Language soup

wake up in the morning and speak Indonesian with the guest worker at the hotel in Wadi Musa, Jordan.

I hitch hike back from the Dead Sea to Amman with a Jordanian who lived in Italy for twenty years and speaks better Italian then Arabic. He speak to me in Italian, which I can understand, and I can speak to him in Spanish, with a few Arabic words thrown in, and he can understand.

I take a share taxi from Amman to Damascus and try to communicate using English with a few Arabic words thrown in here and there, and I find myself using some very Arabic hand gestures, particularly the tips of fingers together wriggle the wrist up and down one which ostensibly means wait but can be used for a myriad of other expressions. The other three passengers, two older women - an Iraqi and a Syrian, and a middle aged guy who sits in the front seat and thinks the back seat must be thirty metres away given the volume with which he speaks, and the driver spend the entire five hours of the journey in a heated debate about Iraq, Saddam, America, democracy, Palestine, Israel, the King and the best falafel joint west of the Mediterranean. OK, the made the last one up, but I did hear all the others mentioned.

I arrive at a hotel in Damascus and the receptionist, an older Syrian who lived in Germany for years insists on speaking to me in German, even after we clear up the Austria/Australia confusion.

I chill out on my bed in the dorm and meet an Algerian, and we have a long conversation in French about what Algeria is like and why he is living in Damascus.

I go to sleep a very tired and confused Loiterer.