my first day.

So my computer officially hates me. I had almost a page of blog typed and then Word froze and didn’t save any of it. So I’ll try my best to recapture some of what it was.

I actually got some sleep, woke up feeling very well rested, then died about 4 hours later. Jet lag is horrible, and right now I’m just fighting off the urge to nap so I can get a whole night’s rest in tonight as well. Other than that, today was excellent. We had to get up in time to get breakfast at 7 (way too early if you ask me) then we took tour buses around the city, heading first to the citadel (Jebel al-Qala’a) and I got a wonderful taste of Jordanian driving. Jordanian driving is an experience. A few rules:

1) There are no lanes. I mean, there are, they’re painted on the roads, but no one uses them. If you want to make your own lane, go on ahead because if you don’t, the guy in front of you will.

2) No one uses street names. Well, at least not the official ones. A couple of decades ago they instituted an official street name system, but everyone just goes by the famous landmark that’s along the road (i.e. King Abdullah al-Husayn or something-equally-ridiculous street becomes University street, since University of Jordan lies on that road)

3) If you are bigger and/or faster, you rule the road. Use horn as seen fit.

The citadel was amazing. It’s at the top of a hill, which gave a great view of the city. Amman consists of 7 hills, much like Cincinnati if the Cinci hills were closer together and on steroids. These hills are huge, and jam packed with housing. The citadel is one of the highest, if not the highest in the city, so you can see almost everything from on top. The ruins are a mixture of pre-Roman, Roman, Byzantine, and various dynasties of Muslim. Some parts were once a temple to Hercules, others were a church, and some were the palace of a former Abbasid or Umayyid prince. There was a museum as well, with artifacts from all over Jordan. The most recent artifacts it held came from the 1st century A.D. let me put this into perspective: you’re not allowed to take pictures of the gate to the royal palace or even the parking lot of the American Embassy, but I can take pictures of scraps of the dead sea scrolls. There were sarcophagi predating Jesus fenced in by a cheap metal chain a foot off the ground. They aren’t even behind glass, and are within easy arm’s length. I even got to see the copper scrolls, which were a new concept to me.

We passed by a starbucks and the Roman amphitheater, since the rain prevented us from going in.

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So I fell asleep mid post and I’m too lazy to go back and reread what I said, so I’ll just keep going. Fun story though: totally didn’t mean to fall asleep, in fact I was specifically trying not to, and then my roommate woke up me just after she did and we’re both so jet lagged we got really confused. It was awesome, you should’ve been there. Anyway.

I think the highlight of the day for me was lunch. We went to this restaurant called Jafra, which was filled with trendy, young Jordanians sitting around eating and smoking hookah. It was so fascinating to see how people my age socialize in Jordan; in some ways, it’s so similar, the way they all sit around and talk, laughing, enjoying each other’s company. But it was strange to see almost all the women wearing hijabs, and everyone was in fairly conservative dress. And while they were enjoying themselves, they weren’t very loud (unlike us, to be honest.) I think part of the reason why it seemed so out of the ordinary is that the conservative dress and the hijab is so rarely seen in America, and when it is, it’s usually an older woman and mother, not someone my own age. But it’s not uncommon here to see girls walking down the street in skinny jeans and wearing a hijab. I feel so out of place not wearing one, it makes me want to!

So back to the food. We were served baba ganoush (sp?), a sort of vegetable salad, REAL hummos (trust me, the stuff at home tastes pretty different), a few other salad/sauce type dishes to put with pita, and chicken, steak, and kebab. Oh, and little containers of “cloud water”, which provided my table mates and I with at least 10 minutes of solid discussion over whether cloud water was really just rain. For dessert we had this amazing dish, whose name I can’t remember, which was goat cheese in a sort of buttery, sugary crust with pistachios on top. Apparently it wasn’t that good because it wasn’t hot, but I thought it tasted amazing regardless.

We also had a fairly long cultural orientation session, which was very interesting and very important but very difficult for me to stay awake through. The best example the presenter had was the difference between an American Starbucks and a Jordanian Starbucks. For the record: it is a cultural norm for your Starbucks to take 10 minutes to be made because the worker who handles the money is on the phone and won’t hang up, and cultural hierarchy means that the guy making your coffee can’t take the money. Also, they almost never take plastic, because the internet here is so bad.

There’s not much else to add. I meet my host family on Thursday, and I think that they’re gonna be awesome. I really don’t like small children, but the little boy that they have is the CUTEST thing I have ever seen. And only the mom speaks English, so it’s gonna be an interesting semester. Thank goodness I have a roommate though, so we can struggle through this together (also, she loves children so I don’t have to worry about hanging out with the baby too much.) I’ve made friends here with almost everyone I’ve met – seriously, everyone in the program is just really genuine and laid back. I was talking with one the girls in my program in the elevator and she summed it up pretty succinctly: “you’d have to be pretty chill to be able to study in the Middle East.” So in other words, everything is off to a good start. I will hopefully be posting on a fairly regular (hopefully daily) basis, especially since my homestay has internet.

Beth

p.s. don’t worry about the political situation in Jordan. When my roommate and I woke up this afternoon she had like 3 emails about the Jordanian government dissolving. Considering the fact that no one told us during the day, and none of the citizens were talking about it (at least the ones that we ran into) it’s clearly not as big of a deal as everyone in America is making it out to be. Everyone is fine, and nothing’s gonna happen. If you guys found out about the government before anyone in my program did, take that as a good sign ☺