Night 55: In Which I Accidentally Go Biking Through the Desert

Okay, so maybe the "In Which I Accidentally" posts are getting a little old, especially since I'm not really using that word correctly. But I meant to go to Ajloun today but actually ended up going on a bike trip through the desert. That's an accident, right?

I can just hear Inigo Montoya in the background saying "I do not think that means what you think it means."

In any case. My day was pretty awesome. It began with me holding the door open for Batman. Or, a five year old version of Batman anyway. A tiny little Jordanian boy left my building with me this morning dressed up as Batman and carrying a Spiderman lunchbox (Christian schools here have school on Saturdays). He ran to his bus shouting "Yom Halloween!" Cutest ever.

My plan for today was to go to the University at early o'clock to get on the bus to Ajloun and go paint a school all morning, then hike to an archaeological site on what is supposed to be one of the best hikes in Jordan. I'll have to find out whether or not that's true after the Eid break though, 'cause we did not go to Ajloun today. Since only two of us showed up for Ajloun (myself and my friend Elizabeth), the trip was postponed. However, at the same time, a bunch of other CIEE kids were straggling into the University to meet up for one of CIEE's mini-trips, the Desert Castle trip. At that point, Ahmed pulled Elizabeth and I aside and told us that the Ajloun trip would happen after Eid, but that since we are (and I quote) the best CIEE students for showing up for Ajloun when no one else did, we got to go on the Desert Castles trip as well! We also got some free Ajloun postcards.

Now, some of you may remember that I really wanted to do the Desert Castles trip, but decided to go on the Biblical Jordan trip instead. Man, am I glad I did 'cause I got to do both! The trip consisted of a bus trip out to the desert, where we saw two pretty fantastic castles, then a lot of biking, and a trip to a marshland. First off, the castles. The first castle we reached was called Kharaneh, and was pretty excellent for climbing around in, and there were lots of nooks and crannies to explore:

The second one was a castle with a giant well and a water pump and an old reception hall that is currently being restored. There was a lot of scaffolding, which diminished some of the cool factor, but also added to it. When I was younger, I remember reading books and watching movies about the kinds of archaeologists that restore historical sites like this one and I thought it would be the coolest job ever. I've since taken an archaeology class and changed my mind, but still. The people restoring this castle have pretty excellent jobs and I took quite a few pictures of them:

Ignore the strange man I don't know in the photo. 

Empty well!

Restoring the awesome frescoes. 

Ceiling fresco. 

After that we went biking through the desert! I'm not sure what desert, or if the desert has a name. But it was pretty flat and dead and looked quite a bit like South Dakota. It was still really cool though, if a little rocky and hard to bike on. We biked about 25 kilometers (15-ish miles) through the dust and sand and rocks. We saw giant camels (twice as big at least as the camels we rode in Wadi Rum), one of which I thought was a statue like  those big plastic buffaloes or cows you see near gas stations in the Midwest. But no, it was just a giant camel. We also came within about 100 miles of Iraq, so that was pretty cool.

Nothing funnier than a Bedouin man trying to get cell service with a herd of camels in tow. (No joke, that's what he was doing). 

The trip was cut a little short due to ALL the studying, but we made on last stop at the Azraq wetlands. It's a desert oasis/marshland that has a number of endangered species, as well as some water buffalo (the water buffalo were the only animals we saw). It turns out that not only did Jordan previously have awesome animals like rhinos, elephants, and cheetahs, but the country used to have a whole lot more water, too. The elephants and rhinos and cheetahs have been gone for a long time, but only 20 years ago we would have been neck-deep in water on the paths we were walking on. It was a little sad. But the water buffalo were cool, and the watery-marshiness felt like home.

And now I'm tired. My butt hurts like none other and I have a midterm to take tomorrow. Momkin (maybe) a smart person would have stayed home to study today, but this day was totally worth the potential lost points on that test. Still, studying and sleeping time!

Night 54: Oh, We're Halfway There! ... Whoahhhh, Livin' on a Prayer!

I've had Bon Jovi stuck in my head since we were halfway to Petra almost a month ago. I blame Elizabeth.

Yeah, so I'm halfway done with the semester. Halfway to home and Christmas and my own bed and unlimited internet that doesn't conk out on me every other day and ENGLISH.

I'm excited. Can you tell?

Yeah, other than being excited about being at the halfway point, not much is going on here. Maybe that's why this halfway thing is so exciting. I knew October was going to be long, but I didn't know it was going to have so many un-blog-worthy days. Most of my time in the past couple of weeks has been spent in class, studying, reading, and watching TV with Lara and Janet. Also Skyping when my internet is working. It's been a homesick-filled month. BUT things are going to get exciting really quickly. Even though I have midterms this week, and I have my hardest exam on Sunday (3-hour MSA exam, blech), I'm going to Ajloun to go hiking tomorrow. We'll also be painting classrooms in the school with REAL paint. Woooo. Also, I'm going to Istanbul next week for a solid seven days! I am pumped, and I'm sure there'll be a ton of great stuff to post in November (not to mention pictures)!

