Jessica's Jaunt to Jordan

Brief before Spring Break update: the Dead Sea was magical! It was really cold in Amman so I couldn’t believe that I’d want to put on a bathing suit and enter a body of water but it was warm and awesome. Wearing a bikini felt quite scandalous. I survived midterms (I think) and then it was Spring Break! 

So to start things off: we called ahead to get a silver taxi to the airport. He wanted to be at the airport at nine thirty so to give ourselves some time we wanted the taxi to pick us up from my house at 8:15. The taxi was not there at 8:15. Nor was it there at 8:30. So we called the taxi company’s main line a few times, got my host mom to give the driver directions and waited. And waited some more. Finally this guy pulls up and we’re all elated. Until we see that there’s a girl sitting in the front seat. And we all had the same thought: “this is a little awkward. Maybe she’s going to the airport too?” She was not going to the airport. This guy rolled up with his habiiba in the front seat. And she had some long blond extensions, a fedora, a tight red lace shirt and some shiny red high heels. 

So he drove like a mad person to the airport. And they closed their windows in order to smoke. Laaaaysh. We refused to pay him and just moseyed on into the airport. But since we called to reserve this taxi he had Leah’s number so he kept calling here for the next hour until he gave up. 

So that was an interesting start to our trip. We made it to Istanbul and to our hotel where, since we booked through a Jordanian travel agency, they did not speak English. But they did speak Arabic! So we got to use our limited language skills to communicate such things as: “The key, doesn’t work” and “We go to the airport on Thursday, how?” 

There was a tram stop right by our hotel and we got on the tram and got where we needed to go like bosses. We saw the Blue Mosque and then went to a restaurant where the menu included such wonderfully translated items such as “vegetarian food.” We had a really great dinner and then afterwards a waiter came and gave us free apple tea. Later the manager comes up to us and asks us if we got his letter. We were very confused until he pointed to the napkin in the middle of the table that was brought with the apple tea and read “from your friend in the grey jacket.” He then proceeded to ask us where we were from and how old we were until we decided it was time to leave. So we went and got Turkish delight across the street. 

The next day we went to Topkapi Palace, the residence of most of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire. In the palace, they had rooms full of relics of the prophets. We saw such things as: John the Baptist’s arm, Abraham’s saucepan, Prophet Muhammad’s beard, and the swords of the Prophet and the four Rightly Guided Caliphs. There were also rooms full of assorted loot and gifts from other countries including an 86 carat diamond. Really baller.

That afternoon we went to the Grand Bazaar. I was really excited about this because a) I love buying things and b) there’s a Turkish soap opera we watch in my host family all the time that’s about a bunch of carpet merchants in the Grand Bazaar. We walked around as merchants yelled out anything they could to entice us into their shops. We got called: angels, Charlie’s Angels, Miss America, rednecks (we think they meant it affectionately?) and other hilarious things that I’m probably forgetting. It was overwhelming in the best possible way. I walked out of there having spent way more than I intended. 

The highlight of the Grand Bazaar was acquiring a set of teacups. I came to the Middle East wanting a set of teacups like one that my first Arabic professor had. I’d looked in Amman and not found any that made me happy and I had seen some around the Grand Bazaar earlier that day that were alright but came in cardboard boxes, not something sturdier/prettier/more permanent. So I saw a set of awesome ceramic cups with saucers in a velvet box and fell in love with them. I was nervous to ask how much they were because I was sure they’d be super expensive and I was right. However, I managed to haggled them down to a bit over half the price. I felt accomplished. More haggling highlights: the guy who sold me a necklace who wanted a kiss in payment. I denied him that, but then he regrouped and asked if he could kiss me. Still no. I got my necklace and no kisses were exchanged. Success!

After the Grand Bazaar we went to the Spice Bazaar which is full of spices, yes, but also tea and baklava and Turkish delight. We walked around trying free samples and getting yelled at - one guy yelled “I’m single!” and us as we passed and when we passed him again he yelled “I’m still single!” and then “she still doesn’t like me” once we’d passed him without acknowledging him again. Also: they sold this mysterious “love tea.” I can’t remember the exact quote, but one shopkeeper really wanted us to stop so he could sell us some love tea. We declined. 

