Shootings in the streets... and STILL not in Baghdad

Hi Mom, don't read this.

Everyone else, here's how my 40-hour day has been going so far:

I woke up at 6 a.m. in DC, got a cab to the airport, flew out by 8:30, landed in Detroit, then had exactly one hour and seven minutes to scramble out of security, grab a shuttle to another terminal, go to the international ticket counter to get my passport checked and pick up by ticket to Jordan, run through security again and find my gate. I boarded on time... but not without clear divine intervention.

The flight was 11+ hours, but it went smoothly despite the fact I got very congested and felt blah-ish the night before (still recovering... hitting up the sudafed and ibuprofen). I sat next to a 25-yr-old University of Michican chemistry student who was born in Iraq and was on his way to visit family in Najaf, Iraq for a month. He was a pretty nice guy... and he also was trying to figure out whether while he's in Iraq he should become engaged to this high school graduate who he had only met a couple times before. I told him not to rush it.

I got in to the Amman airport at 5:50 a.m. local time, which meant I had an entire day ahead of me. I was completely exhausted. Some travel agency folks whisked me through the visa process and I arrived at the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman a half hour later. It's the fanciest hotel in town. The bathroom is about as big as my room back home. I'll post photos later. It's swank.

After taking a three-hour nap, I grabbed some ground lamb in pita bread at the hotel restaurant and then hit the town. I had only a vague idea of what I was doing... I thought: Here I am, in the middle of the Middle East (a region I've never been before), in a city I know little about and amongst a culture I'm slowly becoming familiar with. When do I get my own reality TV show?

The mode of transportation in Amman is taxi. Unless you're dirt poor (as many here are) -- then you use run-down, decrepit public busses (which look more like large vans. Thankfully taxis are cheap here.

I hit up the Mecca Mall, which lives up to its name. It was the Westernized center of Amman... tons of cell phone shops, lots of American restaurants, and Play Stations everywhere (though overpriced... as was everything: A Tommy Hillfigure shirt -- $126). I bought a DVD recorder the Baghdad bureau needs. Besides that, I kept my wallet sealed.

Then I taxi-ed over to the Citadel, an area in the middle of the city with Roman Empire-like ruins from teh 8th century. My taxi driver didn't speak English, so he kept pulling over to the side of road -- bringing traffic behind him to a grinding halt -- and asking random strangers how to get to where I wanted to go. The traffic there is insane. No one uses turn signals, all the lane marker lines are faded, and people are constantly running across the middle of the road.

The Citadel, however, was pretty amazing. I'll post pics soon. There I met an American and his son and his brother-in-law. The American, Tom, had been living in Amman for about a year. We ended up touring the ruins together, and then catching a cab together. I was going to go to some downtown shops and they were heading to dinner. But the cab stopped when the road we were going to travel on was blocked off by dozens of soldiers who were monitoring a rally off in the distance that had something to do with the local elections that day. We ended up getting out of the cab and walking down a street lined with small hole-in-wall, run-down shops. We stopped at a restaurant. Tom suggested that I don't eat any of the vegetables. I agreed. The dining experience was bizarre, yet awesome -- it was just what I was hoping for: Not the touristy stuff, but the greasy place where locals hang out in the not-so-rich hoods. And the food was great (the cooked parts were... we didn't eat anything not cooked).

As we walked out, six tanks sped toward us from out of nowhere and abruptly turned a U. I was about to take a picture, but Tom suggested I not get shot. As we continued walking, we noticed that everyone was closing up their shops even though it was only 7 p.m. Not normal, Tom said. It was like the weird calm you feel in the air before a storm. "By all rights, we shouldn't be here," Tom told me. A few minutes later, we decided to turn around and we walked back the way we came. After we got a few blocks away from the hub-bub, we heard the distinct sound of a machine gun in -- coming from where we had just been. Soon we found a taxi and drove off. My nerves were a bit rattled.

With how crazy the last two days have been, I can't wait to get to Baghdad tomorrow for some peace and quiet.