Also, as most of you probably know, there was a pretty bad (7.2) earthquake in Eastern Turkey this week. This is not going to effect my trip, as the quake was hundreds of miles away from Istanbul. It was a pretty devastating earthquake though; I don't even want to talk about how many people died (fortunately it was during the day, so people weren't in bed sleeping). And I feel strange about being a tourist in a country that's receiving aid without doing something about the fact that there was a natural disaster in the area. So if any of you feel like donating/have enough money for that kind of thing (trust me, I know how guilt-making it is to see a link to donate to a good cause when you have next to no money in your bank account, so no pressure), here is a link to the GlobalGiving Turkey Earthquake Relief Fund: http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/turkey-earthquake-relief-and-recovery-fund/.
Here is a link on statistics and updated info on what's going on in the area, as well: http://earthquake-report.com/2011/10/23/very-strong-dangerous-earthquake-in-eastern-turkey/.

Night 48

I was going to go to Ajloun today to pick olives, but instead I mistakenly hit the "off" button on my alarm instead of the "snooze" button this morning, so I slept until 10 instead. With this extra time I read my book and did some homework, woohoo:

Yay, Arabic!

Yeah, that's kind of what my whole next two weeks looks like. We've got midterms coming up and while I am not at all worried about my area studies midterms (two tests, both with only one essay question), I am worried about the Arabic. I have two 3-hour Arabic exams, guys. Yeah. So next weekend will also not be filled with cool Ajloun pictures or other things. It will be filled with studying. But in less than two weeks I'll be in Istanbul! 

Night 44: In Which I (sort of) Accidentally Become a Resident of Jordan.

That title makes it sound so much more interesting than it actually was.

So I'll explain. Since Jordan doesn't have a student visa for foreigners studying abroad, CIEE students get a multiple entry visa upon arrival. The multiple entry visa works such that ~30 days after we entered the country, all CIEE students had to renew their visas and get our fingerprints taken with weird ink that was hard to get off, blah blah blah. About a week after that, we were done. Or so I thought. Most semester-long students (like myself) didn't have to do anything further with their visas; our visas are good for 90 days unless we leave the country. If we leave the country, then when we come back into Jordan, we have 30 days to renew the visa again, or pay a fine. But year-long students have to get residency in Jordan, or renew their visas two or three more times, which would be a major hassle. I decided to skip residency because there was a possibility that CIEE wouldn't be able to get our passports back to us in time for the Eid break. I'm going to Istanbul for break, so I wanted to be sure I'd have my passport.
Ha. It turns out that I was supposed to sign a form and stuff in order to skip the residency process, which I did not do because I did not properly read the email. So I got an email yesterday reminding me I had to go take a blood test for residency. I was confused at first, but me being me I just went along with it. Got my blood drawn and they have to do something more with my passport, but in about a week I should be a resident of Jordan (until my residency expires, one year from now).

Yeah, that was a lot duller than the title made it sound, huh? But that's kinda been my week. My Arabic class got moved forward an hour (it's at 9:00 now, instead of 8:00. And on Mondays and Wednesdays, it's at 9:30), which was basically the highlight of my week. I also tried shawarma for the first time today, it was tasty.

One more thing (although this will only make sense to a few of you): I figured out the perfect way to describe Amman traffic: Imagine my Dad driving in Amman. Multiply it by approximately one million drivers. There's Amman traffic for you. ... Love you, Dad!

Night 41: Jesus Lost His Sandals Approximately... Here!

So I came within about 15 feet of Israel today.

Let's back up a bit and address the "Frustration" blog post. I'm feeling (mostly) better now, guys. I really do love Jordan and today was a pretty good day to remind me of why it's so great. Except the taxi ride home (I TOLD the cab driver, in Arabic, that he was going the wrong way but he wouldn't listen so I had to walk a ways). I still hate the transportation system here and that will likely never change. But the scenery and the history here is so worth the hassle of transportation, and the people (not including the men that stare at American girls) are pretty fantastic.

Anyway. Up until yesterday, my week was kind of uneventful. But I went out shopping with some girlfriends yesterday, which was a pretty great way to start my weekend. We went downtown (which is awesome when you're there deliberately and with a bunch of other people) where everything is pretty cheap and there are things to buy everywhere. Oh man, guys did I spend a lot of money this weekend. After shopping and walking downtown for a solid three or four hours, we went to Hashem's for dinner. Hashem's is a local place that has become somewhat famous due to the fact that King Abdullah once (allegedly) ate there. It's pretty tasty and has all the standard food (ful, falafel, meza...) and it's pretty cheap, so I liked it. My friend Elizabeth got her third marriage proposal at dinner; our waiter offered us five camels for her. I'm not even kidding.

Today, about twenty of us went on one of CIEE's trips called "Biblical Jordan." Besides the Dana/Wadi Rum/Petra trip, CIEE also has smaller day trips that we signed up for at the beginning of the semester. At the time, I thought Biblical Jordan would be a good one because it was something I wouldn't be able to do on my own, and I had friends that were going. I'm glad I went, but it was a little awkward at times. Most of my friends on the trip are Christians, and I'm distinctly not. I'm just a history nerd interested in religious history. It was a good trip, though. It was a great reminder that we are in a country that is really, really old. You don't get much of a sense of it in Amman because it's a very industrial city that has a had a giant technology boom and population explosion in the last ten or so years, so it just feels like a big city. But Jordan is ancient--the culture and the tribal system here has existed for thousands of years.