Crap this post is getting long. Moving on! We went on a cruise on the Bosporus, which was included in the travel package we bought. After that we went to the Hagia Sophia which is probably one of the most beautiful places I’ve been in my life. Next was the Basilica Cistern, a giant underground chamber full of columns. It was really dark and eerie and really really neat.

The next day we went to Dolmabahçe Palace, the residence of the last six sultans and Ataturk’s home whenever he was kickin’ it in Istanbul. Beautiful. Highlight of the trip. The castle was built when the Ottoman Empire was trying really hard to be modern and like the rest of Europe, so it’s quite different from Topkapi. It even had central heating and electricity. Also the biggest chandelier in Europe. The tour had two parts - the pimped out administrative part of the palace where they’d receive foreign dignitaries and the harem, which was the residential part for the sultan’s family. Typically you had to pay to get into both but with our ISIC cards we got into both for 5 Lire, saving 35! The only time my ISIC card has gotten me anything. In the harem tour we got to see Ataturk’s bedroom, which he died in. His bedspread was embroidered with the star and crescent of the Turkish flag. 

We also went to a Jewish Museum and generally spent a lot of time just walking around the city, including time spent just sitting in the train station and talking. We went back to the Spice Bazaar and bought approximately one shitton of Turkish delight each. 

Other ramblings. Food: it was really good. Leah’s a vegetarian so typically for dinner we’d get a bunch of things and split them. That worked out well for us. One memorable lunch we decided we wanted some french fries so, not speaking Turkish, we just pointed to them on the menu. What came to our table was a french fry sandwich. Sandwich. French fries, ketchup, and mayonnaise on some bread. What? We ate the french fries out of the sandwich and I tore off chunks of the bread to eat with my meat and yogurt. So yeah, I guess I ate all the parts of that french fry sandwich but I did not eat it as a sandwich. That seemed a little too weird. Also we got free apple tea  all over the place. Restaurants, like stores, had people whose job it was to yell at you on the street to get you into their restaurant, like the guy who told us on a few occasions that he had handsome waiters for nice girls. We never went there.

Shenanigans: People like to ask you where you’re from. So a few times a day we’d decide where we were from and just tell people that. That resulted in us having a surprisingly lengthy conversation with a guy in a carpet shop about our hometown of Boston and a guy selling scarves telling us that Alaska was a beautiful city. 

I anticipated having an awesome time in Istanbul but there were a few expected and some unexpected things that made it an awesome vacation. 

• Water! Jordan has a water shortage. Turkey does not. We definitely showered every night and the water pressure was awesome and it stayed one temperature. Amazing! Showers felt so long and leisurely but we really only took about ten minutes.
• Drains/Gutters! When it rains in Amman it just stays. The road outside my house becomes a lake. The street outside of AMIDEAST is a river that we all have to ford across while cars laugh at us. It was raining in Istanbul for most of the time we were there but our feet didn’t get soaked! Infrastructure!
• Sidewalks! Amman has sidewalks, yes, but they’re not very consistent. True, semi-embarrassing story: a few days before I left for Istanbul I walked into a boulder. There’s some miscellaneous rubble strew about the not-quite-a-sidewalk on the side of the street across from AMIDEAST and I was walking one direction and looking in the other to see if there were taxis and I walked right into a boulder. I’ve still got the bruise. But in Istanbul there were wonderful wide and level sidewalks.
• Public transportation! I take a bus in Amman and it’s amazing (if I’m not lazy sometime I’ll do a post about transportation in Amman) but Istanbul has a tram and it was the best thing ever. For 2 Lira you get a cute little plastic tram token and you hop on a tram that’s clean and modern and wonderful and it takes you wherever you need to go. Big fan. 
• Napkins! Jordanians seem to believe that anything a napkin can do a tissue can do. Not true. Having real napkins at restaurants was definitely something I didn’t expect to appreciate, but there you go. 

