to 'the Pasha' to get myself fixed up.

The place resembles some big Arabian tent filled with old collectibles picked up by an eccentric old man who likes to horde his treasures and twist his mustache all day while lying down on his side while being propped up by an elbow with his shisha pipe in his hand. It doesn't seem like a place for a hot bath, but who am I to criticize?

Next is the front desk. Every time you have to reserve a service or book a tennis court, there is that front deskman experience here. You have a guy who works there and is employed by the company. He's got 2-3 buddies there too. You however get the feeling that they don't work there. They are playing backgammon, eating, smoking shisha, or drinking tea. You announce your prompt arrival. They stop what they are doing and look rather annoyed at you for breaking their concentration. They then point you where to go and hand you off to someone else. Playing backgammon, eating, smoking shisha or drinking tea re-commences and your on your way.

The first step in a turkish bath is to take a hot shower. Yipeee.. unlimited hot shower. My shower at home requires me to heat the water boiler 30 minutes in advance in order to get a ten minute hot shower. Everytime the hot water goes out on me, you would swear you heard the blood curdling screams of a little ten year old girl emanating from the bathroom. So what if the water smelled like well water and the pile of hair on the floor indicated that some guy with a receding hairline got pissed off and decided to just pull it all out right then and there. It was unlimited hot water and I wouldn't let anything take that moment of joy away from me.

After about 15 minutes, I was escorted to the hot steam room. Passing through the curtains, you enter what seems to be a malfunctioning disneyland attraction. A dark room with kaleidoscope colored glass ceiling sets the tone for the staging room where only the brave can venture to the next level up the steps. A dark hissing from an overworked steam machine god seems to blow angrily at anyone who dares to approach. I was like the first guinea pig in Indiana Jones movies where they send some poor hapless native to check out a booby trap, only to get his head chopped off or stabbed by a hundred poison darts. Well, since I was the booby, I ventured into the second stage room where the ominous steam god rested. Suddenly lava hot water droplets from the ceiling crashed on my neck causing me to jump and stand up....and just like the poor hapless native guinea pig in Indian Jones movies, I got my head chopped off. A cloud of "fry you to death vapor" just floating 4 ft above the groundfloor burned the crapola out of my scalp and fried my ear like a deep fried wonton wrapper (this probably explains why there is hair all over the floor. Others before me probably ran back to the showers and it probably all just kind of fell out from there. I did not see ears on the floor so I will have to rethink this theory some more). OWCH. So like a hapless coward I retreat to the staging room and decide to sit there since it is well below the vapor cloud. By this time, the attendant brings me a tall glass of hibiscus juice with crushed ice and I'm thinking 'do I drink this or pour it over my head?'

OK. I get called out. Its time for a scrub. Finally, some action. There is something particular about the staff that works inside of the hammam. They are all this breed of stocky, burly, strong, hairy men. Super friendly, but I somehow I get the sense that they are hired to manhandle the customers and get them scrubbed and washed as efficiently and as quickly as possible.

I am escorted to a small room with a marble countertop built into the wall. One side of it is open to allow water to drain while the other three sides are sectioned off by a wall. The problem is that its not exactly flat and as manhandler #1 starts to rinse it off with warm water, I notice the water starts to pool up on my marble countertop. I am asked to jump on top and lie on my back in this small layer of water and mandhandler #1 begins to scrub the sh*t out of my skin with a wet rag. This is a process where they take the dead skin cells off in order to promote the growth of healthy new skin. Manhandler #1 then takes my hand, puts in on my chest and I feel something that feels like a large mass of rubber from pencil erasings. "Today's skin" he says to me as I am totally grossed out by the fact that he made me feel all my dead skin rolls. In true manhandler fashion, he just flips me over and takes off more of 'today's skin.' So I'm on my belly, looking down at this water film and I get to see this soup of all of my dead skin floating around me. Just as I am thoroughly grossed out he flips me over again and commences to wash me with a loofah pad and aromatic soap. Ok, much better I suppose, but I'm still grossed out.