To be more specific, today we went to four biblically significant sites: Mukawir, Madaba, Mount Nebo, and Bethany beyond Jordan.

Mukawir: We climbed a giant hill/mountain in order to get to Herod the Great's fortress, where his son ordered the beheading of John the Baptist. It was a hard trek, but we saw some cool caves and the ruins of Herod's fortress:

 Big steep mountain/hill. 

 Cave, in which I realized the awesomeness of being short.

Herod's Fortress itself. 

Next we headed to Madaba for a trip to a Greek Orthodox church and lunch. The church was pretty nifty, and very decked out in gold and mosaics. Apparently Madaba is the city of mosaics here in Jordan--everything is covered in mosaics, and we even visited a workshop where they make a whole bunch of mosaics. The church itself had an incredible mosaic map on the floor, although it's been mostly destroyed by earthquakes. It's about 1500 years old and it's one of the oldest (if not the oldest) map of the area in existence:

 The inside of the church; I thought the arches were really cool.

Remains of the mosaic map. 

We went to lunch in Madaba at what is apparently the "best restaurant in Jordan." I don't know if I'd call it the best, but it was definitely really good. Since I forgot to take pictures of our ridiculously epic lunch on Day 1, I took pictures today to show you guys just what going out to lunch at a fancy restaurant means here. This is a picture of the appetizer course: 

Yeah. This included salad, bread, a lot of veggies, cheeses, hummus, baba ganoush, some sauce thing I didn't recognize, and possibly chicken wings that I didn't eat for fear of being full when the real lunch came around. I've learned a thing or two since Day 1. Then, the real meal (we actually asked our waiter if it was the main course just to be sure): 

After we all took bread... : 

Yum, yum. 

After lunch we headed to Mount Nebo, where Moses died and possibly was buried. It was pretty neat, but we didn't spend much time there. It was beautiful though, and basically when I think of an image of Old Testament days, the views at Mount Nebo are what I think of. Also, there was an excellent view at the top where we could see Israel off in the distance: 

Last, but definitely not least, we went to Bethany beyond Jordan, the site where John the Baptist baptized Jesus, kickstarting his career as a Prophet. It took us forever to get in because Bethany beyond Jordan is right at the border between Jordan and Israel, so there are a lot of guards that didn't really want us there, but we got in anyway. They like to keep the area controlled, so they only let a few tourist groups in at a time. We saw what remains of the Jordan River here: 

Where did all the water go, you ask? To Israel. I might post more on that later... To be fair, this is the dryest part of the "river"--there was another bit that might just qualify as a stream. Seeing this was just an obvious reminder of why we can't throw toilet paper in the toilet here (we use trash bins), why all of our water is bottled, and showers are few and far between. Jordan is the land of no water. Further along the path, we got to the official site of the baptism, and right across the river from us was Israel: 

I was literally 15 feet away from Israel, guys. There were people on the other side that we talked to and waved to. It was bizarre. There was a river rat swimming in the river in front of us, eating reeds from the Israeli side of the river, and then he swam over to our side and started eating reeds from the Jordanian side. I thought that was pretty cool. I wish I could have swum to the other side without getting shot by soldiers on both sides of the border...

Also, side note because I don't have anything else to end with and blog endings are awkward--does anyone else think that this guy looks like a velociraptor? : 

Night 37: "Frustration" Stage, Reached.

So... you remember when I said I thought the "stages of study abroad" thing was bullshit? I may want to retract that statement.

Note: I have (for the most part) been avoiding "foul" language in this blog up until now because I know that young people and parental figures are reading it. That is not the case in this post--swearing is an excellent way to get across my frustration right now and I'm going to use quite a lot of it (particularly when it comes to the transportation system), because I am quite frustrated. You've been warned.

Remember, the "Frustration" stage predicts that "You might reject your new environment and begin to have a lack of interest in your new surroundings." This is pretty much exactly how I'm feeling right now. I think I remember reading something about feeling resentment during this stage as well. "Resentful" sounds about right. At the moment, I think that Jordanians are stupid, the Jordanian way of doing things is stupid, Jordanian transportation is REALLY fucking stupid (multiplied by about a million), my professors are stupid, and Arabic is stupid (possibly because Arabic makes me feel stupid). I know that these things aren't actually true--except the transportation thing, that's true--but it's how I feel right now.  Let me elaborate by telling you all how my last three days have gone.

Sunday. It was the first day of the week and I had three hours of Arabic, and then another hour of Arabic with my peer tutor. Sundays are always hard, but this one made me especially cranky. There was no real reason for it, other than that I'm feeling like I'm falling behind in Arabic because Muna is determined to get through 10 chapters of al-Kitaab (our Arabic textbook) this semester and that is just too fast for me. There are 13 other students in the class though, and all of them are totally on board with getting through as much of the book as possible. Personally, I'd rather fully understand six or seven chapters than get through ten and only kinda understand what's going on. But that's how it is.