My vacation in a semi-nutshell? To use my MSA’s class favorite word it was: تجربة سحرية (a magical experience)

So I’m pretty much the worst at keeping a blog. Whatever.

I’ve had classes and such, which has pretty much been a bummer. I’m so unmotivated. It’s the worst. On the plus side: I’m pretty sure every paper I’m writing here is going to be about Jordan. Of course my paper for Jordanian Culture will be about Jordan….my research for my internship is about Jordan….and I’m going to write my Arab Spring paper about Jordan. This will help me when my senior honors thesis is probably about Jordan.

Besides classes I’ve been engaging in our number one Jordanian pastime - hanging out at Cafe Abdeen. It’s a pretty chill place where we just drink tea, smoke ‘argileh, and play cards. For hours upon hours. It’s pretty great.

I went to hang out in Starbucks on Wednesday and we walked there even though it was really cold and sleeting. We met a guy who was kind of a creeper (notable quote: “You live with a Muslim family? That means no hanky panky”). Kind of ridiculous. Worth noting: probably the only time I’ve felt uncomfortable in a dude’s presence and this dude was American. Take that, cultural stereotypes. And then we went to go home, fording through another road that had turned into a river and soaking our shoes for probably the billionth time that day. I made it home, and my host family sympathetically sat down in front of the space heater and gave me falafel, a cookie, and some ginger drank.

Aaaand then I woke up sick the next day, but school was cancelled! Amanda and I decided to go to Abdeen that night despite all the slush. Amanda’s and I taxi karma was baller and a taxi pulled up outside our house right as we were leaving. We hung out at Abdeen, but the fun didn’t start until it was time for us to leave. We typically have to wait a bit for a taxi when we leave, but that night it was super cold and there were no taxis. People kept pulling over in their cars and we kept ignoring them because the good samaritan/creepy creeper odds probably were not in our favor. We got in a taxi only to have him tell us that we had to pay 4JD to get home (about triple what it really costs). So we got out and waited and ignored the cars pulling over to offer us a ride. BUT. We finally got a taxi and this car that had been idling next to us backed up and hit another car and knocked off its bumped. Hilarity.

And then I didn’t leave my house for two days. My friends who did venture outside reported about being pelted with snowballs by strangers. Amanda and I recounted this to our host mom and her response was “Americans don’t play in the snow?” and we responded that yes, they do, but not with nonconsenting strangers. I guess that’s a cultural difference right there.

So I pretty much sat in front of the space heater for the rest of the weekend reading “Mark Reads the Hunger Games” and slowly going a little bit insane. It’s a good thing I’m not a bear, because I’d be shit at hibernating.

But things are marginally better today! We have class and I went outside and I still have dry feet. Tomorrow we’re going on our next excursion, including to the Dead Sea and this weekend is Spring Break. But before that I have to get through midterms. Midterms! How did it get to be mid-term already? I feel like I’ve been here for a week. Also I feel like I have not learned enough things to be taking a midterm. Eek.

Well, so far anyway.

Leaving off from last time since I’m really bad at updating:

We had a party at one of my host mom’s sister’s houses to celebrate all of the February birthdays in our giant extended family. There was dancing - to Arab music as well as some American classics like Elvis, T-Pain, the Cha Cha Slide, and the Macarena - as well as quite a lot of cake. It was pretty surreal but an amazingly fun time.

The rest of the weekend followed what seems to be our typical plan: walk around somewhere for a bit and then go get coffee. We adventured to see where the bus we take to AMIDEAST ends up going. We’d heard it went to First Circle, which is where Rainbow Street and a lot of our favorite coffee shops are. But it actually drops you off in the heart of downtown, which is really close to Rainbow Street but separated by a bunch of really steep hills and staircases. We walked around downtown, which meant that a lot of shopkeepers yelled “Welcome!” at us as we walked by, found our way to Rainbow Street where we found a coffee shop where it took me about an hour to successfully order chocolate cake. Endless struggles.