I get a bucket of warm water dumped on me to rinse and I am promptly moved on next to Manhandler #2 for my massage. I tell him that I have a tightness in upper back and I would appreciate his help in getting the knots out. "No problem. I take very GOOD care of you." Manhandler #2 was even bigger... with a long mullet and hands that can crack a walnut.. He was really going to work on my tight muscles. Right around the time when i was on my back and he was massaging my THIGHS he asked me where I am from. I said "America..where are you from?"

"I am from Iraq" - followed by a short uncomfortable pause.

Did I mention he could crack a walnut with those hands?

The coup de grâce was my final back massage where he pressed and pinched and pounded all those nasty little knots in my back with the force of those huge arms of his. I lay face down in a towel and he moved to the front of the massage table next to my head to push downwards on my shoulder and shoulder blades. I forgot to mention that manhandler #2 also has a huge beer gut and while he was pushing down on my shoulders he was basically burying his belly fat into the back of my head, crushing my nose and cutting off my air supply.

At the end of it all, I got a hot shower, burnt scalp, skin soup, and a crushed nose.. all for $30. I think I got my moneys worth.

Books at Cafe Amman

Geeze,

This happens all the time. I must have a GPS chip lodged somewhere in my body... but where?

I'm sitting at Books@Café which is THE place for foreigners in Jordan to congregate. A huge sprawling bar on top of a house overlooking the downtown area of Amman. Its decorated in a style of mixed pastels and flower power wall paintings with 'The Reflex' playing on the loud speaker. They sell out of date books at the basement but its one of the only places where you can buy a glass of wine, grilled cheese sandwiches, and cherry flavoured hookah pipes in Amman.
















So, I just wrapped up a meetup with my friend Andy Jacobs who is heading a new film school here in Jordan sponsored by Steven Spielberg. Evidently after filming Indiana Jones 3 here, Spielberg has had some sort of love affair with Jordan and volunteered to help build the regions first film school. Andy and I have this great deal going on where he has this empty apartment on the beach and I 'volunteer' to house-sit while he is away on business.

So I'm sitting here with Andy discussing his IT strategy for his school and we here a voice at the table behind us saying... "So how the heck am I supposed to find this guy in Amman? Do I need to just go to Books@Café and just ask if anyone knows Andy?"

So we turned around, and just calmly said.. "Yes, as a matter of I'm Andy. Is there something I can help you with?"

Small world? Try microscopic.

This experience has led me to reflect back on all the times I bumped into people I know. This type of thing really does happen to me all the time. I even bumped into my friend Khaldoun on the road while driving out to Books@Café just an hour ago. The last time I was at Books...about 2 weeks ago... I ran into a dutch couple at the Halloween party and then the Italian guy from Syria I met at a UN party... Weird?

Even three days ago, I was doing another one of those "Lets go hang out at the beach (Andy's apartment) for a week while everyone is working thingamajigees" and before I know it my Japanese buddy Mitsu just happens to be showing the great majestic Red Sea to his mother who is visiting for a week.

And of course, one of the rare times I decide to walk down the road in the hot Jordanian sun, Crazy taxi driver buddy Akhmed screeches to a halt and offers to give me a ride to wherever I am going. Never mind that he has paying customers in his car at that moment who are wondering who the hell this Korean guy is.

I suppose I do have this talent for running into people I know. When I was a student in Tokyo, I happened to be travelling at some random temple in Kyoto 500 km away and happened to bump into my mom.

The cousin of my friend Shana came to visit from Chicago while I was in highschool in california. I asked if she knew a filipina friend of mine named Faith who lived in Chicago. Of course, this girl rolled her eyes and said ' duh... chicago has like only a few million people...' What happens next? They end up living on the same floor in their dormitory the next year during their freshman year.

Encounters can be unpleasant though... like the time I ran into an ex-girlfriend who had recently scrumpled my heart in an unfashionable Ren-and-Stimpy-take-a-tennis-racket-and-swat-the-beating-muscle-out-of-the-yard....Yeah..
We bumped into eachother again at a calistoga hotspring large enough for 8 people with her new boyfriend and myself accompanied with Elodie. Can you say "awkward???"

