Snow.

Snow in this country is pretty cool and everything, but its incredibly inconvienent.
When it first started snowing I was trying to catch a taxi, I found it absolutely hilarious then, it wasn't incredibly cold yet and it was just so odd. I couldn't stop laughing. Three hours later however, when I was walking through three inches of freezing dirt water in a pair of ballet flats, and my Minnesotan roommate was all "Not to be the bearer of bad news, but we have about ten minutes to get home before we start freezing" I kind of started panicking. (I love Minnesotans.) I don't even want to go into the whole debacle where I went to school early to skype my lovely friend, only to be told that school was canceled by the lone security guard only to get the text from our program director that all of my classes were canceled. Well, I guess I just did. It was also totally wotrth it for the conversation I had though.

Its really kind of cool how much the weather just stops everything though. Theres no drainage, and of course there are no plows, becuase it never snows this much. balh blah blah insert here the cliche about humbling powers of nature over humanity. At the end of the day though its just NOT COOL because there is so much I want and need to get done, and it just can't happen when I actually have to walk up a hill in the snow to get to school, and it just sort of saps all the energy and zest for learning that I thought I had.
At least its only up hill one way though...

Why I Love My Roommate

One thing that I really miss is decaffeinated tea, there is nothing better than a warm drink at night. That's a lie, there is nothing better than sleeping really well at night, and for some reason decaffeinated  beverages are not the norm in this country. My solution to this was to dip tangerine peels into hot water. It was a fail.  Here is the conversation that I had with Alice
Me: Well. That just does not tastes good.
Alice: Does it at least smell good?
Me: sniffs beverage Nope.
Alice: Can I smell... smells it... does it at least taste better than it smells.
Me: Yes.

I don't know how I would get through this without these conversations. I will be posting more.

Indirect Statements

In Arab culture, you don't just say what you want or need, you imply it some other way. For example, if I was hanging out with a bunch of people, and I was hungry I would say something like "I just find Shwarerma delicious, don't you?" and then someone is supposed to pick up on that and suggest that we all go get shwarema.

Last night at Cafe De Paris I was going into the bathroom, and all of a sudden there is a hand on my back, and this georgeous woman leans in and whispers, "I think you are lost," and then she gently guided me in the right direction.

"You have no idea." is how I wanted to reply.

The Swing of Things

I think that I'm becoming adusted to always being overwhelmed. There is so much to do, not all of it can get done. This is not a new concept for me, and I've always pretty much known my priorities. However, the fact that I have one chance to do this whole study-abroad-thing has made me worry...
Okay. Imma jump into Real-Life-Time, I just got interrupted from this post by a lady teaching my host-sister Fusha. She asked to see the articles I have to do in Al-Kitab 3. If I needed help, she would have been incredbily... helpful, but I really just need to be studying for this quiz tomorrow.
And this is the kind of thing that I love about living here. Because I come home and there are random pople in my living room, and I just get the chance to have a conversation with someone new, also I feel like the more I have these really brief interactions I learn a lot more. Even though it seems like I'm just going through motions, and the whole conversation seems shallow, each person has their own nuances with language, and I love just trying to hear the differences between people.

This goes back to the point that I was going to make earlier, there is always just so much going on here that something has to get put on the back burner. I just can't tell who/what I would be learning more from. Is it the people, becuase usually half-way through whatever conversation the other person always ends up switching to English, and I feel rude always asking them to go out of their way to speak Arabic with me. So would it just make more sense to sit in a room and study as much as much as possible? I know the obvious answer is to talk to other the people here, but I'm always wary of obvious choices, there always seems to be a catch. 



On another note, here is the link to my Tumblr where I'll post the poems I'll be writing while I'm here/pictures, if I ever take them.
http://noneedfortickets.tumblr.com/
...and if you don't like poetry, don't click it.

Culture?

