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.