So the moral of the story here.. especially in Jordan is.. Do not piss anyone off. You WILL meet them again. Perhaps in a hotspring. Perhaps in a Buddhist temple. Perhaps at Books@café.

Festival des marionnette

What's a festival des marrionnette? Ten glorious, attention grabbing days for its host city, Charleville Mezier (Elodies hometown). The only other times it manages to make the national news broadcast is when it hits the record for the coldest temperatures in France or when a Belgian Pedophile crosses into its borders. The festival des marrionnette is held every two years with a line-up of hundreds of shows featuring the worlds best puppeteers.



Elodie came back from Jordan for a week to be with her family for the birth of her brothers first born son. We tried to explain to his wife that she needed to give birth by Wednesday at the latest or Elodie will need to pay a penalty fee for extending her return flight date but they for some reason didn't do anything about it.

Sooo..while we were waiting for the little guy to pop-out, we decided to pop-in to the festival at every chance that we could.

When we walked into town the first day, we recognised a huge transformation in the modest town of Charleville. Gone were the middle aged mothers in short bobbed hair treated with multiple layers of differing hair colorings (I call it the 'Grand Canyon look' due to the earthy colored strata of their heads).

Replaced by the moms and strollers was a sort of Puppet Woodstock.

The first type of people are the earthy, artsy folks whom I am guessing are the professional puppeteers. I haven't seen that many people wearing hand woven clothes since I got lost in the Santa Cruz mountains and stumbled upon an enormous hippy drumming circle in a grove of pine trees.

The second type of people are the street performers giving incredibly crappy performances for spare change. I have a theory that maybe these guys are just plain crazy and are just playing out their multiple personality disorders in the form of puppetry... and now we give them money for being crazy!

Exhibit A: Crazy old lady on the bookstore corner playing loud music and displaying decapitated dolls on her pushcart. Every once in a while she will jump up, clap to the music and try to do square dancing with the people passing by and cackle the whole time doing it. Sometimes her drunk ass bearded husband in overalls comes by to join in the celebrations. These guys are regulars.

Exhibit B: Skinny young Jerry Garcia on a black floor mat next to the pharmacy showing a crowd of ONE sympathetic viewer how his skeleton puppet can be made to slowly crawl and die. He spent 2 minutes to show me how slowly he can move the finger to make it look like its dying. I didn't want to point out that the mere fact of being a skeleton annotates that it is already dead.

Exhibit C: Wierd guy making an elf puppet play the violin to a recorded song next to the ticket office. Why an elf, and why a violin? And its the same song. One song. And he does it all day, every day. You gotta be either crazy or have an elf fettish to do that all day, every day of your life.





The third type of people there are the tourists who are asking themselves how the hell they landed in the middle of nowhere in France. Everytime I stood in line for something.. a ticket.. a crepe, a beer.. There was a frustrated tourist trying to communicate in English what it was that they were trying to get. Nobody, and I mean nobody at the festival spoke English at the international festival. Its all made up of local volunteers who don't speak a lick of english except for "voulez vouz couchez avec moi."

Now Charleville Mezier is at most a big, small town. Big enough to have a Carrefour supermarket, but small enough to run into everyone you know when you get suckered into becoming part of a street performance.

Yes, the guy had a street show and it needed an asian guy to play the bad-ass Bruce Lee character. So while I hid in the back, he pulled me to the center of his audience because, well, quiete frankly, I was the only asian in a 200 mile radius to play the part. He even gave me a pair of nunchucks believe it or not.

So he grabbed another guy and a lady and made up this story of jealousy and a duel between two guys competing for the privilege to be with the damsel. Kind of a street Kung Fu theater. The best part of it is that they were expecting some mild mannered nerdy asian guy or something. Instead, I lept in the air riding an imaginary Harley Davidson and made roaring loud motorcyle noises that shocked the hell out everyone . Then I whipped out a set of nunchucks that he gave me and started nunchucking straight out of a bad ass scene from 'Enter the Dragon.' Nobody thought that I would actually know how to use nunchucks. I surprised the hell out of everyone, even my wife, who had no clue I had this hidden talent, gained from fighting imaginary teenage mutant ninja turtles in my backyard in the 7th grade.




