Epilogue

I've been home for about a month now and decided it's finally time to conclude the 'Bruce in Jordan' Blog.



Well I guess all of the exiting stuff happened coming home from the last update. Well there was a stamp in our passports when we arrived in Jordan that said "contact nearest police station within one month". But according to everyone who I had at least talked to, they said not to worry about it. Well there we were trying to exit customs at the airport in Amman, and we were told that are Visas had expired. It came down to Jay Harris having to go to an ATM with a security Guard to take out a couple hundred JD so they could pay the $40 fee for us to leave the country. Fantastic! We almost miss the plane but make it just barely.



The plane ride was quite lovely. I watched a film called Alien Autopsy about these two guys that bought a film of a real alien autopsy from Roswell, but the film is corroded some how and they have to make a new film so that a crazy Hungarian art dealer doesn’t kill them. It was really good. 



Well we arrive in London thinking everything is just fine when the flight attendant comes on the air and says "there has been a security situation at Heathrow today, so all passengers need to clear immigration in the United Kingdom". We had no idea what's going on and followed a massive corwd down to customs where we stood in a line which seemed to be a few miles long. Fuad called his parents and they said something to him about a terrorist plot of some kind. Appantly his parents were thinking that that was going to be the last time they would ever talk him. After clearing all of that, we ended up having to take a train to another terminal where it was complete chaos. We weren't aloud to take anything on the plane except for our passport, ticket, and wallet. Once we cleared security (which involved frisking and military personal with machine guns) we proceeded to our gate where we went through additional screening. Once in, they had the BBC playing on the TV. It turned out that 23 guys where planning on blowing up American bound planes with liquids. 

 The plane had to go through extra security which delayed it an hour and passengers’ passport numbers had to be ran through a computer to make sure no one showed up on any terrorist watch lists. Then a security seal broke on our way to the run way which forced us to return to the gate to have that checked out which ended up delaying our plane for another three hours. 



In Washington D.C. we had to fill out our declaration forms at the desk because we couldn't have pens on the plane, which was quite hilarious because the head TSA border guard came on the loudspeaker and gave a speech to the TSA employees about how we didn't have pens.

 Once filling out my little card, I was asked about what I had been doing for six weeks in the Middle East. After an explanation I was off to collect my baggage and go through another checkpoint where a TSA officer guided me into "line C". Another TSA officer gave me a really hard time about what I had been doing in the Middle East and demanded seeing enrolment papers from the university, so I had to have Jay Harris come explain to the officer that I hadn't spent the last six weeks at an Al-Qaeda training camp. I didn't have it that bad though. Erik got pulled off into a room where they asked him about his religious beliefs and checked his hands for bomb residue. 



Then I spent a couple days in Washington D.C. going through a lot of evaluatory kinds of stuff where we had to make the State Department feel good about spending so much money on us.



I'm glad to be back but at certain times I really want to be back there. I felt like I fell asleep one day and woke up in August having this crazy dream about going to the Middle East. 



One thing the other day kind of made me think about Jordan. A gunman at the Roman Ampethetre in downtown Amman mowed down seven tourists and killed one while shouting "Allahu Akbar". He was alone and was probably just crazy. But you wouldn't have heard too much about it because it happened around the same time as the crocodile hunter died and all.



-The End