Leaving

I’m wearing a watch.
Very strange sensation.
It itches, moves and doesn’t feel right.
Quarter past three in the morning, it says.
Well, it doesn’t say ‘in the morning’ – it’s not that sophisticated.

I’m sitting on a yellow cushion, leaning against a soft-padded bright green bench in the colourful children’s play area of Queen Aliaa International Airport in Amman. On my right, a big TV screen is playing a “learn how to see” (equally brightly coloured) children's program in loop.
Now that I’m sitting, the exhaustion my adrenaline has been suppressing is slowly surfacing. Again, I packed till the very last minute. Then a cup of tea with my lovely neighbours and my taxi driver in my barren flat and off we went, though the empty streets of Amman, speeding towards the airport. By far the best lift to the airport I ever got. Jasim had an illegally-installed mini-screen which he could stow away at the push of a button whenever a police checkpoint was near. Add to that a first class sound system and you’ve got the hottest driving disco you can imagine. So we were watching and dancing to Lebanese girls shaking their asses with Black hip hoppers to excellent Arabic vibes and just before we arrived to the airport – like a divine intervention – Michael Jackson: “They don’t really care about us”
I was very pleased!!

It was strange to see my much-beloved flat so very empty and bare, though still more liveable than when I first saw it. All my postcards and pictures taken town, clothes packed up, laundry stowed away and the carpets rolled up and given to friends together with the scarce furniture I had. Good to know, though, that all of the things I had carefully chosen to make my little home, have found some other use or will soon be furnishing someone else’s home. And good to know also, that those things that I have grown very fond of (like the two four-meter-long Bedouin carpets in reddish hues, or my little white desk), are given away under the agreement that I can pick them up anytime I’ve set up a home again in this area, which won’t be too long.

What was even stranger, though, was how I always JUST manage to fit everything in, both in time and space, as if some magic hand behind the scenes has counted all the seconds and minutes that it will take me for every single action I need to do before I can get on the taxi to the airport and every cubic centimetre that all my stuff will take to fit exactly into all the available bags I have. It always JUST works out, to the last minute and the last cubic centimetre. There’s never a half-full bag or a half-an-hour left over before leaving. This time it lead to being hopelessly over the maximum baggage allowance, although I had already given the heaviest suitcase with things I didn’t need so soon (for example my widely-travelled-but-still-not-read 10-volume "Middle East library”) to a friend to keep for me till I come back. Luckily, the man at the Turkish Airlines counter didn’t seem to notice and I was so nervous pretending to fix something on the backpack to distract him from looking at the weight register, that I forgot to look at it myself. Must’ve been 50kg or something. Not including the 5kg Arabic sweets I was carrying as hand baggage of course.

So the first of three parts of my Water management Masters is finished. Well, it finished about a month ago and since then sooo many stories happened that remain untold – a wonderful and inspiring tour of the Anglican institutions in Jordan with my oldest and wisest friend - and whitest, for that matter (-; a great, lonely (ad)venture into the desert with a wreck of a car; a spontaneous trip to the north-west of Syria with my favourite two Syrians, which started with nearly ending up in prison, but then continued with sitting around a campfire in the mountains and swimming in the Mediterranean along the border with Turkey; and throughout all of that – the acquaintance of a number of lovely Jordanians – one in particular, a generous documentary film director – who showed me a very open, moderate and innovative side of Jordanian society, which I had not seen during the rather isolated last half year. This made me sad to leave on the one hand, but also hopeful to return to Jordan again after the next semester, to continue building on these friendships and to join in a movement that is essentially changing the otherwise rather traditional and conservative society of Jordan.