Fragments:
Istanbul: If you want me to buy something from your shop, I highly recommend not telling me I am acting like a Jew when I decline. It took me a moment to realize you were insulting me.
Amman: Time to pack up and make a move. This is a personal ritual exactly three days younger than my first solo trip. How many rooms have I done this? Item by item turning a room that was my bedroom into just another room. Nothing left of me but some trash to be taken away, my scent on sheets to be washed away, a line in a ledger and a vague memory.
Wadi Rum: Even here, I can’t get away from the shitstain that is Jordan Peterson.
Jeresh: While leaving here, I can’t help but fantasize that I have become a a local legend around here. This strange, solitary westerner, dining by himself, assumed to be an American before a local woman asked a restaurant owner to ask me. An unshaven figure asking at a dozen Samsung shops for a two-metre USB-C cable, before admitting defeat and buying a beer instead to head back to his hostel. A wanderer around the ancient ruins.
Jericho: Me feeling jealous of a cat, being petted by an exquisite Danish woman, who speaks flawless English with a slight Scottish accent, and reads Harry Potter in Arabic.
Ben Guiron Airport: My passport contains pure innocence, but stamps for Indonesia and Turkey were viewed with incredible suspicion when I left Israel. I don’t know what they thought I was up to in the eighteen hours I spent in Istanbul, maybe buying black market plastic explosives?
Various places Jordan and Palestine: The strange thing I noticed is how well traveled, and older my fellow travelers were. No one getting there first stamps on a passport backpacking on their gap year, no one there because it was the cheapest flights to the cheapest beer. It didn’t mean every interaction was great, but it certainly made for many interesting discussions.
Jeresh: One of the idiosyncrasies of Jordan was on non-tourist buses, local women could not sit next to men not of their families. This led to meaningful looks, a face-saving offer of giving up my seat, fare refunds, and me still not sitting next to a Jordanian woman with unlikely red hair peaking out from her headscarf, and flashing dark eyes. But that was never going to happen anyway, I only mention it so someone else knows about it. Did keep everyone happy however, and proved myself to be a reasonable member of the bus riding community.
Adrian's Got The Moose 
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