Pif Paf

A few of the other kids have been putting up pictures of the Dead Sea, so be sure to look around other blogs. I think Alex has some pictures of us covered with mud from the Dead Sea, which is supposed to make your skin nice, that he should be putting up in the next few days.

So anyways we’ve since had two more exciting days of class, where the reading we’ve been going over is about Wadi Rum, which is our destination for a weekend trip two weekends from now; it is where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed. But the most exciting news to report is that all of our rooms were fumigated, which was a headache. It is hard to get across how casual business transactions are here, but being a half-hour late is never a big deal. So with the fumigation, we were told that we needed to be here at two o’clock to let the guy into our rooms, and then after that we couldn’t enter the rooms for two hours, and it would be another six hours after that before the smell would dissipate. But our bug guy, true to form, didn’t arrive until 4:30, and so I wasted three hours of my Sunday waiting around. Tuesday I was supposed to renew my visa but my one thirty appointment never showed. The good news from the fumigation is that based on the body count (of cockroaches) it appears to have been needed, and my room ridded itself of the smell fairly quickly.

The other exciting thing was that I got my language partner. She has only taken one semester of English formally, but she has watched enough American movies that she can understand a lot of what I’m saying if I speak with gestures and draw a few pictures to explain words that I can’t translate into Arabic. She also said she might like to have blonde hair like American girls and I told her American girls would like to have tan skin like she has (she thought I was lying).

The middle of the school week seems like a nice time to make a quick mention of something cultural, so, Arab fashion: men here dress western, or at least older men look like something out of a JC Penny catalog from the mid 1990s and younger guys wear a lot of knock off Dolce and Giovanna and Diesel. The kind of cultural dress that is popular in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Coast is not commonplace in Jordan, so that if you see a man with a koffia (red and white checkered head scarf) and a dishdash (white full length outer robe) than it is a fair assumption that they are wealthy and from the Gulf States. Older women here dress like you would imagine, sleeves past the elbow, pants or dresses to the ankles, and a head scarf. For younger girls on campus, there is more variety. Some dress very western, a lot dress western but with a hijab (head scarf), and the rest dress like the previously described women. I have seen a few women in burqas, which are the full body clothing with only the eyes, hands, and feet showing (as was required by the Taliban in Afghanistan), but they are fairly rare.

I realize this has been a shorter post, but it has been a serene two days. Alex and I are continuing to try to come up with big things to do each weekend, so I promise better stories each Sunday.