This is a good time to explain an observation that I've made: Jordanians are incredibly impatient. This is not a stereotype, it's something that I've witnessed consistently over the last month. You can see it in the way Jordanians teach, the way they talk, the way they provide goods and services, the way they drive... everything. Muna is relatively patient in comparison to my other professors. Both of my Area Studies professors claim to be interested in our opinions and comments, but if someone takes too long to formulate an answer to a question, they'll just answer it for us. If someone doesn't get something, the professor will be like "It's this, of course, why don't you understand?" I've described the situation here with lines--how Jordanians just ignore lines and the rule is whoever gets to the counter first gets what they want, even if it means budging people who have been waiting in line for ten minutes. It's a frustrating system. On the same note, there's no "service with a smile" here. At times, I kind of like that. I've worked retail and food services, I totally understand when the cashier/salesperson/whoever doesn't feel like smiling because hey, they're getting paid to give me a cup of coffee, not to make me feel good. But Sunday was just one of those days where I could have used a fake smile and an excessively perky "Have a nice day!" even if the person behind the pretend-happy face was thinking "Go die in a fire."

Then I talked to Sam and I felt a little bit better.

Monday. I only have an hour and a half of Arabic on Mondays and I have almost five hours between Arabic and my Area Studies classes, so Mondays are usually okay. They're like Tuesdays at home--it's too early in the week to be stressed out and looking forward to the weekend, but it's not the first day after the weekend either. That was mostly how my Monday went. Except for my Conflicts in the Middle East professor being the most tangential person on the frakking planet. I paid attention for about 90% of the class and I still couldn't tell you what the fuck we talked about. I can tell you  that we were supposed to be talking about the Arab/Israeli conflict and the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), but instead we talked about the Syrian uprising, gas prices, and Steve Jobs. To use a phrase of Sam's: "What the fuckitty fuck?" To make it stranger, the professor thought it was interesting that Steve Jobs' dad was Syrian, and actually said "Isn't it wonderful that Americans are so accepting?" I shit you not. He thinks that because Americans love Steve Jobs, who is apparently Syrian (but I can guarantee you that very few Americans are aware of this), clearly we're super accepting of other ethnicities. I don't even... Still, I was able to be mostly good-humored about this through the afternoon. As long as I give up on the idea of actually learning anything concrete and objective about conflicts in the Middle East in this class, it's actually kind of amusing. So my Monday morning/afternoon wasn't great, but I was feeling okay. That is, until I took the bus home.

I take the same two buses home from the university every single day. I either take the 52 bus or the 252 bus. I prefer the 252 because it seems to be a sort of express bus and it gets me home faster. Sometimes the 252 bus isn't at the bus stop when I get there, but the 52 is, so I take the 52. They both take the same bus route. I know this route VERY well because again, I take the bus home from school EVERY day. On Monday, the 252 was nowhere to be seen, just the 52. I wanted to get home early, but I didn't feel like waiting around, so I got on the 52. I really, really wish I had waited for the other bus. There was really heavy traffic that day and it took us about half an hour to get to a point that usually only takes about ten or fifteen minutes. The bus driver got frustrated by the traffic, so instead of waiting in it, he decided to try to get around it. Buses aren't supposed to do this. I do not care how bad the traffic is, what country you're in, whatever. A bus is supposed to follow the goddamned route. I've come to expect the buses to be late, and to not necessarily stop when they're supposed to. But for the bus to go off on an entirely different route? No. Not allowed. But this ass-hat of a bus driver went and did it. At first it just seemed like the bus would go around a little bit of traffic and get back on track, so I wasn't too worried. Especially when it turned toward my neighborhood. I was prepared to get off at a familiar landmark since it obviously wasn't going to stop at the normal spot. But I never saw a familiar landmark. The bus just kept going. And going. And going. It went downtown, guys. Downtown is a kind of sketchy, very conservative part of Amman. All of the CIEE students live in West Amman, the trendy, relatively liberal part of Amman where you find shopping malls and KFCs and McDonald's on pretty much every street corner. Downtown is in East Amman, which is nice in its own way because it has a ton of pretty awesome markets and it's where most of the important historical sites (the Roman amphitheater, the Citadel, etc) are. But it's also the poorer, sketchier, more conservative part of town and it's not recommended for a woman to be there by herself at night. But that's exactly where I, a woman, was at night, because of this stupid bus. Once the bus had been weaving around  downtown traffic for ten or so minutes, I got fed up and got off. I don't know if this was the right decision or not, but it wasn't a pleasant experience. It was dusk when I got off the bus and it was nearly dark when I finally found a cab. During the fifteen or so minutes it took me to find the cab, many male drivers seemed to think it would be funny to honk and "flirt" with me in English ("How are youuuuu?") I didn't get home until over an hour after I had left the University and I was upset and frustrated and generally just pissed off with this country.

Then I talked to Sam and I felt a little better.

