Jordan: Mikie the Anti-Hero

Last week, Mikie took me to a duty free alcohol shop whereupon he imposed a limit on how much I could buy so that he could buy exactly what he wanted; a bottle of whiskey. Subsequent to this, Mikey was fired after a whiskey fuelled argument and later rampage on the rooftop while preparing a barbecue for staff and guests. This made things a little awkward for me as I'd hired him for three days of driving and guiding around and out of Amman.

Somehow, he earned a reprieve the following day and took me to Jerash. Over the course of the day, his position at the hostel became virtually assured in the short term as the other two staff members walked out; Daniel the Spaniard just straight out disappeared while Halem cited family issues and gave two days notice.

Mikie is morally ambiguous and has a fine sense of unintentional dramatic irony; while decrying men who treat their spouses like shit and cheat on them, he paused mid sentence to cat call a white girl at a roundabout we were waiting at.

Understandably, she flipped us off.

This has since become a regular occurrence.

After failing to marry Halem off to me, he then insisted that I go with him to his sister's house to meet his niece, "long black hair, big dark eyes, the most beautiful girl in Jordan... And a virgin too!" It was important to him that I have a family in Jordan and so we went to their house with barbecue meats for all and a bottle of liquor for his nephew, something that Mikie's sister expressly forbids.

On the one hand there is a flourish of goodwill, meanwhile the other is taking potshots at his feet.

His nephew, no doubt a future Rhodes scholar, necks the bottle in one go - with some rapidity too - and so begins a ticking time bomb.

We excused ourselves as his nephew's symptoms went from hiccuping to dry wretching, all a beautiful prelude to a date with a bucket or your head in the toilet.

Mikie the antihero; morally ambiguous to chaotic, self sabotaging, generous to a fault and very peculiar.