After a big round of applause, I had a chance to look at the audience. Elodie was there. My mother in law. My mother in law's friends. Elodies highschool friends. Elodies highschool friends' parents. People who I did not know but were invited to my wedding by Elodies parents were there. Geeze, there is no hiding in this place.

Subsequent walks throughout town were greeted by passerbys screaming 'Ouiii C'est la Coréen'!!! I walked into a Hungarian puppet show about Borat's ancestors and got greeted by multiple members of the crowd. So this is what fame must be like if u live in Charleville Mezier.

On our last day at the festival, we decided to see a big name Australian puppeteer named Neville Tranter of the Stuffed Puppet Theater. The description sounded good. He had been a festival regular. Reviews said 'Shocking and Funny.' Great, just how I like it. Except that, it was anything BUT that.

Maybe I just don't understand art. That's it. I am too uncultured to pick up the subtleties and underlying messages about humanity expressed through puppet rabbits with big giant red penises sewn on them. Ok, it was only one, but that's when I decided that there was no turning back on this show... I would just have to sit there and suffer.



First bad sign was that we had just been talking about swine flu, and this lady ends up coughing a lung into the back of our heads so we decided to rudely move out of the way from her spray. Then there is the puppeteer who is part of the act, wearing fake bunny ears, and evidently he thinks he's a rabbit. Then one rabbit tries to have sex with him, another tries to get him to adopt an orphaned rabbit, another one is a rapping gangster rabbit with a red weiner half his size sewn in-between his legs. The final act ends up with him finding out he's not a rabbit because he 'pisses while standing up', the others kill and grind the orphan rabbit and feed it to the unknowing guy, the guy doesn't have sex with the first rabbit but does get raped by Randy the gangster rabbit and somehow seemed to enjoy it ('I could hear the sound of a butterfly's wings flapping' was his post-coital remark), and half the audience was shouting 'Bravo!' at the end while the other half was shouting 'WTF?'

So there you have it folks. You can come and enjoy the festival next year... err I mean in two years. Just bring a translator, nunchucks, and your schizophrenic uncle and you'll have a blast!

Visiting/Surviving Hammamat Ma'in Hot Springs

Death is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when you visit the beautiful Hammamat Ma'in hot springs in Jordan. Survival however, was the only thing in my mind in this situation. You would think that with all of my past history with taxi drivers, that I would stay away from them. One of my best friends in Jordan however, is the 29 year old 'Akhmed the crazy taxi driver.' Love it or hate it, Akhmed has somehow become family. To give you a lesson in pronouncing words in Arabic, you don't say his name like 'Ack-Med.' Pretend you have some salt water taffy or peanut butter stuck in the back of the roof of your throat and your trying to hock a loogie to unlodge it. AKHH. Try it again. AKHH. Okay, now add the rest... AKHH-MED. There you go!

Of course, trying to be a good friend to Akhmed, we tried to use him whenever we needed a guide through the outer regions of the country. For a while, our relationship had been quite formal and friendly but he was through the moon when we finally we invited him over for a few drinks just the day before our trip to Hammamat Ma'in. When he found out that he could be himself and just hang out, have some laughs and drink some beers and stop with all that professional 'sir' and 'madam' formality, he finally felt at home.

Have you ever hung out with a professional alcoholic before? Jordan was probably the last place I figured I would run into my first one. We served in true formidable French fashion, the apéritif, which is a light alcoholic beverage before eating dinner. To pronounce apéritif like a true French native, just read it out loud just as you would read it in English but put your nose up really high in the air so that the tip of it is at a higher elevation than your ears. If you don't look snobby enough, then I suggest you take up smoking and stare past people when you speak to them and look uninterested in what they say...there you go!