Today, Tuesday. I stupidly got into a cab that was going in the opposite direction of the University today. It didn't take him very long to turn around, but he ended up going the extremely trafficky way, and much like the ass-hat bus driver from yesterday, he got annoyed with the traffic. So we took a tour of what may have been every single back alley in all of West Amman. About halfway through the drive, the taxi driver put his seat belt on. This made me nervous, because no one wears their seatbelt here. He started driving very fast, which in turn made me very carsick. Furthermore, he overcharged me for the long, circuitous, carsick-inducing ride. This did not help my mood.

Herein lies my reason for blogging during the day rather  than tonight;  I'm hoping that blogging will make me feel better.

I never expected to be the kind of of person that would get this frustrated by a foreign country. Only stupid, ill-educated, hick Americans do that, right? Also, I'm a pretty laid back, chill person, and I'm not particularly attached to the "American way." Except apparently I am. So now I'm sitting in a coffee shop that plays Indie music and the employees speak English, eating a chocolate croissant and I think I'm going to have a cheeseburger for lunch. Hopefully, I will get over this "I miss the States" funk soon, because it's making me feel ishy and even more frustrated.

...Yeah, that's it guys. This is not a "Jordan is frustrating and Arabic is hard but I like this, this, and this about it so it's all okay". Not really feeling that way right now.

Edit: At lunch a 25-30 year old Jordanian man was staring at me through the window. I gave him a full-on evil glare because I was not in the mood for that shit. He pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and started writing something, and I was just about to get up and tell him off (and by that I probably mean get up and leave because have I mentioned I'm shy?), but he put the note up to the window and it said "I'm sorry." That made me feel better. I thought about writing a note back saying "Thank you," but in this culture that might have been interpreted as "Please sleep with me," so I didn't.

Night 34: The Day of Sleep + Ajloun

I got 11 hours of sleep yesterday. It was glorious. Fridays here are for sleeping, Ahmed (and many others) calls it "The Day of Sleep"; this is something that I can definitely get on board with. Unfortunately, Fridays are also for homework. :P So I got a lot of homework done yesterday and then went to Lara's first basketball game of the season. Her team won against Aqaba, 91-11. Ouch, Aqaba. I couldn't tell if Lara's team was really good, or if the Aqaba team was just really bad. They didn't even make one basket before the second half. Janet and I felt so bad for their team that we started cheering them on and clapping whenever they did manage to make a basket.

But on to the more eventful part of my weekend. This year, for the first time, CIEE is working with an NGO (non-governmental organization) called Ideal to help fix a school in Ajloun (up north, about an hour and a half from Amman) called Usuraya. Pretty much every Saturday, CIEE is sending students up to Ajloun to help fix the elementary school (they'll be working on the high school next semester), which is in pretty shitty condition. I went for the first time today, and it was a pretty good trip overall, if somewhat frustrating.

Since I didn't go the first time two weeks ago, I'm not sure what it looked like before today, but it's not great. It's pretty dirty and sparse, and the tiny chairs are awful, and there are only four or five per classroom, with one or two tables for the kids. The schools I worked in in Guatemala five years ago were actually worse, but not significantly. FYI, the literacy rate in Jordan (according to the CIA World Factbook) is about 90%. Based on my observations while I've been here, I'd be willing to guess that most, if not all, children attend elementary school and high school in Amman. However, I think that significantly fewer kids attend school in the rural areas of Jordan, like Ajloun. The idea in fixing up this school is to make it more attractive to the kids in the area. At the moment, they ditch school basically because it's dirty and there's no where to sit.

This is the outside of the school.

 One of the classrooms.

We split into three different groups this morning (had to leave Amman at 7:15, by the way, not cool), two for painting and one for planting trees. I was in the painting group, naturally. Yes, yes I did get paint all over my pants, go figure. My group was put in charge of painting hallways and classrooms inside of the school. This is where my day got frustrating. I hate saying this, but Jordanians have a tendency to be impatient and disorganized. This isn't always the case, mind you, but it's often the case and it really showed today. The phrase "slap some paint on it" is really applicable here. The people helping us seemed to be more concerned about the amount of wall space we covered than they were with how the walls looked. For example, I was halfway done with one wall when one of the workers came up to me and said "Kowayyes, hallas" (basicallly, "It's good, stop"), and then he instructed me to move to a different wall. So we got a lot of walls done today, but some are really shoddily painted, or only actually half-done. Also, the paint we were using was not the best, I'm not even sure what it was made out of, other than water. It was really watery paint. I was also given a duster at first to paint with, which didn't really work considering the bristles were made out of plastic. I got a roller eventually, and that made things a little better. 

We also only worked at the school for momkin (maybe) three hours. Not enough to make a significant difference on the school at all. I know we're going to come back here multiple times, but I wish we could have stayed for longer and actually gotten something accomplished. With the Ajloun project, I feel a little bit like I'm volunteering so I can put a brush in my hand, take a picture, and feel like I'm doing something good. But volunteering isn't supposed to be about me, it's about making this school a better place for the students. So it's frustrating when we spend three hours in a place, slap some paint on the walls, and call it a day. I don't know, I'll definitely be going back to Ajloun, so maybe it'll get better once we get more paint on the walls. 

