Shawarma + Falafel =

SHAWAFEL in Manhattan

(no, I couldn’t bring myself to try it!!)

Back from New York City

I’ve been back from my 12-day trip to the US for a few days now. I’m supposed to be past the jet-lag, but it seems that my sleeping habits have drastically changed. I have so much to blog about I don’t know where to start!! The seminar was very rich and interesting, and the few days I spent in Manhattan were truly amazing. I skipped some of the “touristy” bits and got to experience bits of New York City with a great group of locals (if there is such a thing as “local” in New York!). I spent a lot of time in the East Village and Lower East Side Manhattan, exploring ethnic restaurants and cafes, people-watching on the subway, walking across Chinatown, and simply taking in the street pulse of this incredibly cosmopolitan city. Of course I couldn’t skip Museum Mile, and it was so hard to make a choice of what to see (ended up going to the Guggenheim and the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum), Central Park, Time Square, and the Brooklyn Bridge. I also got the chance to attend a STOMP show, which was an absolutely sensational theatre experience.

This feels like a stupid introductory paragraph, and I don’t have a convincing reason of why I haven’t gotten around to writing all about the experience. But I will, eventually. Meanwhile, here are glimpses of the photos I took there, and some more on my flickr.

Clean after you Dog!

I thought I’d share one of the photos I took in Philly yesterday before I go to the afternoon session on investigative journalism.

I have more to share about the city of Philadelphia, hopefully tonight

"Tell me about Jordan"

I only have 45 minutes before the afternoon sessions start, so it’s going to be hard to deciding what to write about now.

One great thing about the seminar is that the majority of the participants are very intelligent, open-minded, and present some very interesting points that pick your brain and make you think about a lot of issues related to media, journalism, liberty, economics, and civic engagement from so many different angles. I also love the balance between the intellectual academic stuff and the practical journalism dicussions. I definitely want to write some more about that later on, but for now, some points I thought I’d jot down…

I’ve had people come up to me and say, “to be honest, I don’t know anything about Jordan. Tell me about Jordan.”

What do I say about Jordan in a nutshell?? It’s been very interesting for me to obeserve myself and the pattern of my answers. Sometimes I talk about history, sometimes about all the changes taking place.. sometimes I talk about it within a regional context, and sometimes I just talk about social aspects of things. Of course I can just ask “what do you want to know?” and that makes it slightly easier… but then people come and ask me “so, is there free press in Jordan?”, “so, we hear that Jordan is one of the more liberal countries in the region, how’s that like?”

{Sigh}… there just aren’t clear-cut answers, are there? I mean, I could talk about how there’s a lot more freedom these days than there used to be before… we have privately-owned newspapers, private TV stations, and with the exception of a few clearly defined red lines, it’s not the law that stops you from addressing different issues, is it? I can talk about how most censorahip is self-censorship, remnant of the 1950’s mindset probably. But what about the Press and Publication Law and the whole bunch of laws that are vague enough to turn almost any case against a writer, journalist, or someone plainly expressing an opinion?? Or may be I’m just repeating a line we all use without really researching the governing laws and regulations that we have. If there’s one thing I want to do when I go back home, it’s to better learn the different set of laws, and dig up so-called contradictions or ambiguities. It’s not enough to roughly know that there are many fluid terms in there “you’re free to express your opinion as long as…”

We just had a very rich discussion over lunch with one of the speakers, Professor Ben Berger, who is specialized in areas of political theory, and civic engagement. His sessions tackled some great intellectual questions related to media, television and its role in strengthening or weakening civic engagement. I respect the IHS, because while they are committed to promoting the libertarian line of thought, they do practice what they say, which is to encourage people to think for themselves and engage in constructive debate; they’ve brought speakers with very different political leanings… from the very conservative, to the social democrat, to the hard-core libertarian. I personally believe in principles of social libertarianism (in a country like Jordan though you have an extremely powerful informal institution, which is social norms, that governs such issues and that is much stronger than any possible laws or government intervention related to issues of social liberty)… but when it comes to my feelings about economic libertarianism, I’m not so sure! On paper, it’s a very nice ideology… in practice, existing inequalities are too powerful to ignore.

So, tell me about Jordan…

I personally think it’s an exciting time to be living in Amman, and in Jordan as a whole… and an exciting time to be a journalist there. In many ways, I can’t wait to be back!