We poured brother Akhmed a campari on ice and introduced him to all the joys of slow culture and appreciating the fine things in life. Akhmed introduced us to the concept of grabbing a glass of booze and showing how one can gulp it in a single go by pinching his nose and opening his throat like a bucket mouthed black bass. A look of dissapointment wiped his smile away when all the energy and enthusiasm he put into downing his drink was answered by a girly evening drink with low alcohol content. "Alcohol, not very strong. Absolute is better!" Being gracious hosts we served him one Absolute and orange juice after another with which he subsequently pinched his nose and gulped in rapid fire concessions.



The next morning he returned with his taxi and we set off to go. With us was Caroline, a french canadian friend of Elodies who quit her crappy job in Paris and flew out to join us in Jordan for a week's adventure. We thought it would be a good idea to show her a good time and introduce her to all the rare sites of Jordan.

The road to Hammamat Ma'in is the same road that you would take to go to the dead sea, which is about an hours trip from Amman. You take a slight detour up the hills to Madaba, the site where Moses was buried and where they make a good local cheese that our neighbor buys for us from time to time. You then reach the top of the hills in the back country where a steep rollercoaster backdrop of roads leads you to the fabled hotsprings.



It was at this point where Akhmed could not hold back his desire to drink at 10 in the morning and he reached into the grocery bag and cracked open a beer. We all screamed as the car descended down the valley at a vertical twist while our driver was steering with one hand and chugging a beer with the other. "What???? Akhmed VERY STRONG!" was his response when we objected to him drinking.

We made him put the beer away and in a short time we arrived at our destination, relieved to have made it through. Elodie and Caroline went their separate way to the newly built 5 star spa underneath the hotspring waterfall and Akhmed and I went to the public section of the hot springs. Not bad actually. For a public hot spring we had access to two gorgeous waterfalls dropping into rocky pools with a hidden cave and colorful rocks behind the falling cascade of water. The smaller waterfall feeds into a roasting 140 degree hot pool where anyone who dared to enter risked roasting their nuts off and eliminating all chance of offspring (that is, if you have nuts to roast off in the first place).



Akhmed just stripped down to his swim trunks and proceeded to SWAN DIVE right into the volcanic water of the hot pool and slosh water at the rest of us wimps hanging out on the sidelines. "Akhmed is VERY STRONG!" he would proudly proclaim. Shoot. Now I have to go into the water. About two hours later, I finally got the water past my belly button with no feeling in my feet and dashed hopes about the cute french korean progeny I was expected to deliver to my parents.



I emerged from the pool afterward with a pink fleshy tone to my skin, much akin to the color of a boiled frankfurter that has hit that stage where it starts rolling on top of the bubbles. In a burst of inspiration, I suggested we check out the indoor sauna and bath next door in order to escape the blistering heat of the waterfall.

The public bathhouse looks like a plain crumbling government building with a huge hot spring pool and sauna built inside. This is as local as local gets my friends. We walked inside to the swimming pool where it was filled with dozens of big, heavy, bearded and brauny men. Scores of young and rowdy energetic teens and a few old women clung around the edges of the pool but mostly this was a man's domain. At least the day I chose to visit it was. At least the time that Akhmed decided to forward flip into the pool and splash everyone it was. Oh boy. Yes, Akhmed ran, jumped, and flipped into the dead center of the pool, creating a wave and splashing hot water in the eyes of just about everyone in the pool. Emerging from the water, he declared quite proudly to myself and the entire room "I AM THE KING!!" Everyone just about wanted to murder him and probably myself as well for being his accomplice.

At the end of the day, we picked up the girls from the resort where they sat peacefully under the mineral water cascades while sipping tea after their thai massages. Ahh, the good life. Yes, they had the 5 star experience but did they get the opportunity to brave a full day of survival with Akhmed the Crazy Taxi Driver???

I AM THE KING!

