we will start with the bad, and rip this band aid off quick. we went to jordan on thursday only to stay a day and return to israel the next. we did this so that upon our reentry into israel, we would get another three month visa. we had already been in israel for three months so we needed to renew. so we went to jordan, stayed a day, and came back. here is the run down:

thursday morning we leave jerusalem, take a two hour bus ride north to bet shean, get a taxi from there to the boarder crossing, show our passports at the entrance to the first building, show our passports again to change our shekels for jordainian currency, show our passports again to some girl behind a desk [i don't know what she did], show our passports again to a guy in a duty free store we had to walk through on our way to get a bus, wait at the bus station for an hour in the blistering valley heat, show our passports again to get on the bus, ride the bus across a bridge and over the jordan river into jordan, show our passports again to get visas, show our passports again, get our picture taken and our finger prints scanned, show our passports again to a jordanian officer who gives us a small interrogation, check our luggage through customs [the customs officer thought my harmonica was a weapon], show our passports again to the customs officers, catch a cab to amman, half way there the cab driver motiones that something is wrong with his car so we switch cabs [the second cab had no license plate on that back], on the way south to amman we hit about five or so military check points in which we show or passports each time, and finally to the hotel in which the front desk takes our passports until check out two days later. the entire one way trip from jerusalem to amman took eight hours.

something to note, amman is about fifty miles east of jerusalem, but the boarder crossing is two hours north of each city, so while, theoretically, a straight shot from one town to another might take an hour drive or so, we had to go north two hours to the boarder crossing, cross into jordan, and then south two hours to amman. a solid eight hours.

the most frightening thing was the cab ride to amman, two hours of our driver speeding up hills and around sharp turns to pass the cars in front of us while smoking, talking on his cell phone, manning the stick shift and listening to jordain-arab-techno-trash. and to top it all off, out of the four taxis i rode in while in jordan, four of them had broken seat belts. forget an intifada, i am scared of the cab rides.

a word from me on the music in jordan. i feel a little stupider for having heard so much of it. every song is the same hoppy pace of techno drums, a quick wavering arab conversation between the vocalist and horrendous violins, and some instrument that sounds like a synth mix between a sitar and someone just learning how to play a voilin. and the real amazing thing is that every song sounds exactly the same. i am convinced that there is no arab in the middle eastern world that knows how to play the drums. now i know this sounds really harsh, but it still plagues my mind. i've said before that i feel like a creek bed whose shorelines only flourish when music is flowing through it, well, whatever was flowing through me while in jordan nearly burned down whatever forest had grown along my shores before. i was musically suffocating, we all were.

so take everything i've just written, throw a sweet day at a holiday-inn pool in the middle, give food poisoning to joel's entire family, and then repeat the entire process in reverse to get back to jerusalem; and that about sums up our trip. only now we have fresh three month visas, and it's never felt so good, and we've never felt so at home to be in jerusalem.

alright, out with the bad, in with the good.

we recently got word that the people we needed for this documentary have agreed to interview. a very excellent thing. and that pioneers our next endeavor, which i can't really tell you about right now. but there will come a time in which our goal will be to tell everyone and anyone. and i'll let you know when that is. i also finished editing and burning dvd's of the cohen conference, which to you may not sound like anything, but it's a great thing to be done with.

sorry that the "bad" was so extensive and the good was so brief and vague. that's just how it goes i guess. i posted a picture on my flickr page that sums up my entire jordan trip in a thousand words, it's kind of a double-entendre i suppose. love to you - feel free to correct all my grammatic and spelling mistakes. peace.