“You know, my cousin is from Gaza.” Really, I ask? “Yes, he was killed by an Israeli bomb last week.” I try not to choke on my pita. “He had 23 kids, from one wife! Four of the boys are commandos, Hamas.”

The flight from Tel Aviv to Amman lasts a mere 25 minutes. Worlds apart in the mental geography of the Middle East, in fact the two cities are astonishingly close. Familiar landscapes whiz by below, first the towns of Israel’s coastal plain, then Jerusalem, the West Bank and the deserts of Jordan.

I have an afternoon in Amman ahead of me, a stopover on the way to a conference in the United Arab Emirates.

My two traveling companions, a Yemenite Israeli and his Australian girlfriend, have an even longer stopover. They are on their way to do some backpacking in the Far East, and after that to Australia. They have a hotel room waiting for them not far from the airport, but they decline my offer to join me in Amman for the afternoon. “Now’s not a good time,” they tell me.

I have to concede the point. War has been raging in Gaza for weeks now, with plenty of civilian casualties. In Israel, people are mostly supportive of the war. But in the rest of the world, especially the Arab world, people are angry. I bid goodbye to the couple and wish them the best.

Driving into Amman in a taxi, my new fellow traveler is an Indian-Canadian real estate agent based in New York. He was in Israel drumming up interest in some residential project in Manhattan, and has also decided to spend his afternoon layover in town. He introduces himself as “Mike.”

“Eh, my brotha,” Mike strikes up a conversation with our taxi driver, Khaled, “how are the rents in Amman, eh? How much you pay here for a big apartment?” The driver responds, in spotty but understandable English, that housing prices in Amman are intolerably high. Hundreds of dollars a month for a large apartment, which are apparently in great demand here due to the size of the families, and a couple hundred bucks even for a small studio apartment.

I wonder out loud how much money they make here in a month. Not much, says Khaled, “No petrol in Jordan. Tourists – our petrol,” and begins a discussion on “good” American tourists (who take taxis to the Dead Sea and Petra and tip generously) versus “bad” Saudi tourists (who head straight from the airport to the bars and nightclubs and are parsimonious tippers).

“Apartments here very expensive,” says Khaled, returning to the previous discussion, and exits the highway. He offers to drive us through Amman’s luxury neighborhood, an offer which Mike enthusiastically accepts. The neighborhood looks like a pleasant neighborhood in northern Jerusalem, while the rest of the city more closely resembles East Jerusalem, its buildings covered in Jerusalem stone and framed by scruffy pines.

“Brutha, how many wives you got?” Mike asks Khaled, overflowing with tact. Khaled has apparently heard the question before, and he’s got a witty answer ready. “Only one, and look what I have from her,” he responds, pointing to his balding pate.

As we get further into town, the landscape begins to look vaguely familiar. I was here once before, several years ago. The only landmark that I remember from that visit is the enormous Roman amphitheater in the city center. Not surprisingly, Khaled chooses that very spot to drop us off. On my way out of the cab, he hands me his business card, which is textured and gold embossed, and suggests that I call him on my way back to the airport in a few hours. Mike and I part ways, and I head up the street in search of something to eat.

The streets here are bustling, and the shop fronts are full of color. Arab women’s clothing, water pipes, all sorts of belts, canes and dark men’s suits, all of which contrast starkly with the monotonous grayness of the buildings. As I make my way up the streets, scents waft out from the storefronts: za’atar, coffee, falafel, cashews.

Traffic here is also lively, with seemingly endless traffic jams clogging up the streets, which for some reason lack painted lanes. The drivers, however, seem relatively calm, and there is none of the obnoxious beeping of Cairo or even Tel Aviv.

On the recommendation of a young man working in a hole-in-the-wall kiosk, I duck into a restaurant in a narrow alley off one of the main streets. This is the oldest and best restaurant in Amman, a large middle aged man tells me. He is seated across from the cash register, doling out orders to a staff of Egyptian waiters, but keeping an eye on the television in the corner of the restaurant, where Al Jazeera is broadcasting scenes of bombs falling in Gaza.

“Where are you from?” he asks me. I tell him I’m American. “We don’t hate the American people,” he tells me. “Only the government. Because they help Israel.”

Everyone with whom I exchanged more than two sentences in Amman wanted to let off steam about the war in Gaza. My being a foreigner, and an American at that, made me the perfect address. My girlfriend made me promise that I would pose as a Canadian while in Amman. I should have listened to her.

The man introduces himself as Ibrahim, and tells me his cousin is the owner of the place. The King eats here often, he goes on, pointing proudly to an extensive gallery of framed pictures on the wall. Outside, King Abdullah’s pictures are everywhere – the King smiling, the King in uniform, the King shaking hands with someone – and so are pictures of his wife.