But wait, if we only worked at the school for three hours, what did we do with the rest of our day? Had a fantastic lunch at a local family's house, visited the local Calligraphy House, and went to a (real this time) wedding, that's what. The house we ate at was gorgeous, as was the food: 

 A real garden! Not much of these in Jordan due to water shortage.

 The school bus we took from Amman to Ajloun; also an olive grove.

I should really start taking more pictures of food here; it's all super delicious.

After lunch we went to the Calligraphy House, an organization sponsored by the EU, run by women. The Calligraphy House makes silk-screen T-shirts with Arabic calligraphy and designs on them, and other than that basically seems to exist to teach tourists a little bit about Arabic letters and calligraphy. We were given some ink pots and a pen to write our names with, walked through the gift shop, ate some figs, and then we left. 

Writing our names in Arabic. 

Also, note: Ajloun also has a place called Biscuit House. Inshallah, we will go there at some point, because by "biscuit," they mean "cookie." Cookie House. Oh man. 

After the brief stop at Calligraphy House, we went to a wedding! Sort of. It was more like the pre-party to a wedding. In the rural parts of Jordan, weddings take a long time, and there is often a celebration/gathering beforehand where people dance and talk and party. These parties are gender-segregated, so we were in a tent filled with women and young girls, dancing and clapping and singing.

Wedding party tent. 

 Usually, the rest of the ceremony includes driving around the village with the bride and groom, basically announcing their marriage to the village. We were going to participate in this, but the bride was taking a really long  time to get ready, so we had to leave before it got too late. However, we got to dance and some women got out some henna and henna-ed some of us. The girl, Khadija, henna-ing my hands kept asking me what design I wanted (I think), but my Arabic only goes so far as "Mabaref, asafeh" (I don't know, I'm sorry). The only things I could understand were "sho ismik" (what is your name?)  and "meem" (the letter M). I told her my name is Meg, so she henna-ed two giant Ms on the insides of my hands: 

Back at home now, sleepy, and going to go to bed. It is 9:30. Glorious.

Night 32: Classes and my Cannibalistic Arabic Professor.

Okay, so it's kind of difficult (nigh impossible) to outdo my last post, so I'm not even going to try. This post is going to be about UJ classes, both Arabic and Area Studies, so I apologize in advance for the boring.
This week I realized that I am learning two languages here, not one. I'm learning Modern Standard Arabic as well as the colloquial Jordanian Arabic. They're pretty similar, but often very, very different. Sometimes the difference between the two is just a matter of dropping a letter (Coffee in MSA is "qawha," while in colloquial it's "ahwa"). Sometimes, however, they're two different languages entirely. It can get frustrating, especially since for the first couple of weeks of Arabic classes, there wasn't a great distinction between which vocab words were MSA and which were colloquial. Until today, I thought the colloquial way of saying "beautiful" was "jameel," but no, that's MSA. Colloquial is "helu" (sort of, it's kind of hard to transliterate).

Other than the fact that I'm learning two languages, Arabic is... well, it's hard. Also my Arabic professor, Muna, is a cannibal. She said so herself ("I put you in my stomach and you can say 'bye bye America'!"). Today we were supposed to write sentences in Arabic using new vocab-- my question was "Why did Muna eat the student?" (لمذا منى اكلت الطالب) Her answer: "Mmm... Zaki" (Zaki=delicious). So, yeah--if I don't come back to the States in December, it's because I failed Arabic and Muna ate me. I'm doing fine for now, but I've never been very good at languages... it kind of feels like math. I'm definitely using the same part of my brain for Arabic as I do for math in any case, and it's a very underused part of my brain, so I'm pretty exhausted. Can I just write a research paper on immigration in the Middle East or something? Or a project, a presentation, anything?

The answer to that question is sadly, no. *sigh* My Arabic classes may be difficult, but that's in a (mostly) good way. Muna is tough, and I'm learning a lot in her class, which is great. Unfortunately, not really the case in my Area Studies classes. I mean, I'm learning about what Jordanian professors think about conspiracy theories, Saddam Hussein, and Saudis... that's something, right? But I'm learning about their opinions, and while that's very interesting from an "I am observing this culture" standpoint, it's frustrating from an academic standpoint. Also, these are the opinions of highly educated, fairly liberal university professors. Not exactly an adequate representation of the average Jordanian. It means that neither of my Area Studies classes are particularly challenging--each only requires one paper. We also have two tests per class, and I do hate tests, but still.

Let me elaborate a little bit by discussing each class separately. Besides MSA five times a week and colloquial twice a week, I also have two "Area Studies," classes. Both are Political Science courses, although I'm pretty sure that Political Islam would be classified as a Religious Studies course at Beloit. My first PoliSci class is Conflicts on the Middle East. I've mentioned before that this class did not seem promising. It's difficult to take the professor seriously, because he frequently goes off on tangents and he likes to talk about conspiracy theories. It's difficult to interpret whether or not he likes to talk about them because he thinks they're legitimate ideas, or because he thinks they're funny. Also, on Monday he told us he thought Saddam Hussein wasn't a terrible leader, just a bad guy. He also genuinely did not seem to think that Iraq invading Kuwait was such a big deal, and didn't think that it made sense for the U.S. to get involved during the first* Gulf War.

