The other day was one of the most rediculous days of my life(maybe not my life, but it was pretty ridicoulous).So that morning I went to church. Now in Jordan, Church is on Friday becasue it is holy day of the muslims and Sunday is Monday in Jordan. Grechen had the card of the branch president who we had called the night before to get the time. It was in english in Arabic so we figured that if we gave the card to the driver, he would just be able to take us to the church. Amman isn't like other cities. In New York, for example, if you have an address, you can find your destination very easily. In Amman, they don't have addresses, just post office boxes. The driver was very frustrated and droped us off at the king abdullah mosque thinking that that was good enough. We called the number on the card and he told us to flag down a taxi and let him talk to the driver about directions. So we did just that. It turned out that the church was on the other side of town from where we had been droped off. The cab driver was very eager to practice his English on us. He told us that he was getting married the next week and wanted to come to America to get a masters degree. He was the nicest cab driver I've ever had, and will probably ever had.

The Church owns a very nice and large house in the embassy disterect which they have turnd into a church and humanitarian headquaters for Jordan. There were about 100 people there, 20 of them BYU students. I really enjoyed going to church here because it was so basic. There was a puplit, a table for the sacrament, and chairs. That was is! Instead of normail bread for the sacrement, they used pita bread. Sacrement meeting was in both English and Arabic which was extremly confusing. Sunday School was even more confusing, and Priesthood was pretty much in English. We met a lot of people who were mostly Americans who live in Jordan or are just visiting. But there was a suprising amount of Arabs, Indians, and Africans. I sat next to boy who looked like he was 12 from Nigeria named Mathew. The Hymbooks are in Arabic and English and alternate laguages every other verse.

When we returned from Church eveybody had been worried about us because we were gone for three plus hours. When we told them that our church was normaly 3 hours, they were shoked. Some of the Muslims in the group had just returned from Friday prayers where the Emman (the head of the mosque) gives a sermon which lasted about 45 minutes and they though that that was long.

Alex decided that we should take a field trip to a cave on the outskirts of Amman which is belived to be the sight of a story in the Qu'ran. In the story, seven people were being persicuted for there religon, so god led them to the cave and put them to sleep for 300 years. When they woke up they weren't persicuted anymore. The drive was about 30 minutes by cab and costed 4 dinar each way. We had to drive through the industrial section of town to get to the cave which is situated next to a factory on a hillside. We got out, saw the cave which wasn't very interesting because it was just a small room that had been built over the actual cave by the ummyads. There was a mosque further up the hill, but we weren't aloud to go, so it was time to go back home. Cabs aren't to frequent in that part of town so he had to walk to the main road. After 10 minutes a cab cameand three girls got in the back and wanted a boy to come with them because women aren't safe by themselves in the middle east in general. So I got in the front seat and went home. I got the key and went up to my room where I read for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and eventualy almost 30 minutes had gone by and no one had returned. Eventually Erik came back and told that no taxis had come. A bus came by and offered to take everyone back to the hotel so they got on. The driver thought that they should get 20 dinar for the ride and Alex talked them down to 11 dinar. The bus went the really long way through the old city and was a few miles away from the hotel when it broke down in the middle of the road. Everyone got out and had to take taxis to the hotel which was and additional 2 dinar per cab.



That night we decided to go to dinner as a group. So we had past this restauraunt a couple of times called "Pollo Rancheo: Latino Flavor". Someone got his idea that they would like to try Jordanian Mexican food and so half of the group including me got dragged into going. We took a short but tedius cab ride to Pollo Rancheo where we went in and found out that there was nothing Latino about it. First of all, the only thing they had was chicken, lot's of fried chicken which I don't think is a Latino food. We were considering eating there when I noticed that the waiters were all wearing pirate suits. The menu was all in english but with many errors like "Chiken Prest" or "Maxican Food". We decided to go somewhere else, somewhere with more traditional food. We went out side and were approached by an old man with a black plastic bag. He struck up a conversation with Rashadd (who's family is from Jordan and speaks really good Arabic). The man gave Rashadd a small box from the bag which turned out to be French Perfume and went on to give a few other people standing around him a box and take 2 dinars from each of them. I walked away as to avoid the situation because I didn't want French perfume, but decided to approach again to take a look at the bottle when the old man shoved a box into my hands. I tried to give it back to him but he wouldn't take it back while giving compliments to me like "you are handsome man". I decided to just giv him the 2 dinars because the rest of the group was moving away. I took out my wallet to get 2 dinars when he saw that I had a 5 dinar bill and he started asking me for that. I refused and he kept asking for it. After a while I just left with the bottle giving him 2 dinars for it.

We could see a restaurant across the street that looked pretty good but crossing the street was suicide. Everyone in the group except me Erik and Eman ran across the street just barley making it. We decided that we would just either go back or eat at Pollo Ranchero. Somone in the group flaged down a cab and had them drive to the other side of the street and pick us up against our will. Because this street was so busy (it's one of the main streets in amman) we had to drive a mile before we could turn around and drive another mile to the restaurant.

The Restaruant was huge. It was set up so that all the tables faced the front where a band was set up in front of a giant waterfall. We were the only people in the entire restaraunt for about an hour when a few other people showed up and the band started playing. The band consisted of a keyboard player who had done something to the keyboard so it could play arabian scales, a fluetist, two drumers, and a vocalist in a very skimpy dress. The food was pretty good but xpensive. So after drinking a lot of water at dinner, naturally, I had to go visit the restroom, right? So I walk into the mens restroom and there is a guy just siting there with a little table set up with a tip jar full of money and some pictures of what were probably his family. This kind of thing is uncommon outside of America, but it was the fact that he was inside the actual bathroom with one toilet and a urinal against the wall and no dividers. Extremely akward.

That was that day.