The question of culture comes up so much in my daily life here. I think part of it comes from just the types of friends that I have and make, but its also really hard to avoid the subject when I come across a menu completely in English, with waiters who speak English. Its also unnerving to listen to conversations where there are English sentences sand-witched between Arabic ones.
For instance: Last night I went to city mall with two friends and it was legit nicer than most malls that I've ever been to, and there were very few veiled women, probably about the amount that you see in certain places in DC.
There were two notable experiences at the mall however. When I went into the girls bathroom, it was just like the way I imagine that guys image girls bathrooms to be. There were women just crowed in front of the mirror, shaking hands and cheek-kissing. Large amounts of eyeliner was being applied, and one chick straight up sat down and lit a cigarette. (okay I guess that another difference, we were smoking hooka in a mall, something that doesn't really happen.) The second interesting thing was that a fight was totally about to break out. I've never actually witnessed a fight, but I was in the middle of a sentence, when all of a sudden, my friend Nate, goes: "guys I think we need to go, I think there's going to be a fight." And sure enough, they were pushing tables back, and mall security was there in about two second. We still got out of there. On the way out of the mall, we saw the kids getting put into the back of one of those police vans...
When I told my host mom she said "Over a girl, for sure" I had the same thought, and to me, that sounds like a mix of Jordanian culture and the Jersey Shore. Like really, who is really stupid enough to have a fight IN the mall. I think that the culture here is so much more different than it appears, even in the Western areas, you just have to open your eyes to the subtleties

 
This morning, however, stands out in sharp contrast to the mall. I'm currently at a cafe downtown with a group of other students who live in this area. We took the bus (its soooooo much cheaper) and so we had to walk though part of center city. Since its Friday at noonish, everyone just got out of the Mosques, and the streets were full, but there were no women. Additionally, there was a side walk that was ummmmm kind of a butcher shop. The first sign should have been the roosters that were just chillin' on the sidewalk, but then there were rabbits, and finally there was a small creature being straight-up butchered on the side of the street.
This is NOT something that one would ever find in the US and I'm not gonna lie, I really enjoyed imagining the horrified expression of a USDA official. I think its great that people know where they're getting their rabbit/chicken/pigeon from. 

Transportation

I am not that great a driver. I do not enjoy driving in towns in the U.S., and that's when people follow traffic laws (for the most part.) In Amman, I'm not even sure that there are traffic laws, which is probably why one of the rules on our program is that we can't drive. This makes transportation very interesting, and every person I know has at least one crazy-taxi driver story...
Most recently, we got in a cab and as soon as the driver realized we were American he changed the radio station to Western music, and he kept asking Brian if it was okay. Aaaaaaaand then Stereo Hearts came on and we started belting it out, and our taxi driver, instead of getting annoyed, just turned it all they way up. And then you get the taxi drivers that don't say a word, and I'm never sure if they heard me, or if they're just driving around for their own amusement... they usually know, but it still makes me nervous.

Buses are a whole different ball game. I live in a part of town where about four other families are hosting kids from the program, and though it is economical to take a taxi all together, its even cheaper to take a bus. Its definitely not as creepy as the guide books make it out to be. You have the driver and the the door-opener-dude, the driver drives and the dude opens the door, you ask him if its the right bus, and then later he takes your money. Usually if there's a man in a single seat, and the rest of the bus is full, he'll get up for the woman who just got on. But occasionally the door-opener dude doesn't listen, and so you have to be a little more assertive, which is hard with the whole language barrier thing. The buses can also get as strange as the taxi drivers, me one friend saw a man who missed his stop hitting the driver with his cane. The driver then grabbed the cane and threw it out the window. I love this city.

Drivers in general are crazy here as well. From what I've observed, you basically have to drive concentrating on a billion different things in front of and behind you. It does not look like fun. My host family doesn't have a car, and so when we come home from the Circassian Nadi (more on that later) someone usually drives us. The first couple of times it was this dude names Teto, who, when angry, likes to floor it and then suddenly put equal pressure on the brake. Its kind of scary, but that's nothing compared to last Thursday when I got into a car and the driver turns to ask me "Do you like to drift?" when I asked what it was, the other girls in the car silently lifted up two fingers and twirled them in a circle, so I said "Why not?" The rest of the car was not as enthusiastic as I was. Twenty minutes later, I was looking out the window, and all of a sudden we were moving very fast in circles. Also, there was this noise, which I later realized was me, screaming. Of course I wanted to do it again.

I Gave In

Yeah, I gave in and got a blog. I don't know how comfortable I am just kinda sticking my experiences out on the internetz and all. It makes me feel self-centered. However I feel like too many ridiculous things happen to me that I want to share with everyone, but now everyone I care about is just so far away, and this is just so much better than seeking out each person with my limited/valuable internet time to tell them my long stories. My Thursday evening is up for my next blog post... soonish... Good God I miss having the internet 24/7.