As-sallamu allaykum from Jordan. I just got back from a trip to Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan way up near the sea of gallilee. When we left, we weren't quite sure what we were even doing there, so when we arrived and were greeted by about twenty students it was kind of a shock. I feel bad for the people who organized this trip because everything fell apart because of the bus driver. He was almost an hour late, and refused to take us to a castle in Irbid because he "wanted to go home" even though we had reserved the bus until 7:30 that night. But I had a really great time talking to all of the students. Most of them are studying English Literature so it was interesting to get their take on Shakespeare and MArk Twain.

One of the funniest things ever happened at the begining of this trip, but I didn't hear about it until just a few days ago. A girl in the group wanted a take away box at the restaurant down stairs from our appartment and thought that the waiters wouldn't understand her english, so she drew a picture of a box on the placemate and even gave it an extra touch by putting a smily face on it. The waiter thought that in stead of drawing a take away box she had drawn a picture of a trash can and that she wanted them to throw the food away. So they did just that. Pretty soon the manager and the cook came out to ask what was wrong with the food, and they had to explain in Arabic what whe really wanted. They made her a new what ever it was she ordered and made her pay for both.

Fuad (one of my roomates) and I finnaly got the opportunity to move out of our cramped room into the old girls room, because they finaly found enough host families for the girls. We moved and found the place to be a complete dirty mess. Now when I say dirty, I'm talking about actual dirt. Here in Jordan, they don't use carpet but tile floors. So to clean them they pore water on the floor and scrup out all the dirt and use a scweegie (I have no idea how to spell that) and push the water into a drain. Once we had scwegied all the floors in the apartment, we had come up with water that looked like Lake Erie, and then when we opened the drain in the kitchen a whole bunch of little tiny insects swarmed out. After all of this cleaning we had a perfect room. But, unfortunetly the next day, a girl had to leave her host family so we are currently in the process of moving everything back to are old room.

Today was my last day of volunteering at the King's Academy. I think I'm going to miss this the most from the whole experience because all of the people there are just so nice. The school itself hasn't officialy opened except for the two week summer program I was involved with, so a lot of things are still in the makings there. Most notibly is the food situation. They decided to have all of the meals catered because it was only two weeks. And of course they insisted on feading us when we came on tuesdays and thursdays, but it was food of the healthy but not very interesting kind. When we showed up this past tuesday, they gave us a big box with chicken, fries, and peta bread topped of with Pepsi. We soon learned that the catering service had been fired because they kept giving the kids really small portions or something, so instead they go out and by fast food for them. So much for trying to change their eating habbits. When we showed up at the kings academy today, they were eating McDonalds and had forgotten to get us lunch. Even though we insisted that we didn't need lunch, they had someone drive all the way out to Maddba and get us Shwarma.

When we went to dinner tonight, we went to a FIlafil shop that most people in the group have been to and liked. But when we arrived and started looking at the food, Fuad noticed that there was funguss growing on some kind of mixture of meat and potaatoes. After a failed attemot at trying to explain to the manager that there was mold on the food we had to leave. As were waking out we noticed him mix the mold back in with everything else.

-cheers