My second class is Political Islam. At first, this class seemed like it was going to be a good one. The syllabus included a lot of good readings, the professor seemed to be interested in what we had to say... then classes really started and I was proven very, very wrong. Yes, the readings on the syllabus are good, but when we get to class, the professor lectures about the readings due that day and frequently quotes them verbatim. At the end of the lecture he asks us if we have any questions or comments. That's it. It's not nearly as discussion-based as I'm used to, and that's difficult for me. Also, this professor is aggressively secular. Yeah, you read that right. He's an aggressive atheist. I have never gotten a more pro-democracy, pro-Western, pro-capitalism vibe off of a professor. It took studying abroad in the Middle East to find a professor that thinks democracy is the obvious answer to the world's problems and secularism is the bees knees. To be fair to this guy, he is clearly embarrassed by the world's perception of Arabs as crazy "fundamentalist" Muslims that hate all things Western. He seems to want to set the record straight that most Arabs are "normal" people that like America and drink and watch television. However, yesterday he made fun of Saudi Muslims that drank wine with him in the States, only to return to Saudi Arabia and revert back to calling drinking alcohol haram (un-Islamic. Which it is). It kinda made my skin crawl. It's really difficult to describe, but this professor is discussing Islam and "Islamic fundamentalism" in a way that Natalie made me feel really uncomfortable with last year in Secularism and Fundamentalism. It's a difficult subject. I feel ishy when a professor laughs at the seemingly backwards and hypocritical ways of Saudi Muslims (I specify Saudi here because his opinion of these men has as much to do with politics and the way Jordanians feel about Saudis as it has to do with religion and how secularists view Muslims), but I also feel ishy about women not being allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. Where do we draw the line between cultural understanding** and just being wrong?


... Okay. That got serious in a hurry. Here, have another adorable camel picture!

Habibi Shilou.

*Here in the Middle East, what the United States calls the first Gulf War (1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait) is actually referred to as the second Gulf War. The first was the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s. The third is the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
**By cultural understanding, I do not mean cultural relativism. Cultural relativism also makes me feel kinda ishy. I just mean having an appreciation that we, the relatively secular West are not always "right" and "secularism" is not always synonymous with "progress." Similar to cultural relativism, but different.

Yalla, Let's Go On An Adventure! Otherwise known as My Weekend Was Better Than Your Weekend.

So, this weekend...
Did you explore a nature reserve covered in very, very climbable rocks?
Did you climb these rocks and caves as though they were a playground?
Did you ride a camel and sleep in tents in the desert beneath the stars?
Did you watch and participate in a faux Bedouin wedding?
Did you see one of the new Seven Wonders of the world?

No? I thought not. But I did!

Okay. I'm done with the blatant and obnoxious bragging. Probably. Now on to the ever so slightly more subtle bragging. I will start with a picture:

This is the Dana Nature Reserve, as seen from the top of a cliff. Dana was the first spot we visited on our "Southern Triangle Trip," or (courtesy of Jill) the "Southern Rhombus Trip," considering we went to four places, not three. Okay, now I'm going to attempt to go chronologically.
We left Amman on Friday afternoon and took a bus for four hours to the Dana nature reserve. None of us really knew what Dana was, so we were kinda un-enthused about the day and were really just looking forward to Wadi Rum on Saturday. Boy were we ever wrong. Dana was possibly the best part of the trip, actually... well, better than Petra anyway, but maybe not better than Wadi Rum. Dana is an eco-reserve with nature hikes and supposedly endangered animals, but we didn't see any. We had to hike down about a mile from the parking lot to the camp smack in the middle of absolutely gorgeous mountains and canyons:

Once we got to the camp, we got to go hiking. Most people headed for the shorter trail that had some foresty bits, but me and some other people walked back the way we had come toward some caves. Oh man was this a good decision. The trail was a little scary and I almost fell down a cliff, but it was totally worth it. Once we got to the caves, we got to climb around and play in them. The only way to describe their awesomeness is with pictures:

Later that night I climbed a giant rock that was so easy to scramble up that I didn't think about getting down until halfway up. Oops. Getting down was a lot harder than getting up and I scratched up my hands a bit, but it was still pretty awesome. After that, we were supposed to have dinner, but it was about an hour late due to--according to a program leader not to be named--"lazy bastards." In any case, the food was delicious when it did come. Most of us stayed in tents that night, but a few people stayed in a hotel a few miles away. No one really wanted to stay in the hotel, but since Dana is an eco-reserve, only 70 people could stay the night, so the program coordinators majorly pimped that hotel ("You can smoke shisha there, you can't do that at the camp!").