On Monday we had our very first excursion: to Jerash and Ajloun Castle. Jerash was amazing. Sprawling Roman/Byzantine ruins. I’ll put up some pictures later but it’s hard to express how awesome it was. The weather was beautiful and it was great to get out of the city and walk around in open spaces and see trees. After Jerash we had lunch - where we all ate a shocking amount of cheese pastries - and then headed to Ajloun. Ajloun was a fortress built way back in the day - during the Abbuyyid Empire in the mid 1180s. We spent an hour exploring, which mostly meant climbing all over the top of the castle. Since it was a fortress, it was on top of a hill and had amazing views all around.

We got home and then Amanda and I decided to get cake. There isn’t much in our neighborhood in the ways of coffee shops where we can all sit down, but there are a lot of banks. And a lot of bakeries. There’s one right around the corner that probably knows Amanda and I as the Americans who like cake. A great ending to a great day.

The rest of the week was taken up with classes - with the exception of one fun afternoon where I went with some friends down to Second Circle to get what’s apparently the best shawarma in Amman and then spending hours in a completely empty coffee shop doing homework and hanging out. Then on Thursday afternoon I got to go to the Center for Strategic Studies and work out the details of my internship. Success at last! I’m going back on Monday to work for realsies.

Friday afternoon we went back to Rainbow Street and then that night I went with some of my friends to a Circassian dance performance. Their host mom is the cousin of my host mom and is half Circassian, half Palestinian. One of her friends - a pilot in the Jordanian army - got us really great seats for this show just because we were his American friends. It was amazing, really incredible dancing. And a really awesome example of experiencing what you’re studying because earlier that week my Contemporary Jordanian Culture class was all about minorities in Jordan. And then my life flashed before my eyes as I got drifted home on the rainy back streets of Bayadir. 

Today was the Jordanian equivalent of a snow day - it was cold and slushy outside so I didn’t leave my house because it would’ve been impossible to find a bus or a taxi. It’s supposed to snow (or slush or something) more tonight so we’ll see if I make it to school tomorrow. 

It’s been awhile!

We had a long weekend, so I got to do a lot of exploring in Amman. My language partner makes jewelry and was selling it at a garage sell so I went there with one of my friends. Other weekend shenanigans include: continuing to assess coffee shops in Amman and walking around downtown. 

One thing we’ve noticed is the completely ridiculous music they play in coffee shops here. There was the coffee shop that was playing “Never Gonna Give You Up” when Amanda and I walked in, and then one of the places I was in over the weekend was playing instrumental versions of “Memory” and “My Heart Will Go On.” Constant source of amusement. 

We had an interesting time this weekend as a prominent opposition figure in Jordan was arrested and protests were happening right by where I live on Friday and Saturday nights. Luckily, both of those nights I had Jordanians with cars driving me home so they took me right outside my house and I didn’t have to pay them extra when we encountered police blockades and had to go a different way. My host dad likes to keep me updated on these things, so I have half-Arabic half-English conversations about protests in Jordan and the situation in Syria. 

Classes are continuing to go well, although I still don’t have my internship set up which is getting fairly frustrating. Hopefully by next week?

Almost every Monday we have “Cultural Dialogues,” where we get into small groups of Americans and Jordanians and talk about stuff. It’s a good way to talk about issues that may be sensitive that you don’t want to bring up with people you barely know, and through it I’ve met some really nice people. 

That’s all I’ve got? Upcoming weekend shenanigans: another mall trip, a gathering with my extended host-family and their American students, finding a flea market downtown, dinner at one of my Jordanian friends’ houses, and our first excursion. 

I made it through my first week of classes! And did a bunch of other stuff too. Both of my Arabic classes went really well the first week, but since it was the first week of my other classes we didn’t have any reading or anything really to talk about so a three hour block of time was filled up with going over the syllabus. For Community Based Learning (CBL) I’m hoping to get an internship at the Center for Strategic Studies but it hasn’t happened yet.

