I have made to Jordan. My first impressions of the middle east are very different than what I was expecting. For example, it's not really that hot, and people here don't hate americans. I'm living in an apartment across the street from the University of Jordan which gives me the opportunity to walk through the local shoppng area where you can find all kinds of fantastic middle eastern food cheap. In fact everything is cheap.



Our journey here had a lot of obsicles we had to jump over. Once we got to London. We found out that we couldn't store are luggage in the airport we had to take it into london with us and store it in the British Museum. And of course everything was expensive. On return to the airport, a girl in the grioup was told that she had to get a new passport before leaving for Jordan. After many phonecalls to the state department they let her go. After a quick stop in lebanon we arrived in Jordan.....without my luggage which had been left in London. All I had were the clothes on my body and an extra pair of socks. Me moved in and have had a great time with many great experiences. oh and my luggage did come two days latter.




The university of jordan is across the street from my apartment, but you have to walk all the way down the street and go under the street through a tunnel because the road is too trecherous to cross. My appartment is comfortable but quite frightening when it comes to the bathroom. We have learned to take semi-sponge bathes instead of showers because there is no curtain, just a hole for the water and taking a shower means that the whole bathroom will be flooded for the next day.



My Arabic classes are frustrating right now because the language is so insanely hard to learn after speaking English all of your life. The grammer, the alphabet, and the way your mouth feels when you speak is totaly different. In fact the other day, a gril in my class started crying because she was so frustrated and the teacher had to calm her down by telling her that she was just a beginner. If you wan't to talk to the people in Jordan and Syria, you have to learn their colloquial dialect which is completely different from that of other parts of the middle east which makes things difficult. The other Arabic is called modern standard or classical which is the language of the newspapers, literature and the Koran.



Amman is a fairly new city. In roman times it was the city of philidelphia which was pretty big. But up until the 1950's it was just another city in Jordan. Ever since the British partition of the middle east, Amman as expanded quite a bit in size. It's built on steep hills covered with white stoned houses everywhere and minurete's from mosques. In fact I think there are more mosques in Amman per capita than mormon churches in utah which is really saying something. Five times a day all of the mosques begin the call to prayer at the same time which is an amazing experience.




The language barrier has caused a few bumps in the road while I've been here. The other day, me and three other people decided to go to Mecca Mall(which is completely western unfortunetly). We flagged a cab and told him where we were going. He wouldn't run his meter (it's the law to run your meter)and tried to talk us into to paying 5 dinars for the ride. 5 dianras is the equivalent to $8 which isn't bad for U.S. standards, but if the meters running, the ride would cost about 1 Dinar ($1.50). We finally talked him into 2 dinars and continued are ride. He started asking questions in broken English about where we were from. We replied in our broken Arabic that we were American. He started talking about much he liked President Clinton and we agreed with him. He then tells us that he's palestinaian and hates Bush but not Clinton (which is very understandable since clinton tried to help palestine and bush has obviously hasn't). Then he starts shooting people with his fingers shaped like a gun. If that's not scary enough he starts talking about how much he likes Sadahm Hussein. When we got to the mall, we practically jumped out of the car. He might not seem scary when reading this but I had a homicidal maniac as a cab driver.



I haven't just learned a lot of Arabic, but also a lot of sign language. We had to get our pictures taken for our Unbiversity of Jordan ID's at a fuji film place near are hotel. Nobody there spoke english, so I found myself trying to communicate that I wanted my picture taken for ID. Once I had gotten the point accross to the man running the store, he led me up into a dark room and started taking pictures of me. I went back to wait for them and watched as my face came up on a computer screen across the room. I watched as he photoshoped my face so that I didn't have any acnee, gave me crystal white teeth and put a soft focus effect on my head. I thought I was just getting one picture but ended up getting 8 wallet sized pictures and one large picture of my face. I started worring because I thought I had only ordered one picture and didn't want to pay for everything. It turned out that everything came to 3 Dinars ($4.50) which is very good.

So that's it at the moment.
-cheers