Abdulla the Aqaba Scuba Terrorist of the Red Sea

I LOVE scuba diving. Love, Love, Love, Love it. I estimate that I go down to see the little fishies about once a month now in Aqaba. The water is warm, clear, and filled with endless colorful varieties of fish. I tried scuba diving once in santa cruz, california and decided to give it up when I looked at my diving partner and her chubby face had puffed up underwater and turned blue like some over-weight freak smurfette. Lord knows what I may have looked like.

The outfit I go with in Aqaba is the Red Sea Dive Centre (0795591310). Its run by this Jordanian giant named Abdulla (you tube video here) and his cousin Amet (youtube video here). These guys must be working hard because I was asking them questions you ask 40 year olds here, like 'where are all your kids' or 'how many wives do you have?'

Errrr... 'Frank, we're 29.'

Guys. You need to wear more sunscreen.

So this time around, I asked them to organize a night dive for Elodie and I. Yes, the fabled night dive of aqaba. Its the stuff of legends. Sea creatures from the deep come out to feast on the easy meal they find in the coral reefs. Large predators, rare species, and prehistoric fish with bad dentistry all come out to eat the little nemos. And we were going to witness it.

When we arrived at the beach to do our dive, we were met by a soldier from the Jordanian Navy who had to watch our every move. Aqaba is right on the Saudi Border, so I guessed that maybe he was making sure we weren't planning on doing a night safari in Saudi Arabia.

We walked into the surprisingly warm water armed with underwater flashlights and our guides. It was pretty exciting as we went down as we found an octopus swimming in the grass. Its pretty hard to appreciate the beauty of a sea creature when all you are thinking about is how good it would taste on your plate. MMMmm. I love to eat live octopus like in this youtube video.

Following this, we saw the hugest puffer fish I have ever seen. Its easy to find one here the size of a rugby ball, this was even bigger. If it puffed up, it could have been mistaken for a pilates ball. The corals were hugely different with bright fiery colors and species of fish I did not recognize.

We saw so many fish, and really, its too many to name in this blog. We ended our tour and walked out of the beach from underneath the boardwalk pier. After about a minute of walking back, my spidey senses went buzzing off. I looked above at the pier to find about 200 jordanians crowding above and staring down at me whooping and cheering us. I suppose that maybe they don't get to see a dozen people dressed as frogs come out of the sea in the middle of the night that often.

After our dive, I had to ask Abdulla more about the Navy Guy. What was he worried about?

-'Frank, you mean I haven't told you the story of Abdulla the Terrorist?'

"Here in Jordan, we had a terrorist attack on some hotels three years ago in the capital city. The weeks after the bombings it was very tense and the government was on a high alert.

I had a job at the Marine Research lab to collect coral samples from various locations in Aqaba. One week after the bombings, I took my research boat and went past the port. Now, sometimes they have Navy boats, but this time they had dozens of them. More frightening was the fact that they were all coming towards ME!

The first one comes to me and starts shouting, who are you, and what the hell are you doing here??! Luckily for me, the captain of the navy boat was my friend and once he recognised that it was me he said, 'Abdulla is that you? You dumbshit! What the hell are you doing here taking your boat so close to the port just after the bombings!' I looked around and saw that there were the police, the navy, the army, all watching me from the Port.

I was able to explain that I was doing research and was left to continue my business.

I then took my boat to the other side of Aqaba and went diving for a coral sample. When I got back into the boat, another Navy Boat came to me at full speed. "Put your HANDS UP or we will SHOOT!"

"Abdulla, you dumbshit! is that you???!" This time, the captain of this Navy boat was my cousin.

"Abdulla, there is a report that some guy at the port saw a scuba diver had put a bomb on the bottom of a boat and everyone thinks that it could be you since you are the only one diving around today. Go Back home NOW."

So I go back towards the research center, but I realise after some time that the army from the road sees my boat. From the shore, they shout at me with a loud speaker. "Put your HANDS UP or we will SHOOT!"

I was forced to bring my boat to shore, with about 50 men with automatic weapons pointed at me. A large crowd was gathering from shore, many of them people that I knew.

