Dutch music

At the moment I'm busy selecting songs for the next edition of my International Song Contest. Usually I don't select Dutch songs, but the past year or two Dutch artists have been making very good music, so certainly this time there will be a Dutch song in the contest again. Since most of the readers of this blog are not Dutch, I will now share some good songs by Dutch artists. And actually all of them have a story behind them, so be sure to read the description as well.

Dotan - Home

This song has been like an anthem for the Netherlands in 2014. It was a big hit during the World Cup and also one radio station made a remix of this song and radio commentaries from the game after each game of the Dutch national team. However, shortly after the World Cup ended the song got a completely different meaning. It became connected to the crash of flight MH-17: the plane full of Dutch people that was shot out of the sky by Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. Because of all the emotions that are connected to this song, it is the highest newcomer in the Dutch top 2000 of the best songs ever made, at rank 82.

Mr. Probz - Nothing Really Matters

Mr. Probz used to be one of the many wannabe-hiphoppers that I dislike so much. He was involved with the wrong kind of people during his youth (which explains his nickname Mr. Probz: Probz is short for all the problems he had) and never really achieved a real breakthrough as a rapper. In 2013 he surprised everybody with his beautiful song "Waves" and after Robin Schulz made a remix of this song Mr. Probz became internationally famous. "Nothing Really Matters" is his latest single and with this song Mr. Probz has been on top of the Dutch charts for 6 weeks.

Niels Geusebroek - Take Your Time Girl

The following song was performed live on the radio for the first time and dedicated to the unborn child of the news-reader of the radio station. In the background throughout the entire song you will hear the heartbeat of this baby. And the song is pretty good as well!

Chef'Special - In Your Arms

The final song I want to share with you today may seem like a sad love song at first ear. However, if you listen more carefully you will find out that there is a deeper meaning to this song. The song is written for the father of the singer, who died a couple of years earlier. As this song is the first big hit of the band Chef'Special, the singer once mentioned that it's kind of strange to him that the death of his father made the band's so successful in the end. But he knows that his father would have been proud to be part of the success and that he will be watching him from a cloud.

I hope you liked these songs. A merry Christmas to you all!

My trip to Jordan

Last month I went on a trip to Jordan. "Jordan?", you are asking. Yes, Jordan. Despite all the dangers in the islamic world right now, Jordan is still a very safe country to go to. And it has two top attractions to offer: Petra, one of the 7 new world wonders, and the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth. I arrived in Aqaba via a low-cost flight from Amsterdam. Aqaba is a city in the south of Jordan, next to the Red Sea. My initial plan was to go straight to Petra on the same day, but a taxi driver and his friends convinced me that there were no more buses that day and so I spent the night in Aqaba and left to Petra early in the next morning.

Petra

To describe Petra in words is difficult. It is better to just show you some pictures:

At the end of the day, as you can see on the last picture, I climbed up a hill to get a lot at the "Treasury" from above. The viewing point was a bit hard to find and at when I finally found the right spot, I was invited by two bedouin guys to have some tea with them, while enjoying the great view. This was a nice preparation for that night, as I was going Couchsurfing again and my host was Ghassab: a bedouin who lives in a cave in the Petra-area. Unfortunately it was too dark to go to the cave and sleep there when I got out of Petra (you don't want your jeep to get stuck in the desert sand at night), but I could stay with his family in a bedouin village called Umm Sayhoun. A bedouin house doesn't have a lot of furniture. You both sit and sleep on cushions on the floor. Some bedouins who have no cave and own just a house even construct tents in their garden, where they would sleep most days of the year. I guess that if being a bedouin is in your blood, you don't feel comfortable living in a regular house.

The next morning I explored Wadi Musa (the village next to Petra) a bit and at around noon I went to the bus station to catch a minibus to Amman. In Jordan, like in many other non-western countries, there are many minibuses that don't follow a fixed timetable. They just leave whenever the bus is full enough (or whenever the driver feels like it). In this case, filling up the bus was a bit of a problem. There were around 10 people in the bus, but it was not enough for the driver to depart. After waiting for more than two hours, four young men even asked their money back and left the bus. This caused a bit of a stir and the locals in the bus started arguing with the driver. In the end they couldn't convince him to leave. I decided two hours had been enough for me as well and also got my money back. I would walk around in Wadi Musa some more and take the more expensive "tourist bus" in the afternoon instead. This was a good choice: on that bus I met two other travellers from Singapore and USA and the American guy had the same plans as I had for the next day: to go to the Dead Sea.