As Ibrahim continues to chat me up, my food arrives. This is one of those places where there is only one choice on the menu. Falafel balls, hummus, foul, a large warm pita, hot tea and some chopped onions with mint leaves, all drenched in olive oil, lemon and garlic. Quite the feast actually, and I’m starved.

I only manage to enjoy a couple bites, however, before Ibrahim begins talking about the war in Gaza. “One thousand, two hundred and three.” He reads me the Palestinian body count, according to Al Jazeera. “You know, my cousin is from Gaza.” Really, I ask? “Yes, he was killed by an Israeli bomb last week.” I try not to choke on my bite of pita. “He had 23 kids, from one wife! Four of the boys are commandos, Hamas.”

As it turns out, Ibrahim is one of those people, and there are many, many of them, for whom the abstract politics of the Middle East has had very personal consequences. While his friends and relatives in Gaza were killed by Israeli bombs, his girlfriend of 10 years, as he calls her, a young German woman studying in Jerusalem, was killed by a Palestinian suicide attacker.

Ibrahim spends his summers working in Aqaba, he tells me, where he works with tourists, and that is how he met and fell in love with a tall, blond German woman. He even went to Germany, to meet her rich father. Losing her made him crazy, he says.

The conversation goes from heavy to light. Down in Aqaba, they call me Adonis, Ibrahim says, a nickname from an old romance with a Greek woman. I used to have so many adventures down there, before I became a good Muslim, he says with a wink. He invites me to stick around after I finish eating, but I’m no longer in the mood. I ask for my check, which comes out to 1.5 Dinars for the entire thing, about two dollars. “Expensive?” laughs Ibrahim, and wishes me the best.

My flight is still hours away, but it’s starting to get dark and chilly, so I head back to the Roman ruins hoping to find Mike and maybe share a cab with him back to the airport. But he’s not there, so I catch a cab by myself.

Thinking ahead, I had asked Khaled, how to say airport in Arabic. “Al matar,” I tell the driver. He seems to understand me, and we have even settled on a price when the driver suddenly dials someone up on his cell phone. “Here, English,” he tells me. The voice on the other end: “Hello. You are going to the airport?” Yes, I say. “Where are you from?” America. “What do you think about what happens in Gaza?” I’m not happy about it. “My cousin, the driver, wants 20 dinars.” Ok, I tell him.

This driver, R., apparently loves Americans. Despite speaking about as much English as I speak Arabic, he is dying to chat. He keeps saying something that sounds like “babzi, babzi.” After seeing the blank stare on my face, he pulls up beside a kiosk. “Babzi?” he says, making a drinking motion. I politely refuse, but he disappears into the kiosk and returns, all smiles, with two Pepsis and two chocolate bars in his hand. With any doubt, I think to myself, this is the first time a taxi driver has ever offered me refreshments for the ride.

In my honor, he finds a radio station playing American music, bland easy listening tunes, and looks back in the mirror for my reaction. I smile appreciatively. From what I manage to gather from our conversation in broken English and Arabic, he loves Americans because he served in the Jordanian army with American soldiers, or something like that. Then again, I probably misunderstood.

During the long ride, a woman repeatedly calls R.’s cell phone, each time drawing agitated yelling from R. The phone rings again. “Madame,” he tells me, indicating that it’s his wife again, and rolls his eyes.

Back at the airport, it seems the restrooms are constantly in a state of being cleaned. Next to every restroom I pass stands a guy patiently holding a mop. After someone walks in, soiling the perpetually wet floor, the guy goes over it again with the mop.

At the entrance to the flight gate, a small roadblock has been erected in front of the x-ray machine. Four young men sit on the other side, drinking coffee. What’s going on, I gesture to them, can I pass? No passage right now, say their gestures, sit down and wait, which I do.

Men napping in the airport while they wait for their flight.

I am gradually joined by more and more passengers, all chatting in Arabic. I keep hearing the word “Hamas.” Apparently here too the prime topic of conversation is the war in Gaza.

I wander over to a café advertising free wireless internet. On the newsstand, a Jordanian newspaper displays an Israeli flag and a Nazi flag, with an “=” between them. Below this image is the word “Holocaust.” On closer inspection, the image is actually a photo of a banner carried by someone in a protest against the war in Gaza, but the message is clear. The editorial page actually features a cartoon of a senior Israeli politician drinking blood, and here too Arabic news channels broadcast harrowing scenes from Gaza in an endless loop on the café’s televisions.

After another surprisingly short flight, I finally make it to my hotel room in the UAE at around 3:30 in the morning, local time. I immediately check the news channels to see what’s going on back in Israel, which now feels quite far away.

Unilateral ceasefire to begin in half hour, read the headline.