1) There is a kid in our program named Matt Baird. This name is rather unfortunate because "maat" in Arabic means "he died", and "baird" means "cold". So his name, Matt Baird, translates as "he died cold" in Arabic. Every time he tells an Arab his name, they either bust out laughing or think they misheard.
2) One of the first days I was here, I accidentally called somebody a really horrible name in Arabic. I was talking with some Shabaab (a gang of guys who sit around and make fun of each other) and was intending on calling the guy a "humar" (donkey) in Arabic, because that is how this group of Shabaab refer to each other. But I mispronounced the word and said something close to the word , but the vowels were off (I think that it was something like "Hamur" or something). The kid got this look in his eyes like he was going to hurt me, then he gave me a lecture about how I should never use that word, taught me the correct pronunciation of "donkey", and then shook my hand and acted like nothing had ever happened. It was a close call.
3) A girl in our group had hiccups, so I offered her some water and told here to drink it with her head upside down. This didn't work. So a few minutes later I jumped in my chair and startled here to which she screamed. The hiccups were gone, but this guy came running out of his office thinking that I was trying to rape her or something. We tried to explain to him what had happened, but he was still really confused, and still thought that I'd done something to her. Then one of the guys we were sitting with (it was actually Matt Baird who was mentioned in item #1)just happened to know the word for hiccups in Arabic so we could explain to the guy what happened, to which he laughed, said "salamtik" (your peace), and walked away. This was another close call.
4) My roommate and I met a guy who told us about a history book about the United States that said that a U.S. president was assassinated for making a speech in which he said that Jews should be kept from immigrating to the United States. We thought this sounded pretty fishy, something that we would read in the "al-haqqiqa" tabloid we read every week for one of our classes, but the guy insisted that he had read it in a history book. So he got my roommate's phone number and called us back yesterday with the book in hand and told us that "President Benjamin Franklin the 3rd" was the one who was assassinated. We insisted that this person was not a president. After doing some research on the internet, I have come to the conclusion that there was never a "Benjamin Franklin the 3rd" in the first place.
5) The Arabic language is wierd because the written language is universally understood by all Arabs, but the every-day spoken language changes drastically from region to region. In the United States they taught us the universaly written form and the egyptian spoken language because it is the most commonly understood form of sproken arabic. So when we showed up in our host family, they thought it was so funny they we spoke like egyptians. The mom especially keeps saying things to us in Egyptain Arabic and laughing. We are slowly exchanging our Egyptian accent for a Jordanian accent, but people still think it's really funny or "cute".
6) This is old, but I was just thinking about recently. When we were in Egypt, one of our guides kept using the expression "too many" to express what native speakers of English mean when they say "a lot". It was funny because he would say stuff like "there are too many pyramids here in Egypt" when he wanted to say "there are a lot of pyramids here in Egypt". In english, the expression "too many" is used in the negative sense, but he never used the expression this way. He also pronounced everything according to Egyptian Arabic pronunciation rules in which only two consununts can be pronounced at the same time, so "words" would be pronounced "wordes", or "mosques" would be pronounced "mosqes".
7) I was talking with my host brother Yazan, and somehow we started talking about the meaning of the word "satanic". He then informed me that people who like disco dancing are satanic. Apparently, a bunch of people in Amman got together and had a "satanic disco party", and were subsequently arrested. I thought he must have been mistranslating, so I did a little disco dance with my left hand on my hip and right finger pointing up and then down to see if he knew what dsico really was, to which he said, "yes, this is disco. It is very satanic."
8) To get to the University of Jordan everyday, my roomate and I take a taxi to a prominent intersection where we meet up with a girl from our program and then take a bus. Every few days the bus drivers keep trying to charge us more because we are foreigners. This is illegal and we usually just sit down and ignore them. So we were here at the University for a week in between semesters here at the University, and therefore hardly anybody here and limited bus service. When we finished class we walked out in front and there was one #3 bus (the one that we take) sitting there, so we started walking towards it. When we got close to it, the number on the bus changed to #16 out of no where. We stood there confused, and decided that we should probably just take a taxi home instead. As we turned and started walking away, this guy ran out of the bus towards us and asked us where we were going. We told him, and he said that the bus would go there. We got on, and he asked for more than the normal fair, so we said thanks and walked away. Then another guy came out of the bus after us, probably his son, and asked us why we weren't going to take it, to which we told him we normally pay less. He said we should pay the normal fair, but the driver was really bitter about it. We were the only people on the bus besides the driver and his son. The driver then turned the number on the bus back to #3. We sat on the bus for about twenty minutes and only one other person got on. A bunch of people started congrogating on the curb in front of the bus, and when a #16 bus showed up, they all got on. Our driver got out and started arguing with someone. He was pretty mad and kept walking in circles shouting at someone on his cellphone. Still, no one else got on the bus. It seemes to us that the driver had known that a lot of people would be going on the #16 route, but changed it to #3 because he thought he would get more for taking some foreigners, but we ended up paying the normal fair. Then only one other perosn got on his bus, so he was mad. After we had been on the bus for almost forty-five minutes, he drove all four of us, but he was incrediblly ticked.
9) For some reason, Arabs have a really hard time pronouncing my name. I have no idea why because the sounds in "bruce" are all found in Arabic. I often hear people say my name like "press" or "buush" or one of my teachers always says "mosh". My favorite one though is "brush".
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