Second childhood

When I was about 4 years old, I watched a lovely friendly man give my mum a small blue car because he had a much larger and better green car that he was keeping for himself.

Clearly I had no idea what was actually going on. Now that I am old and wise I know that what he actually said must have been, "Well, for your budget I can sell you this small and not very desirable Datsun, which will get you from A to B if you're not in a hurry, but for just double that amount you could be the proud owner of this Kingswood, which is clearly much cooler."

And it's that completely clueless part of childhood that I am revisiting now. So much of what happens around me is mystifying. I can't even read the alphabet. I can however count to three - wahid, itneen, talata! - thanks to an app intended to prepare Jordanian kids for preschool. With any luck, by the time we leave here I'll be able to mumble my way through numbers up to 10, and maybe even sound out a few words. And unlike most 4-year-olds I'm allowed to cross busy roads by myself.

Yesterday we had to go and have our fingerprints taken. I think this was something to do with our visas, but for all I actually know it could just have been because it's really funny to see foreigners wandering around with their fingers and thumbs covered in black ink. Luckily the school has staff who know how to deal with these things, so we were driven (in a school bus, because they don't seem to have any minivans or cars) to the Customs office, where we handed our phones over to the security guards (hence no photos) and then meekly followed our guide from one office to another while he did paperwork and talked to the officials on our behalf. The fingerprint forms were carefully labelled with our names - "MARK NADREW" and "ALLSON MARY ARWD" - and put on top of a large pile of other people's fingerprints (apparently there is a reference number on the form which matches up to another form that has our full names correct, but I didn't get the impression that there is any hurry to collate the forms. And yes, even Nadrew is a better shot at writing in English than I could hope to do in Arabic). And then we were escorted away again, and the bus delivered Mark back to school and then took me home where I washed my inky fingers and settled in to watch a bit of TV.

Because I can't type Arabic into Google to look things up, I'm free to make up my own reality when I'm blipping through the channels. Sometimes it's clear enough what's actually going on:

And other times, well ....

A thousand channels (and nothin' on)

Yesterday was a quiet day, mostly spent waiting for the fixit men to come and stop one of the radiators from pouring water out onto the floor. While I was waiting, I decided to investigate the TV in the second bedroom (I suspect putting a TV in either living room would have lowered the tone).

We have a TigerSat box with nearly 1200 channels available. A good half of those channels are either scrambled or "test", but that still leaves about 600. We have channels from Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Dubai ... the one thing they almost all have in common (apart from a staggeringly large number of Christian channels) is that of course they are not in English. We have four news channels in English (Al Jazeera, BBC, France24 and CNN) and one channel showing movies from the 1980s and 1990s with Arabic subtitles. Sleepless in Seattle, anyone?

The local channels are intriguing though, even if I don't understand what they're saying. One of the sports channels was showing competitive falconry:

And then there's the camel festival:

This festival is clearly a huge deal. News headlines about the event include "Vets pull off life-saving C-section on stricken camel at prestigious Saudi festival" (arabnews.com) and (my favourite) "The International Longest Famous Event King Abdulaziz Camel Festival 2018 Kicks Off with Prizes for Camel Beauty Reaching Over 30 Million Dollars" (BusinessWire.com).