Dead Sea

I stayed in touch with Michael, the American guy, via Whatsapp and together we got a taxi that would take us on a touristic trip the next day. First we visited a church in Madaba (not so interesting), then we went to Mount Nebo (the place where Moses first saw the "promised land" Israel, quite interesting) and finally to the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is the lowest point on earth. It used to be a big sea, but due to the desert sun all the water melted and there is only very little water left. This water is very salty (it tasted horrible, like a saltier version of salt), so humans cannot sink in this water and will always float.
Michael had booked a room at an expensive holiday resort with a private beach. Normally all places (including the public beach) charge over 20 euros as an entrance fee for the Dead Sea, but since Michael said I was with him I got in for free. Being social and meeting other travellers abroad really pays off. Moreover, I also had somebody to enjoy the day with and take pictures of me while floating in the Dead Sea:

It was a great experience that I wouldn't want to have missed for the world.

Amman

Michael invited me to stay the night in his hotel room, but I had to decline, since I had agreed a Couchsurfing host in Amman already. My host, Ramzi, was living in a far-away neighborhood though, so it was quite difficult to get there. But after one taxi, some walking (and meeting a nice universiy professor alongside the road who in the end even invited me to his home in Ajloun) and another taxi I found the right place and met my host. And the next day I even went back "home" with just two minibuses (tip: ask locals to write down the places you need to go in Arabic and then just show those signs to people who don't speak English, so they can still guide you in the right direction and tell you when to get off the minibus). Ramzi already had a second guest, an Australian backpacker who had been hitchhiking from Romania all the way to Jordan and who was going to do volunteer work in the desert the coming month. So if you already think I am an adventurous traveller, then this example shows that there are people who are way more adventurous than I am. :)

Here is a picture from Amman:

Back to Aqaba

After one full day in Amman (more than enough to see everything in the city) it was time to go back to Aqaba. I had done everything on my list, so I was planning to just go and buy some souvenirs, find a Pizza Hut to take my traditional picture in front of it (I already have more than 5 pictures now of myself in front of Pizza Hut's all over the world) and enjoy some quiet time. On the bus I met an Austrian man though, who told me he wanted to go scuba diving in the Red Sea the next day. I got excited and decided to join him. After making plans on Whatsapp (this app makes traveling so much easier!) we went to a diving resort the next day. Unfortunately I found out during the course that I wasn't comfortable enough under water to go through with the actual diving part, but in the end I still had a nice day because the resort and the area around it were quite beautiful. This is the view I had on my last day in Jordan:

It was quite an intense week, but I'm happy that I managed to see and do so many things. Jordan is certainly a country that is worth a visit. Just watch out not to let all those evil taxi drivers and other people in the tourist business take advantage of you. Those people are the only bad thing I can write about Jordan, actually.

Stories I wasn't able to include in my story

It's not easy to write a blog that's easy to read and still include all the fun memories. So here are three stories that I wanted to include in the main story, but couldn't. You can see this as a "bonus track" or something. :)

- In Wadi Rum I couldn't find the tourist bus easily. I wasn't sure whether it would leave from the bus station in Wadi Rum or at the gates of Petra. So I asked four people and got four different answers... Welcome to travelling in Jordan!
- In a hotel I got acquainted with a Spanish man. He didn't speak English that well, so at first I thought I misunderstood him when he said he had been travelling for 5 years. But I didn't. He told me the full story of how he got into an accident that made him unfit to work. Suddenly he found himself as a 35 years old man without a job or a future and he could only walk with a stick. The man (I never even asked his name) got depressed in the first few months, but then he decided he should make the best out of this. So he sold all of his stuff and started his journey around the world.
I found his story very inspirational. Most people in his situation would have stayed at home feeling miserable or angry at the world, but he actually told me that his life was better now than it was before his accident.
- I planned to buy most of my souvenirs and take my "Pizza Hut-picture" in Aqaba on the last day. As mentioned above, my plans changed. Luckily the Austrian guy knew exactly where to find the Pizza Hut in Aqaba, so he took me there before we went to the diving place. I also told him I wanted to buy some souvenirs, so we stopped at a small shop close to the center. The owner, an approximately 65 years old man, told us he was just about to go to the weekly Friday afternoon prayer several times, but he also said (again, several times) that he was an honest man and would offer us a good price. And he actually did. So I bought all of my souvenirs in his shop. With each item I bought I got a present from this man. With the first present I got a fridge magnet, then with the second a bracelet for my sister (when he found out that the gift was for her) and finally he gave me a free keychain with the flag of Jordan.
After he sold us all these items he was suddenly not in a hurry any more to get to the mosque, because he started showing us a photo album with all kinds of pictures of "famous" people he met in the 1970s... This friendly man was a very nice memory for me, and I even went back to his shop the next day just to say hi and ask about taxi prices to the airport.