So I was taken to the police offices and had to explain that I am a research diver and that I had all the clearances to be in the water. They brought in the witness to verify if I was the bomber.

"Hmmm. He has the same wetsuit. He has a mask. The watch is also the same. But I can't tell the face. I am 50/50 on whether it is him." Thanks asshole.

I eventually got let go and life returned back to normal. However, the arabic rumor mill would NOT stop!

Every time I took a taxi, the drive would say to me... "Hey did you hear about this terrorist at the port?! They caught him with a home-made bomb and he's in jail now!"

My mother was at a wedding and someone said "How is Abdulla?? I heard he was shot!" I had to assure her for two hours on the phone that I was indeed alive and not shot.

"Hey did you hear about the terrorist. He escaped from prison!"

So Frank, that explains why we have high security. Lots of smuggling of course, but we have a high alert for terrorism also."

I was amazed by this story of Abdulla the terrorist.

The next day, I wanted to give it a test. I went to get my haircut in Aqaba, and well, you know barber shops. They are the same all around the world. FULL of town Gossip.

I asked, "Hey, did you hear about this terrorist 3 years ago that tried to put a bomb on a boat?"

One of the clients there told me in a as-a-matter-of-fact fashion, ' Actually, it was not a bomb. It was a home-made rocket that he was trying to fire at a ferry boat.'

Addendum:
After he explained to me that Abdullah was trying to fire a home-made rocket at the ferry boat, he then tried to explain to me that 9/11 was a conspiracy from the american government and that the airplanes that struck the twin towers were actually US military planes according to a witness who 'saw the whole thing'.

Personal Space Bubbles

Folks, I have a personal space bubble. Thats right. That means when you sit next to me on the bus, we don't touch legs and we don't share the armrest (My bus trip to the Red Sea). You don't fall asleep in your chair and use my shoulder as a pillow and drool on me (My subway rides in Tokyo). We don't watch tv in my living room and you use my lap as a headrest (My entire dormitory in Korea).

Almost on a daily basis, people do things to me that would otherwise be seen as an uncomfortable moment back home in the States. People always giggle when they saw George Bush holding hands with the Saudi King. That's kinda like my everyday here.

Its very easy to get into these uncomfortable situations because in the US, we just don't like physical contact with others and we don't like others touching us. Here, you just kinda need to go with the flow.

Its easy to run into problems when it comes to personal space, especially in countries where the men and women are seperated from eachother during their youth. They tend to develop habits that err, would raise eyebrows in different countries. This kind of leads to an interesting phenomenon... namely, very very homophobic people being very, very gay with eachother.

In Korea the the men and women are seperated too so its pretty much the same thing. I'm used to it, but I always revel in watching a newbie to Jordan get tortured when someone calls them 'habibi' (my love) or someone gives them the traditional three kisses on the cheek (which almost always results in a bad beard burn). Here its not as bad in Korea where part of the culture is to go to a traditional hot bath house and make a train and scrub eachothers backs while your all butt naked. However a good friend here wouldn't think twice about giving you a soothing back rub in front of your wife.

Really, its just people being friendly in the way that they grew up with and one of the things you have to cope with when living in a new country.

Just watch the master on how to adapt:

The other day I was at a traditional Bedouin restaurant in a large outdoor tent here in Amman. I was presented with beautifully prepared pulses of eggplant, hommous, and fhool, followed by steaming plates of barbecued lamb and salted yoghurts. The food was delicious, and when we polished off our plates a large egyptian man with a thick heavy mustache arrived with a tray full of deserts.

Now, I can choose most dishes off of a menu now, but these house special deserts were knew to me.

Me: Marhaba, can you tell me what desert this is?

Waiter: Yes sir, this is a cocounut pudding with bread.

Me: Is it any good?

Waiter: Of course! Try!!!

Before I could even blink, the waiter grabbed the bowl, took a spoonful, and in front of my guests tried to feed me like a BABY at the table.

When in ROME right??? MMMM. Yum Yum. I rubbed my tummy as my new Papa served me my baby food desert. Now THATS adaption.