On to Day 2! Woke up early to head to Shobak Castle and Wadi Rum. Shobak Castle is one of the largest castles in Jordan and its so imposing that it has never been taken by invaders, but we weren't told that much about it beyond that. It's basically a typical castle ruin, with some awesome arches and turrets and tiny windows for archers. It was pretty neat, but we only spent about half an hour there because we were running late.

Anyway, Wadi Rum. Wadi Rum can be described as nothing short of awesome. After eating and watching a short movie about Wadi Rum, we all piled into the backs of pick-up trucks to race across the desert. Well, most trucks raced; ours puttered behind most other trucks. We stopped every ten or so minutes to hop out and explore sand dunes and cliffs and fantastic rock formations. Also, it turns out that running uphill in the sand is really difficult.

 Entrance to Wadi Rum. 

 Pickup truck caravan. 

 Climbing!

 Arrakis. 

 The itty bitty figure is me. 

At the halfway point, we were served tea at a Bedouin campsite and then we switched to camels. Let me tell you, camel riding is so much cooler than horseback riding. And I'm not allergic! Camels' limbs are a little bit like giraffe limbs and they look really cool when they walk. They get up with their back legs first, too, so when I first got on, I thought I was going to topple over its head. We were all hooked up to a couple of other camels at the same time, with a guide leading them. The guides were pretty great; mine kept turning back to talk to the camels or kiss them. My camel's name was Shilou and she was fantastic. Super chill and tame, the guide even let me guide her for a little while! I let her stray too far from the rest of the pack though, so then he took the reigns again. There's a special way to ride camels too, the Bedouin way. You sit kind of cross legged on the camel, so your legs aren't spread so far apart and you don't feel like shit the next day. It made camel riding decently comfy.

 Camel caravan. 

 Here's a picture of me on a camel, Dad.

Jamel Shilou. Habibi Shilou. 

We got to the camp around sunset. It was pretty fantastic, but honestly a little disappointing in comparison to Dana. In Dana we had tiny tents with mattresses and some blankets, but that was pretty much it. At the Wadi Rum camp, we not only had biggish, almost Harry Potter-esque tents with beds, but a kind of party area with couches, hookah, and a DJ. We were also pretty close to a highway and a couple of gas stations, which kind of hurt the "out in the desert with Bedouins" illusion. Still, we listened to some good Arabic music, danced, and even had a faux wedding as well as a birthday party. A friend of mine and a guy friend of hers had been joking about dressing up in traditional Arab garb and sending a picture back to his parents as a wedding photo, as though he had married an Arab girl while in Jordan. It helps that she's Brazilian, so she could pass for Arab. One of the program leaders, Ahmed (who is awesome) was part of this, so at the camp in Wadi Rum he organized a fake wedding between the two. There was a whole procession of us dancing and celebrating the wedding, singing traditional wedding songs and everything. They even got a guy to dress up as her father giving her away. It was also another guy's birthday, so we had a birthday party with cake and sparklers. We had tasty lamb cooked the Bedouin way--buried under ground:

The chef taking the lamb out of the ground. 

We got up at early o'clock the next morning to get on the bus to Petra. It was a long bus ride. We got to Petra before noon, and it involved a whole lot more walking than I was expecting. Along the road to the Treasury (the most famous building in Petra, the one in the Last Crusade) there were tourist shops with Indy's face on them, selling fedoras and stuffed camels. There were also small children selling postcards, which was kind of depressing since every time we told them we didn't want to buy anything, they would either look really sad or say things like "You dropped something... your heart." We got this all through Petra; people desperately hawking jewelry and tourist trinkets or donkey rides, shouting that they had had no business all day. It was really hard to say no, but there was just no way to buy something from every vendor.

On to something less depressing... most of the walk to the Treasury was gorgeous; even better than most of Petra itself. There are winding passages and cool rock formations all along the way. Here's the beginning of the walk:

Almost there....



And then my camera died. Damn. Right before the Treasury. Fortunately, if I left my camera alone for long enough I could turn it on for a second and take a quick picture before it died again. So I have one picture of the Treasury:

We wandered through the Petra (yes, there's a lot more to Petra than the Treasury) for another couple of hours. Petra is a pretty big city, built by the Nabbiteans in the 7th century BC. It's mostly covered in caves and ruins that resemble the Treasury, but a lot smaller. The caves are actually tombs, since Petra was originally built to be a cemetery. The last thing we did at Petra was a big long hike up a mountain to the city's highest point, the Monastery. The climb was rough, guys. I still hurt and I blame Petra. In total, from the bus to the top of that mountain and back, we walked ten miles that day. But it was totally worth it. The Monastery looks a lot like the Treasury, but with a little less detail. After snapping some pictures of that, we walked further up the mountain for the real reason we hiked up all that way: the view. It was amazing. Unfortunately, due to stupid camera, I could only take one picture, and I took it of me at the top with the Monastery behind me:

So no pictures of the gorgeous view. But there were canyons and mountains and rocks... It was worth the hike.

We got back later that evening, had some falafel and went home. I took a very long shower due to ALL the dust in Jordan being on my body, particularly in my hair. And that was my weekend, folks! I'm exhausted now, but I'm pretty sure that it was the best weekend ever, totally worth the tireds. :D