bird song, wolf tracks

I am back in Amman after a long flight which involved a lengthy delay in Istanbul. Wow, that is one busy airport. Living in North America, one tends to forget the role and scale of cities like Istanbul: a place that has served for centuries as a regional hub, the ancient seat of an empire, 5x more people than Toronto. The airport has a continuous stream of final boarding announcements to mysterious (to me, at any rate) destinations like Doha, Muscat, Tashkent, Tehran. Spending 6 hours there reminded me of Prague's Ruzyne airport in 1990, where the giant, clattering, digital departure board spelled out destinations like Ho Chi Minh City and Ekaterinberg and Donetsk. Names you never witnessed (at the time) in North American or Western European airports.

Back in Jordan, I have arrived to springtime. 20 degree temperatures, early flowering trees like apricots and almonds in blossom, and birdsong from first light. 2 days in, I am still waking up at the first call to prayer - at 4:30am or so. Unable to get back to sleep, I read my book, watch the sun rise and listen to the birds. As the jet lag eases, I expect I will start to sleep through the night. When I came last time, I knew I was on regular time when I started to sleep through that first call to prayer (thank you, God). A family of songbirds is doing their best to prevent that, however: they have nested in the building's airshaft and their chirps echo into the apartment's (three) vented bathrooms and throughout the apartment from the early morning onwards.

I came back to a full house here in Shmeisani. When I left Amman, I had been living in the apartment alone - with another colleague living in a unit downstairs. Now both apartments are full to bursting with the consulting team - 2 others here with me, another 3 downstairs. All are very lovely fellows and there is a nice, social atmosphere. I have learned that foreign consultant living is a little bit like civilized university dorm living, at a higher salary. I like it, but to get a bit more of my own space back, I will move this weekend to an apartment in downtown Jabal Amman. This upcoming apartment (my third in as many months) overlooks the Roman citadel and is old and big and ramshackle and affordable - a bit like my apartment in Toronto. It is probably too vast for one person with 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a big eat-in kitchen and 2 living rooms (standard in this country where a strict distinction is maintained between the formal place you entertain guests and the cozy place you share with your family - a tradition that I gather dates back to the bedouin tents). So I will indeed get a lot of my own space back. I will look forward to visitors! Photos are forthcoming.

The shirtsleeves temperature and blooming gardens couldn't be more of a contrast to my time last week in Canada, especially Deep River, which was cold and snowy and beautiful. I am hanging on to the memory of cross-country skiing across the Ottawa River to Quebec and seeing dozens of wolf tracks criss-crossing the ice along the way. After returning to Amman, I got an e-mail message from my brother saying that a person who had been skiing along the river a few days after I was there, suddenly found himself surrounded by 5 wolves. (Does that constitute a pack of wolves?). This was in the daytime. I have never heard of this happening before. He scared them off but it was a sobering experience, I'll bet. When I tell this story to my Jordanian colleagues - and that it might just as easily have been me surrounded by wolves - I can tell that they don't think it is neat or interesting that there are a lot of wolf tracks out there in the snow. Or that there is snow at all. Crazy Canadians.