Some pictures

The above three pictures are from the citadel and the roman theatre in Amman. Amman is incredibly spread out, there is no downtown where all of the 40 story buildings are; rather the city just seems to expand forever outward over tons of hills. These pictures are from the top of one of those hill/moutains.

I managed to find Disney's Robin Hood in arabic for a few JD.

The money.

Over the weekend

I am writing this one on Saturday evening, but I won’t be able to upload it until tomorrow morning, which is still late Saturday night in the States. Classes run Sunday through Thursday, as Friday is the holy day of the week in Islam, so tomorrow begins our second week of class. The first week went pretty well; at Miami I get to hear Arabic on a DVD for ten minutes each week, but here we have three and a half hours of class each day entirely in Arabic. Add in a few conversations with taxi drivers and street merchants and I feel like my speaking and listening is already getting a lot better. We’ve also made friends with classmates from places like Austin, Seattle, Paris, Rome, and Seoul.

This weekend we were going to go horseback riding at a private place outside of the city, which I honestly didn’t want to do. But when we got there it turned out there was a shooting range right next door, so those who didn’t want to ride horses went to the range, myself included, and shot some targets. It turns out that I’m a decent shot with a 9mm. Afterwards Saleh took us to a tourist trap, and instructed us to memorize prices so that we would know how much money we save when we haggle successfully at street shops in the city. We ended the day at a nice restaurant where I ordered lamb for the fourth time since I’ve been here, which is officially my new favorite food. The last thing from that day is that we stopped at another DVD shop. All DVD’s here are 1 Dinar, as they are all bootlegged (1JD=1.4USD), so it is very tempting to just load up on bad copies of movies (they even have the Hulk and the new Indiana Jones), but I’m going to wait a month and a half and see how much money I have left over to blow on dinar DVDs first.

I did one really dumb thing this weekend, which was forgetting to plug in my power adapter before plugging in my beard trimmer, so it got zapped and no longer works. I don’t want to let my beard just grow for two months, so I am going to have to go to a barbershop. Barbershops, more than anywhere else, make poor attempts at having signs in English and Arabic, which means I get to pick between “Gentlemen for men” and “The Matrix” (which features a picture of Johnny Depp from Pirates of the Caribbean on the sign).

Another interesting happening is that you hear ice cream truck music all the time. But it isn’t actually ice cream, it’s flat bed trucks hauling tanks of propane. The two competing theories on why they play kids music are that a). It is a warning to other drivers that bumping into the truck may prove explosive or b). to lure in customers.

The last exciting thing is that we read in the New York Times that Obama will be in Jordan for a day or two in a few weeks, so we’ll all be trying to call in favors to get to meet him when he is here. I’ll let you all know if anything comes of it.

Oh and sorry about the lack of pictures, I am taking plenty but having trouble uploading them to blogger. I’ll have better luck in the future, In Shah Allah (transliteration of God willing, which is said anytime you make a future commitment, like meeting for lunch or picking someone up at the airport).

This is a few days old, but I didn’t have internet until now: Yesterday we took the entrance exam, which was designed to be really hard as to sort out students into the appropriate levels of Arabic. I feel like I did well, but I didn’t recognize a few words in the last question and blew that one, although I should have still scored well enough to get into the level I was aiming for. We all felt fairly lost and confused by it, but hopefully everyone will get put into the appropriate level tomorrow morning.

The other interesting thing that happened yesterday was that Ben, Elise, Paula, and I went to a Catholic mass. The church (al-kineesa catholeekee) was nice, but I didn’t have my camera with me so you’ll will have to wait another week or two for pictures. The homily was difficult to follow, as the only big words I recognized were church, father, son, spirit, God, one, and three, so we figured it must have been a sermon about the Holy Trinity, which is still a contentious point in contrast to Islam.

Because we are near the university, there are a decent amount of places near us that try to serve foods that you can find anywhere in the world (ie pizza and fries), so we’ve been asking a lot of people where we can find good restaurants. So far, every single person has said KFC. And we say, “no, a good Arab restaurant,” and the response is still KFC, which is then followed by another less than compelling recommendation.

The last remark I have for today is that people here are insane drivers. Driving here, it is like a race. Drivers cut each other off constantly; it seems like every taxi ride the guy is slamming on the breaks, whipping into another land, and gunning it again. Two lane roads find the cars going four wide regularly. But to their credit, auto accidents are apparently a rare sight. Some of the stop signs have speed bumps, otherwise no one will slow down there. If there is a stop sign without a speed bump, it is more just a sort of forewarning that your about to cut somebody off than an appeal to stop.

First Post

Well, I finally found some internet, but it is slow so I'm not going to bother with any pictures on this one. The plane flight was long, and flying against timezones meant that we arrived in Italy in the morning, not having slept and facing then a full day. The airline gave us a bit of a runaround and we actually left the airport as delta had moved to another terminal and got our passports stamped, meaning I can officially say I've been to Italy. From there we went on to Jordan, and upon landing found our state-side arabic professor, who had connections with airport security allowing us to bypass customs and security. One girl, Mary, had her flight delayed, but the Amman airport reported the flight cancled, so she arrived after we all left, and ended up spending the night with a random Palestinian family she met at the airport! It's better when she tells the story, so I'll link to her blog once she publishes a post about it (all of us made one of these, so if someone has something interesting I'll link it). Our apartments are nice enough, given the price and location in relation to the university. Actually dowh the road from us are a few american fast food chains that cater to the international students here, but we have been told by Saleh (our professor) that we are not allowed to eat at those places. The food here is all really good though, so that's not an issue. The second day here we got enrolled at the university, tuition was about $650 dollars (500 dinars) which is pretty awesome compared to American university costs. The apartment is only 200 dinar ($260 american) each month. My roomate is Alex Bluebond, who's blog I'll link to once he puts something interesting on it. Today we also went to a mall (there are two in Amman), tried to talk with our taxi drivers, and met a few of the other international students that we will be taking classes with.



That's all I can think to write for now... If anyone leaves a comment/question I can answer them next time I get online.