From the Journalism Seminar at Bryn Mawr

It’s 5:30 am. Sounds like how I would start a post in Amman. It would be unfair to say that I’m still suffering from jetlag, because apparently, it didn’t take me long to fall back into my weird cycle of falling asleep very early and waking up before the crack of dawn. It’s just not very practical given the type of schedule we have here.

Today is the third day of this seminar I’m attending on “Journalism and the Free Society”, at Bryn Mawr, just outside Philadelphia. So far the speakers have been very interesting, and the sessions very engaging. It leaves me with a lot of points to ponder, especially when you think of the particularities of our region and media in or related to our region.

We’ve heard from economist Mario Villarreal-Diaz on how to think like economists in journalism, from popular talk radio host and education broadcaster Dom Giordano on blogging, talk radio, and cable TV, and from syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock, on opinion journalism, why it’s powerful and how it can have an impact, and then in another session on networking, and citizenship.

Upcoming sessions tap into magazine writing, investigations, civic journalism, TV vs. civil society, cultural deliberation.. amongst others, with a good diversity of journalists and professors.

Serious stuff aside, Bryn Mawr is a nice little college town. It’s very green, and somewhat humid. We’re constantly warned not to open our room windows because “floors would buckle” from humidity. It didn’t strike me as that bad, but I wouldn’t want to test it The campus is very beautiful, with old gothic-style buildings and semi-towers. I should be taking more photos, and I’ll try to post them soon. Yesterday when I got up at 4:30, I went out for a morning run. I love discovering a town by jogging or walking aimlessly and without a sense of hurry! Waking up early gives you that But then of course, you can’t really judge a town by what it looks like at dawn.

During lunch break, I went to the Bryn Mawr Film Institute where they were hosting Danny DeVito to talk to some film students. I couldn’t stay long, but it was nice to see him in person and smile when remembering his roles in movies we grew up to.

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll get the chance to explore a bit of Philadelphia. I’ll definitely try to post photos. And I still need to write a separate post about the New York subway and the brief impressions I got from passing through the city. Let’s just say that in this case the word “interesting” does not carry all the meanings it ought to carry.

I’m writing more thoughts in an old-fashioned pen&paper journal, and I’ll probably go back to them in Amman and draw upon them on this blog.

One last note, it’s just ridiculous how obsessed the media here is with the Paris Hilton jail story!!

… or not to blog

I’m listening to the Lighthouse Family – Free. Strangely enough this song brings back memories of the Engineering Faculty library and exam cramming… actually I think it was a Numerical Analysis exam we were studying for that day when I played this song over and over and kept singing it, regardless of what a public hazard my voice might have been.

Last week, my friends at work organized the sweetest farewell for me… complete with the Sandy Belle sound track. When I was a kid I used to insist that Sandy Belle had nothing to do with my decision to be a journalist, and I have diaries that can prove it

So now I’m finally going to give it my best shot; being a journalist I mean. No more doing it on the side, no more trying to fit it in the lunch hour and evenings alongside an 8-to-5 job… a job that I liked a lot, yes… but my heart was always elsewhere!

The goodbye gift my friends got was all notebooks and pens and a rainproof folder, with a to-do list attached to it; every other item on the list said “Blog”! I often pause and ask myself these days what it is that is stopping me from blogging all I want… from being entirely true to myself on this blog like I used to be.

Funny how the song resonates in the background “I wish I could say… all the things that I wanna say… Say’em loud, say’em clear… for the whole wide world to hear”

I do write about things that I am passionate about, that interest me, or that I want to share. Yet there remains a lot more that I observe everyday, a lot more that stirs thoughts and opinions up there in my head that never find their way to publishing. “Why” is the question that I need to address; Have I turned out to be such a coward? Am I afraid of being misunderstood? Judged? Am I trying to preserve a certain image? Does it worry me if the ones dear to me realize that they don’t quite know me? Does it worry me that I’m at a stage where I’m still formulating my stands and opinions? I do believe that writing is a process, not an ends in itself… so why have I stopped blogging??

When Shakespeare said “What’s in a name?” he obviously had no idea what Jordan is like!!

A good friend of mine calls it “compartmentalizing our lives”… and I suppose she’s right.

I won’t ramble on about that, not now at least. In a few hours I’ll be on a flight to New York, going to attend a seminar on “Journalism and the Free Society” in Philly, organized by the Institute for Humane Studies. I’ll definitely blog that, I’m just not sure if I’ll do it while I’m there; I made a tough decision to leave my laptop behind… I’m opting to travel as light as possible, and to savor some “disconnectivity” for a change