Thank you for flying Royal Jordanian

A million years ago, on Wednesday…

Ana and I got some takeout Thai food and my mother came over.  We ate a bit and left in a taxi at about 7:20.  I was worried about being late, but there was, surprisingly, almost no traffic on the way to Kennedy.

Standing in the line to check my bags at Terminal 4, my mother said to me: “Don’t you feel like you’re in a different world already?”  An employee asked us if we thought were in the line for KLM.  ”No,” I said, “Royal Jordanian.”  He looked surprised; we were, after all, perhaps the only non-Arabs standing in that line, so you might say we stood out a bit.  Still, you’d think I would have noticed if I were standing in line to check in for a flight to Amsterdam with so many people who do not look very much Dutch.  I turned to Ana and my mother and said, “Hey, I just got profiled.”  I was amused.

There was one man in the line wearing a jallabiya and a skullcap; the rest were dressed like Americans.  The women ran the gamut: some went with bare heads; some wore flimsy, patterned, stylish headscarves showing a wisp of hair in the front (just a few days ago on the 6 train, I saw a woman in a headscarf decorated in a hundred iterations of the word “Dior”); others wore Jilbab, with white cloths wrapped around the head to conceal every possible inch of hair; and a few were decked out in ;full black drapery, leaving all but the eyes to the imagination.  Most, but not all, wore long sleeves, and I didn’t see any slinky collars.

The woman standing in front of me in the check-in line–a muhajabah, but of the more liberal variety–smiled at my mother, and mom, exasperating as ever, took this as a cue to start talking to her about me.  They exchanged a few pleasantries, I accounted for myself, and someone eventually cut ahead of us in line.  Afterwards, my mother made some statement that, in effect, amounted to a decision that Arabs must be nice people because that woman smiled at her.

ME: Mom…

HER: What?

ME: … You know what, never mind.

HER: What?  I wasn’t disparaging the culture!

ME: …

Maybe I was more prone to be embarrassed by her than usual, but really, my mother just doesn’t get it sometimes.  She thinks she’s very open-minded when in fact, she’s full of petty prejudices and silly misconceptions.  As we ate dinner before departing, she started again with the houris and how oversexed Islamic culture is–not in those terms, but with implications to that effect.  I explained to her once and for all that any well-informed Muslim will tell you that the houris are in heaven as symbols of purity and innocence, and not as sexual playthings, for the singular, immaculate happiness in heaven is the proximity of God, against which all mundane pleasures are meaningless.  That shut her up.

Back to the airport.  Bag checked, we went downstairs to the security checkpoint.  My mother, who hasn’t been in an airport in years, thought she would be able to come through to the gate and see my plane take off, so it was a bit crushing to see her realize that this was it.  She began to cry, and even Ana welled up a bit; I hugged them both as hard as I could and walked off to be x-rayed and metal-detected.

In boarding the plane, I began to understand in an intimate sense one Jordanian stereotype: their inability or unwillingness to form lines.  When we were called to board, rather than queuing up to have their tickets taken one by one, everyone congregated around the door in a wedge, passing through the gate like sand through an hourglass, while some stood back and waited for someone to tell them that it was their turn.

The flight attendants looked sort of amused at the sight of me.  One, greeting everyone in Arabic, seemed to light up as he noticed me and greeted me: “Hello!” (in a tone of slight surprise).  I wasn’t comfortable breaking out my limited Arabic skills, so after letting one “shukran” slip from my lips to the stewardess who told me where to find my seat, I consented to be dealt with entirely in English: “‘Ahwa?  Ahwa?  Ahwa? Coffee? Ahwa?  Ahwa?”  ”Shai?  Shai?  Shai?  Shai?  Tea?”

As it turned out, the woman who had stood in front of us in the check-in line was my seat partner, although that fact didn’t lead to much conversation.    Several times, she removed her headscarf, fixed her hair beneath it, and put it back on, which seemed to render meaningless the supposed practical function of the garment.  In fact, I think any culture of modesty must relinquish a few of its shibboleths if it ever intends its adherents to fly airplanes.  With so many men and women packed together, eating and sleeping in too-close proximity and sharing restrooms to boot, I wondered why the munaqqabaat even bothered to cover their faces (although to be fair, I didn’t look to see whether or how they ate).

The plane was late departing JFK, due to the heavy volume of flights.  We were supposed to leave at 10:30, but left at midnight.  I quickly realized that this was all sort of expected.  The flight began with a prayer for safe travel, projected on the large TV screen that would later show Arabic-subtitled versions of “Dr. Dolittle: Tail to the Chief” and “Full of It” (which I only just now discovered was made in 2007 and not in the late ’80s)–there may have been another movie during the time I slept.  All announcements were made in Arabic and English.  When the screen was not busy with bad movies, it flashed through a series of informational images: maps showing the plane’s location; a list of information about the time; one about cruising altitude, speed and the temperature outside; and a snazzy compass showing the exact direction of the Ka’aba relative to the plane (I didn’t notice anyone praying, although the lady next to me occasionally mumbled something in Arabic that might have been prayer–she certainly wasn’t bothered with what direction she was facing).

In my experience traveling by air in the U.S., I have found the “fasten seatbelt” sign to be treated as canon law, very rarely disobeyed and then only by the confused or hopelessly incontinent.  Not so on RJ-262; that sign was no more than a polite suggestion, and half the passengers disregarded it completely.

When the plane touched down in Amman, everyone applauded, which I think is an excellent custom that everyone should adopt.  While we’re at it, I highly recommend Royal Jordanian.  The trip was, on the whole, as excellent as 12 straight hours of breathing several hundred other people’s air can be.  The food wasn’t half bad, either.

(More later)