1) Here in Jordan, gas isn't pummped to houses like it is in America. So everday a guy drives around in a truck selling gas. To let the people know he is their neighborhood he plays a song out of a loudspeaker that sounds something like a sad Russian folk song about how the winter has been rough. It's kind of like a sad ice-cream truck.
2) Where we are currently living the call to prayer is really loud. Really really really loud. And whats more, the mosques around us don't start the call to prayer at the same time, so for about a period of twenty minutes the call to prayer will play about five different times...very loudly. Normally I don't mind this as it is really beautiful, but it wakes me up every single morning around 4:30...and will keep me up because different mosques will start the call up to twenty minutes after the first one.
3) In one of my classes, the teacher at the end of the week gets up in front of the class and announces to the class what everyone's grade for that week is. This is illegal in the United States.
4) I have developed an addiction to the "Snake Xenia" game that came on my Jordanian cell phone. It is the game where you start off as a short snake, but you eat little dots and get bigger. The point of the game is to keep going without running into yourself. At first I thought it was just a nice way to relax, but now I have a craving for it all the time. I'm trying to go cold turkey off of it right now.
5) I feel really bad for the people that work at our hotel. There is a restaurant downstairs that is staffed everynight, but I don't think they have had a customer for over a week. They just sit around in their uniforms until closing time.
6) One of my Arabic teachers is name Ala' ad-deen (the ' denotes a glottal stop). This is the correct Arabic form of "Aladin"...as in the disney movie.
7) They have a TV station over here called "MBC Action" that plays non-stop American action movies. It is really popular, but I'm pretty sure that 6/7 of the American public have never heard of any of these films because they are the ones that never made it to theatres. They're are all pretty ridiculous.
8) Amman is a really interesting city because it is caught between developing into a new important international financial city kind of like Dubai, but it is still lacking some important infrastructure. For example, the part of town we are currently living in is the financial district which has all sorts of new tall buildings and banks going up everywhere. There is also hardly any sidewalk (and what little side walk there is, there are huge holes a few feet deep), empty fields with grazing sheep, and places where sewege is spewing out on to the streets.
9) There is rampant patriotism everywhere. Every room you walk into has a picture of the current king (King Abdullah), or a picture of the current king with the old king (his late father King Hussein) in somekind of father-son bonding position with their arms around each other smiling.
10) There are metal detectors at all the hotels, malls, and tourist attractions. But nobody ever searches me or anything because I look european. I just walk through, it beeps and the guy dosen't even do anything. One time a guy asked to look in side my backpack, and as he did, a big hunk of ash from his ciggarete fell inside.
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