Here is the situation I'm in right now: I live with a really nice family. I love them and I already feel at home with them. For the last few nights I have sat around with them and just talked about random stuff for hours. Their last name is Zabalawi. The dad is a translator by profession, but dosen't work right now. The mom's name is Hana and she is a stay at home mom. The oldest son is named Rami and he works at HSBC bank. The next ldest so is named Yazan and he is studying music education at the Jordanian academy of music. The youngest is a 14 year old girl named Layal. We have an interesting thing going on because our host mom's sisters are also hosting students from our program, so we go over to their houses everyonce in awhile. Everyone in the family speaks some English. One of the sons will only talk to me in English. The daughter is really into Magic tricks, so everynight she does a couple new tricks for me.
I now have a completly different perspective on language. I think it is amazing that we as humans can communicate to eachother what we do in our native languages. I thought I knew so much more Arabic than I actually do. Arabic is especially hard because there are always two differnt ways to say something, but in Jordanian Arabic, there are multiple ways to say something since there is such a borad range of different dialects from the Palestinians, Beduins, Syrians, and Iraqis who all live here.
As I said before, we live pretty far away from the university. So every day we take a 35 cent Taxi ride to an intersection and then take a 50 cent bus ride to the University. It takes over an hour by bus what would probably take 30 minutes by Taxi but would cost 1.40 a person each way. The biggest problem for us in doing this is making sure we have small enough change. The ATM gives us 20JD and 50JD notes, but nobody has change for these unless you buy something around the price of the note. If your taxi ride is 1.2JD and you give the driver a 5JD note, he most likely can't give you change. It is a huge pain.
In other news though, I had my first writting appointment yesterday and my writting teacher turned out to be one of my old teachers from two years ago. I was supprissed that she recognised me on the spot. My classes are going better, but I'm always really tired during class for some reason and have a hard time paying attention. One of the nespapers we read each week is called "Al-Haqiiqa" ("the fact" in english) and it is pretty much a tabloid...but a political tabloid. It is kind of like readin the national enquirer to learn how to read english newspapers, except that Al-Haqiiqa is a step up from the national enquirer...but only a step. Each issue talks about Zionist-Ameican conspiracies to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. This week, there was an article about how some organization called "the messanger of allah unites us" was promoting the ban of Dutch-Danish products (I couldn't think of anything importnat that they would ban besides those Danish cookies that come in the circular tins. I love stuff like this. I look forward to reading Al-Haqiiqa each week. Also, the maps here don't have Israel marked or an Israeli flag. We started playing a game with people here in our program where we would take them to a map in the attrium of the language center and tell them to look for a couple countries flags first, and then ask them to find Israel...which they can't because it dosen't exist according to the map company.
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