Those Wacky Iraqis...

...And jolly Jordanians!

It’s July 1 – 2026 is officially half-over. And so we’re visiting a nation that only delivers half of what it promises: Jordan. And in keeping with our theme, they only get half the column. First, let’s take a fun trip to Iraq!

We visited the safe area of Iraq, which is like visiting the Jewish area of South Dakota. For the record, there are 250 Jews in that enormous state, comprising 0.0% of the population.

As for the safe part of Iraq, that’s a tiny region called Kurdistan. It borders the mountains of Iran so it is literally between Iraq and a hard place. What a great joke! I should stop right there.

Kurdistan is a semi-autonomous region run by Kurds: they have their own language, they police their own borders, everyone knows everyone because everyone’s related to everyone. It’s almost modern and almost peaceful, like Arizona. It looks like Arizona, too: vast stretches of desert, craggy mountains and buttes, deep winding river canyons. If Italy could make spaghetti westerns, you could shoot Falafel Westerns here: A Fistful of Dinars; The Good, the Bad and the Burqa; Gunfight at the OK Koran; The Man Who Shot Libyan Violence. None of these are good, so I gave you a lot of them. Here’s one that doesn’t even make sense: Al Qaeda on the Western Front.

Iraq: It couldn’t be safer!

We stayed in the capital city of Erbil, in a lovely hotel popular with American spies: they were well-dressed men who sat in the bar all day, nursing a single drink, eavesdropping on conversations around them. Maybe they weren’t spies. Maybe they were just nosy, lazy and bored. By the way, Nosy, Lazy and Bored is a great name for a budget law firm:

“ Nosy, Lazy & Bored: This Bench isn’t Just Our Ad – It’s Our Office.”

Kurdistan felt safe – so safe they built Iraq’s first American-style mall. It was a shiny, spotless 80’s mall, right out of “Stranger Things”. And it had something most Iraqis had never seen before: an escalator. It was cute watching the Kurds navigate this thing: waiting forever before they stepped aboard, wobbling and clutching the rubber railing for dear life on the ride down, and stumbling and being thrown off at the bottom. For most of them, the escalator ride was much scarier than the war going on outside their borders. We also went to a local zoo, where there were no guards. Kids climbed into the monkey cages for selfies. Teens pulled on a lion’s whiskers.

Fun and fear sit side by side in Iraq. One night, we were riding a Ferris wheel – Iraq has lots of amusement parks because Iraqis have lots of kids: 4.6 per household, the most in the world. It was all fun until we reached the top of the Ferris wheel – we could see into Mosul, the next city over, where all hell was breaking loose.

Still, we felt safe in Kurdistan. How safe? One day a black sedan with tinted windows pulled up next to us. The passenger door opened up and the driver said, “Get in.” So we got in! There was an old man behind the wheel – he just wanted to practice his English. He lamented, “When I was boy, everyone here could speak English. Now it’s just BALALALA.” He gave us a tour of the town then dropped us off at a beautiful church -- the last church on earth still giving services in Aramaic. That’s the language Jesus spoke. It was like listening to the original cast album of the New Testament.

If Iraq still sounds intense for you, ease into the Middle East with a trip to Jordan. This country feels so much like America you may wonder why you bothered to visit. Some of this may stem from the king – his name’s Abdullah bin Hussein bin Talal bin Abdullah – yes, it’s got an Abdullah at both ends -- but he’s about as Jordanian as Michael Jordan. The king’s mother was English, and came to Jordan as a production secretary on “Lawrence of Arabia”. This guy went to high school in Massachusetts and college in Britain, and when he became king he couldn’t even speak Arabic.

Still, there’s one very compelling reason to visit Jordan – Petra. It’s been featured in roughly ten thousand Nat Geo specials. If you missed those, you’ll remember Petra from the third Raiders movie, “Indiana Jones and the Old Cup”, or whatever it was. That movie ends with Indy, played by Han Solo, and his father, played by James Bond, riding off into the desert. They stop at an amazing church carved right out of a red sandstone cliff. That’s Petra. People think that’s the whole thing, but when you go around the corner you see it continues for another hundred square miles. It’s an entire city carved out of pure rock, bright red and beautiful. It’s two thousand years old and looks like it was just finished yesterday. Petra should be Number 3 on your bucket list, after the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China. Number four should be finding the schmuck who coined the term “bucket list” and hitting him with a bucket.

Beyond Petra, the most interesting thing in Jordan is the Jordanians – no matter what you asked for, they gave you half. If a city tour was supposed to visit six sites, it went to three. A four-course meal was only two courses.

We were booking a day trip, and they asked if we wanted the two-hour hike or the three-hour hike. We paid for three hours and the hike lasted ninety minutes. It was actually shorter than a two-hour hike except their two-hour hike would’ve been an hour.

We could only laugh about it. It gave rise to a bunch of Jordan jokes.

What was showing at the Jordanian film festival?

-The Five Commandments.

-Snow White and the Three-and-a-Half Dwarfs

-Federico Fellini’s classic film “Four and a Quarter”

And here’s my best Jordan joke:

-Who’s their favorite rapper?

-Fifty Percent

Now it’s your turn! Post a Jordan joke to this Substack. Funniest entry gets a free premium subscription for life! That’s a million-dollar value if we both live long enough!

This Substack is coming to you free. Upgrade to paid… just $5 a month!