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A week in the Middle East
By
James Norton
| Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Editor's note: The Monitor's Middle East editor James Norton shares his observations during a one-week tour of Jordan and Israel.
02-01-03
Crossing the King Hussein/Allenby Bridge
Getting from Amman to Jerusalem is my agenda today. Over breakfast at the hotel, Cameron and fellow correspondent Scott Peterson seem to view the trip over the bi-national bridge with a slightly unnerving level of familiarity and schadenfreude. Scott even takes the special trouble to mention the possibility of a body-cavity search.
I assume he is being humorous. It is not entirely possible to tell.
By the time I arrive at the Jordanian side of the bridge, I am sufficiently rattled that I lose my primary wallet. My decoy wallet - the one with a negligible stack of local currency that I purchased specifically for this trip - rests safely in my pants pocket, as the wallet containing my press pass, credit cards and driver's license toodles merrily back to Amman.
Stumbling into the Jordanian side of the compound, I am slightly dazed. Porters offer their services. Arab men in uniform stroll around, looking for malcontents. Signs are mostly in Arabic, with some English hints printed next to select bits of the compound.
I suddenly have a vivid understanding of how it must feel to be a recent immigrant to the United States. My language skills are useless, I stand out like a flaming badger, and my life's progress - represented here by my small, easily misplaced passport - is, literally, in the hands of total strangers.
Fortunately, everyone is perfectly nice, and I'm shunted from my cab to a passport-control office to a bus that carries me and a small cadre of fellow travelers over to the Israeli side of the bridge.
The difference between the Israel and Jordanian sides is like night and day. Security - embodied by M-16s, rolling luggage belts and metal scanners - is rigorous. My every possession is scrutinized.
In Jordan, cabbies, soldiers, shopkeepers, and the everpresent hovering clouds of waiters and porters are male. In Israel, the women are standing right behind the desks, sporting extremely professional attitudes and packing heat.
Something about my shambolic nature piques the curiosity of Israeli security, and I'm taken aside into an extremely well-lit room with plain white walls, and a somewhat impatient - but clearly quite serious - Israeli security officer.
"Who do you work for? Why are you visiting Israel? Why did you get your passport the day before you traveled? Can you really turn them around in 24 hours? Who are you staying with? Why do you have a book on Islam and these buttons featuring the Al-Aqsa mosque [a mosque in Jerusalem that symbolizes the intifada] in your bag?"
I cheerfully answer the questions as fast as they come, positively glowing with innocent intent. Then:
"If you work for a newspaper, do you have a press pass?"
Of course. It's right here in my... it's here... under these souvenirs... behind these books... here in this backpack... it's. In. It's in my wallet.
My wallet is not in my bag. My wallet is probably entering downtown Amman even as we speak.
Inexplicably, this doesn't phase my questioner. He shrugs, and I'm free to go. Reprieved! The young women who stamp my passport out are very nice, and one of them even talks to me about wanting to be a journalist. "It's my dream," she says. I'm far more encouraging than I probably should be, and I make my merry way through the rest of the security maze - only to end up on a 40-minute taxi ride to Jerusalem's Damascus Gate, a bewildering knot of pedestrian and automobile traffic.
But eventually, I settle in Jerusalem. The wallet is in an Amman hotel, quietly awaiting my return. And I look forward to whatever may come next.
As long it doesn't involve a bright white room.
Café Paradiso, Jerusalem
I meet Nicole Gaouette, another of the Monitor's staff correspondents in the Middle East, for some sandwiches and tea. The roast beef and pesto sandwich is fantastic, and but for the Hebrew that drifts through the room - and the security guard out front - it's easy to imagine myself back in Cambridge, Mass.
Then the phone rings: Israel's first astronaut, flying on the US space shuttle Columbia, has perished during the spacecraft's disastrous reentry into Earth's atmosphere.
It's a tragic moment for Israel and the United States. My next mission is to read up on astronaut Ilan Ramon, his mission, and his special place in Israeli society and help Nicole work on the story for Monday's edition of the Monitor. And I've only been in town for about an hour.
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