One of the classes that I’m not taking is Traditional Islamic Arts. The students who take that class get to go to the Institute of Traditional Islamic Arts twice a week and learn geometry, the basis for Islamic Art, and then also a specific medium such as calligraphy, gypsum carving, etc.. So this week we went on a field trip to ITIA’s workshop in Salt where they do things like woodwork and gypsum and tile work. The drive from Amman to Salt was gorgeous, we could see Palestine and the Dead Sea in the distance from a hill and we got off the bus to look and take pictures. And the workshop was beautiful. Everyone at ITIA is really nice and encouraged us to try whatever we wanted even though most of us have no skills at all. My Host Dad is originally from Salt, so it was neat to get a look at where he’s from.

On Thursday afternoon, the beginning of the weekend in Jordan, I went to meet my language partner. AMIDEAST gives each student a Jordanian language partner. We practice Arabic with them and they practice English with us. My language partner lives decently close to my house and is really, really nice. I went to her house and met her family and then we went to one of the many malls in Jordan. She’s an English Literature major so her English is much much better than my Arabic but she and her family were very impressed with whatever I managed to say. 

Sidenote: I continue to be floored with Jordanian hospitality. My host family has been so welcoming and kind and Dana’s family was the same way. Dana’s dad was very excited to welcome me to Jordan and told me that I should consider his house my house while I’m here, upping my Jordanian house count to two.

On Friday I continued my quest to evaluate coffee shops in Jordan because I just can’t get behind the Jordanian obsession with Nescafe. I had coffee and cake and did some homework and then that night my roommate and I went to Cafe de Paris, which as you can guess by the name, is a pretty Western establishment. There were a lot of AMIDEAST kids there and some other American students. It was also Karaoke night. I was going to do Karaoke with one of my friends, but we had to leave to get back home by our curfew (yeah, I have a curfew) before our names were called. Oh well. There’s always next week. 

On Saturday I went with a bunch of friends to Mecca Mall, another one of the many malls in Jordan. It’s five stories. Gigantic and crowded with all kinds of people. Jordanian teenagers in a Forever 21 are really exactly the same as American teenagers in a Forever 21. We spent hours just browsing around. There’s another gigantic mall right up the street that has a Zara and an H&M that I may be exploring later. Then Amanda and I went to the house of one of our host mom’s sisters, who has a CIEE student staying with her. Another one of her sisters has two more students from AMIDEAST and another sister also has two Americans staying with her family. We joked that they’ve all been collecting Americans. 

That’s all I’ve got? Ready for my second week of classes, although I’ve been so excited about getting out and doing things that finding time to do my homework has been really tough. Whoops.

I’ve survived a week in Jordan!

I’ve met some awesome people, started exploring the city, and moved in with my Jordanian host family. The weekend in Jordan is Friday/Saturday so I start classes tomorrow.

For the first week we stayed in a hotel all together and were bussed to AMIDEAST every morning to get information about our time in Jordan. We went on some trips, including to the Center for Traditional Islamic Arts where we got to see some really amazing art and I got my name in calligraphy that I’m going to treasure forever. We went on a city tour and visited the Roman Amphitheater in downtown Amman and also the Citadel, which has ruins from the Roman, Byzantine, Ummayyad and other eras. Words can’t really express how cool it was to stand in the ruins of the eras I studied in school.

Then I moved in with my host family! I have two host parents and four host siblings: two boys and two girls ranging from fifteen to late twenties. My host mom taught me a card game and then proceeded to slaughter me at it. I’ve watched Arab Idol. I’ve slept way too little. All in all, it’s been an awesome week.

The best part: my room in my host family has curtains and blankets with bears doing math on them. Oh yeah. 

I start class tomorrow. Here’s a brief rundown of my schedule:

Intermediate MSA: Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday mornings

Intermediate Jordanian Arabic: Tuesday and Thursday mornings

Contemporary Jordanian Culture: Sunday afternoon

Community Based Learning: Monday afternoon, plus around 6 hours a week at an internship. I don’t have my placement yet so I don’t know where I’ll be interning or when.

Arab Spring: Tuesday afternoon

More updates to come!

So I guess I’m doing the cool thing and making a travel blog. 

In just a week I’ll be leaving the US and beginning my semester-long adventure in Amman, Jordan. And I haven’t started packing yet. 

Stay tuned!