Night 13: The Amazing Race

Guys, guys, guys. Shebab, shebab, shebab*. I went Out. At night time, with a person not in my homestay family. Until the craaazy hour of 9:30PM. Whoa!

...Hey, I'm learning, m'kay?

Sarah and I went out last night to a semi-touristy market called Souk Jara, near Rainbow Street. Rainbow Street is a trendy spot in Amman, with a lot of stores selling jewelry, clothing, and lots and lots of food. The souk is technically open every day, but it's bigger and cooler on Fridays. Stalls go all the way down one street, filled with LOTS of jewelry, souvenirs like the popular bottles of sand, scarves, Spongebob backpacks, and artwork. Also food. Goooood food. We had some cheese and potato things that looked a little bit like wantons, but less squishy. I had a lot of juice. Kids were wandering around giving out free samples of juice, including watermelon juice (Sarah bought that one and I tried it,  it was tasty) and lemon mint juice, which is really popular here. I ended up ordering apple and kiwi juice, but was given strawberry and apple juice. Welcome to Jordan. In any case, it was extremely tasty and I can't wait to get more of the stuff--I was so sad when I had finished it! We also got ice cream, wandered around Rainbow Street, and found this cool rooftop hookah bar/cafe that had an excellent view of the city. The Citadel was all lit up in the background but I couldn't get a good picture since it was nighttime. Neither of us smokes, so we ended up ordering tea and juice. Sadly, the apple juice there was not as good as at the souk.

The end of Souk Jara.

In other news, we had a peer tutor activity today. This would have been more fun if it hadn't been Saturday, the last day of weekend here. I miss sleeping in. But it was a good "bonding activity" with our peer tutors. The peer tutors are University of Jordan students paired up with CIEE students to help us with our Arabic. We are all committed to three hours (or more) of tutoring a week. Today, our activity was The Amazing Race, Jordan style. The idea was to help us get to know the city better, specifically about transportation, and at the same time get to know our tutors. The latter was pretty successful, but the figuring out the city aspect of it was a fail. The race involved trekking around Amman, going to different locations to complete challenges, and moving onto the next stage of the race. The only rule was no taxis, and no private cars. We could use only the bus system (which I have talked about a bit here, so you should know that this is difficult), and service taxis. Service taxis are basically buses, but they're taxis... The taxi goes on a certain route and you can catch the cab, but he won't drive you to your destination unless its on his route.

Anyway, the morning started off with a giant gathering of multi-colored hats. The group that organized this event with CIEE had brought us brightly-colored, numbered caps that screamed "I AM A TOURIST, PLEASE STARE AND GAWK AT ME." Things that make me stand out make me uncomfortable, but I went with it. It helped that my hat was white. We were split up into groups of four (there were five or six different hat colors, but the teams were based on the numbers on our hats, not on the hat color); two CIEE students paired up with two UJ peer tutors. My peer tutor's name is Doaa (I am going to have trouble pronouncing that), and she's pretty nice, and understands that I speak zero Arabic. After we met our tutors, we were given a packet with instructions and a waiver saying that if we were mugged or assaulted during the race, it's our own fault and the organization running the event was not responsible. Great. Then, three kids showed up onstage (we were in a theater) to give us a demonstration on kite-making. Yup, kite-making was our first "challenge." The kids didn't speak during the presentation, they just stood up there and made a kite out of garbage bags and some sticks. When they were finished, each group was given their own kite-making kit and we were off. Kite-making is hard, guys, but we managed to get the kite done pretty quickly. It was a kind of a pretty kite, too. Our next task was to get to the Citadel and go fly the kite, which we were also pretty successful at. Here are some pictures:

The rest of the race didn't go so well. Figuring out the bus/service taxi system here is hard. Especially when your peer tutors figure it all out for you and don't explain what's going on. That's where the "fail" part of this activity came in. Both tutors in my group have excellent English, but they spoke primarily in Arabic (which was fair; we're supposed to be able to speak Arabic with them and the other CIEE student in my group is in the Advanced Arabic class), so after a certain point I stopped trying to help get us to our next location and just followed the person in front of me because it seemed faster. Even so, we came in almost dead last. Out of about 50 teams I think we might have been the 40th team to finish. I think this is in part due to the puzzle. We had to piece together a piece of artwork that was not cut very well and we had difficult with it. Also, we decided to take a bus to the last location and we had to wait 20 minutes for it to fill up.

I have class tomorrow, and I'm exhausted from this race, so I will be going to bed now. But here are some pictures of the train station where we had one of our most bizarre challenges. We had to find hidden stickers in this old train museum exhibit and then put the stickers in the right place on a map. The weird part about it was that even though most museums have "do not touch" signs, we went through this one picking things up, moving things out of place, standing on possibly really old chairs to look at high-up spaces, and generally messing the place up to look for these stickers. Funny, but weird:

Puzzle.

*Shebab=Guys.