#9-24-16

[victroiaa]

So uh what an interesting day!! I took my best friend ON HER BIRTHDAY IF I MAY ADD to see her FAVORITE band for FREEEEEEEEE and we met Adrian Young from no doubt! While we saw THE SPECIALS. Yeah ok Life's good 😎

[jumanaabroad]

Me again

hey,

I know it’s been a while, and in my defense i’ve been a little sick lately. but i will try to keep this updated more often now. I even decided to put it in my calendar to keep this up, but i’ve always been bad at diaries, so here’s hoping.

I’ll break down what’s happened in the last couple of weeks.

So far, I have managed not to fall asleep in our Arabic class, which is honestly a miracle considering i have not been sleeping in the evenings for several reasons. the biggest of which would be that this last tuesday (9/20) was the country’s elections. and now the entire country has been in a riot about the results. I have no clue who got elected and I don’t know any of their stances, but the people who supported them have been celebrating for the past three days, honking and fireworks and parties all through the night. and the people who oppose them have been burning tires in the city center in protest. we usually try to avoid those areas because we aren’t Jordanians and the election really has no weight on us, but it was interesting to see the results.

I did spend Eid here, which was not what i expected, but then again I am staying with a Christian family here so I didn’t really expect them to go to the mosque. I ended up going to a wedding and it was interesting but awkward af because it was so obvious that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I knew no one and I was wearing my hijab in the middle of a Greek Orthodox wedding. Z, one of the organizers from the university here asked me two days ago why I didn’t request a Muslim host family, which I did. I guess the request didn’t get put through on the DePaul side of things :/ but it’s really alright my host family isnt horrible or anything. It’s just a little weird because my host mom is only 7 years older than me and has a five year old and a two year old. And aside from that, I just have the feeling that we wouldn’t run in the same circles if we had gone to the same high school. you know? like her interests are very different from mine and her friend group is much like her, and nothing like me. idk, i get along with her but like tonight i was sitting in the living room reading Game of Thrones while she was doing her nails. Not that there is anything wrong with how she spends her time, it’s just another example of how we are really different people.

I have gone to a few historic places in the last couple of days . the first being the Roman Amphitheater in Amman. It was freaking huge and so freaking steep, like we were climbing up to the top on hands and knees steep.

it’s weird how close history is here. I grew up in Chicago and loved going to the museums. But there anything even remotely old was behind a rope or under glass with guards posted in every room. Here there is only a guard to take your ticket at the door and a sign saying “please don’t touch.” Z was with us when we went to the Amphitheater and she was saying how when she was growing up she and her siblings would play with little bits of mosaic they found in their backyard. They didn’t even realize they were important until they were adults and a group of archaeologists from the University of Toronto came to excavate the site. like seriously this is weird. 

I also went to Mt. Nebo and La Storia. Mt Nebo is the place where Moses was allowed a glimpse into Heaven. There’s a lot of ruins up there, I think at one point there was a monastery there. La Storia is a museum at the base of the mountain that shows life sized scenes of the stories of the prophets Moses and Jesus and John the Baptist (RAW) and part of the story of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW). they even have a gift show where you can watch them put together mosaics and sand art. We didn’t get anything because my host family knows a lot of the shop owners in town and they didn’t want me to have to pay tourist prices for what they could get me for half or less from their friends’ shops. 

We also went to the Church of St. John in Madaba. it was interesting to see the church because it was built over Byzantine ruins and we got to go up to the top of the bell tower and see the whole city. 

we went to the Amman Citadel too. it was the medieval fortified center of the city. well the ruins of it anyways. it was really interesting, and kinda bizarre to see ruins an a Skyscraper within the same space. I keep telling people that these things are super interesting to me for the simple reason that there is nothing like it in America. the oldest things there are around 600 years old, some stuff is older, but there isn’t as much of it as there is here. 

Yesterday me and my host family went to visit their family in Karak, and I got to see the castle there. it was really cool, we didn’t get to see the whole thing because we got there after the museum/mosaic bit was closed but even going to the exterior bits was interesting. we were mostly walking across the top level of it, aka where the archers would take their positions during assaults on the castle. it was pretty cool. It was the castle where Salahudin al Ayubi fought from. 

I’ll post the pics tomorrow but it’s been a long day and the internet is being stubborn :/