Never a dull moment...

Another story from the life and times of Bonnie...... This one is about a border-crossing and I think it's rather amusing!

It began on Wednesday morning when Sarah and I (some of you may know Sarah who used to live in Birmingham where we became friends. Now she lives and works here) left Jerusalem to return here to Jordan. There are three border crossings from Israel into Jordan and our plan was to cross from the middle border, called the Allenby Bridge. We get a taxi to the border, said farewell to my mom and dad (who live and work in Jerusalem) and off we went, toting LOTS of stuff (four suitcases, two boxes, two shopping bags, a computer bag, and a couple of purses... will I EVER learn to pack light?!?! well it wasn't all my stuff anyway). We got to the border without dying in a car crash (these people over here drive insanely), got through the first check point without too much hassle- We were stopped by four young Israeli soldiers lounging with their machine guns. A fifth soldier approached our taxi to check out passports. He was very pleasant (that's not always the case, though) and asked if we were carrying any weapons. We wondered what he actually expected us to say..."yes, sir in my pink suitcase I have a hand gun in my make-up bag. Oh, and I forgot about the semiautomatic is somewhere in there too!" Anyway we thought that was amusing but were thankful that he was nice.
On we went to the main border where we successfully paid the "exit tax" and passed through the Passport Control section (this time without being questioned like last time) and after tipping the very nice (and strong) man who dealt with our luggage we loaded ourselves onto the bus which was to take us from the Israeli side of the border to the Jordanian side of the border. Everything was going smoothly until we stopped in "no-man's land" to have our passports checked again, a nice soldier stepped onto the bus and looked us over. He stopped to glance through everyone's passport but when he came to mine he did a little more than glance. It seriously seemed that he took like 10 minutes to decide what he thought about me and my stamped up passport. Really I think he just took about two minutes before stuffing my passports into his shirt pocket, giving me a disapproving look and sign and walking on. Oooh dear. Where is my passport going? Wasn't he supposed to give them back? Ohhhh dear, dear Lord.....dear Lord. Please let that nice man come back and give me back my passports. Oh here he comes!!! What? Get off the bus?? Come with you to a little room for questioning? I glanced back at Sarah who is taking it up a notch with the prayers and followed the nice man out of the bus into a little building to answer questions about who was I, and what was I doing here, etc? The questioner questioned and I answered, he pushed and I pushed back. We danced. He won. "You can't go to Jordan." he says. I didn't know how to fight back this time so I just said, OK. He sent a young guy to get my things off the bus while I went to get Sarah and after discussing the options decided to stick together (even though they didn't have a problem with her). We unloaded the bus, smiled at the other travelers who seemed intrigued with out situation, and stood on the side of the road in the middle of no-where wondering what next!!!
We stood there looking at each other feeling a mixture of amusement and panic. After a few minutes the soldiers asked us to have a seat in the shade which we did. We were very cooperative for about 15 or 20 minutes and then I decided to start pushing again. I got up to say "excuse me but there is really no reason to hold us up like this.... we have proper visas and we are teachers (or something like that), and please just let us go". I was prepared to throw a mini fit if necessary but thankfully it was not!! Just as I was getting my "fit-throwing" voice ready the guy said, you can go on. They loaded us on the next bus that came our way and off we went! We were pulled aside one more time into another little room and then the official said, these women are no problem for us, let them go!

Exhausted but happy we arrived home after another exciting taxi ride up the mountain in lovely Jordan. Another perfect example that there is never a dull moment with life here in the Middle East.

Sorry for the longwinded story but I felt it was necessary to record the adventures that come my way!!