Marhaba min Amman!

I've been in Jordan for just over a day right now, and I'm not sure I'm much closer to being non-overwhelmed than I was when I got here, but I'll try to chill out enough to tell ya'll (whoever you may be) what I've been up to.

Because I know sometimes I get bored reading about everything someone's been doing, I'll simple and build up to the most detailed description of events. Just read as far as you're interested.

Important events:
Monday - arriving in Amman without loss of luggage, being really tired, meeting lots of new people, smoking sheesha with about thirty other American students
Tuesday - waking up early, orientation presentation, going to the Dead Sea, seeing the mountains of Palestine, learning about my internship options, swimming in the Dead Sea, going to a Jordanian grocery store

Assorted observations and notes:
- Jordan has a long life expectancy than the US, despite having much less money and water
- I am finding lots of people who want to travel after the program ends, which bodes well for a trip to Lebanon
- I have eaten hummus for every meal so far, including breakfast - I wonder how soon I'll start hating it (not even close yet)
- I have internship interviews with two NGOs that are promoting the development of democracy in Jordan! Wish me luck!
- I turn twenty in a week!!!

Ramadan: The lunar calendar says that Ramadan is to be celebrated from 20 August until around 20 September. (They won't know exactly until they know when the crescent moon will reappear, which makes it interesting trying to plan ahead, since holidays from school are scheduled around the end.) It's a very important holiday here, and you can get in trouble (UJ security will kick you off the university campus) for not obeying the fast in public from dawn till dusk. Even drinking water is prohibited. During the day, restaurants aren't allowed to serve anything but takeout, there's no smoking, and only five-star hotels are allowed to serve alcohol during the month, no matter what time it is. (One girl in the program turned twenty-one today. She will not be celebrating in properly American style for quite a while - and even when alcohol is sold, the 200% tax makes it a bit pricey here.) There are exceptions to the no eating/drinking rule for things like travel, and food is still served during the day at touristy places like the Dead Sea resort we went to for lunch. But starting tomorrow, we're going to have to be pretty much fasting for the rest of the month. School days will be shorter than normal, though, which makes that a little easier. One other difficulty is that many foreigners (especially Westerners) leave the country during Ramadan, so a lot of the internship interviews with foreign-controlled NGOs won't happen until after it's over - luckily one of mine is run by one of the Jordanian professors here.

First impressions of Jordan/Amman: there's not very much color here. Everything seems to be shades of brown and tan - the houses, the land, even the sky is colored by dust around the edges (although so far it's been incredibly blue overhead.) The Jordanians use a lot of limestone for building, according to the guide we had today. Nearly all the buildings are similarly colored square blocks of stone in various sizes and states of (dis)repair. From a distance, it can be hard to distinguish which buildings have windows and which don't, and none of the ones we passed seemed to be really crumbling, which made it more difficult to visualize the economic conditions than in some countries. There are some more temporary structures, mainly tents, and maybe all of the people in the stone houses are moderately well off (Amman is considerably wealthier than the south and east of the country) but I'm not getting as much of an impression of poverty from the buildings as I have in the other countries I've visited, despite the unhappy economic figures we got in part of the orientation - the numbers are pretty similar to Guatemala. Maybe I simply haven't seen the right parts yet.

Upcoming:
Tomorrow - an Arabic oral interview and placement test I am going to do terribly at
Thursday - moving in with my host family
6 September (yes, that is Sunday) - beginning of classes
8 September - my birthday (I want to be really sure you remember it's coming)
10-12 September - trip to Wadi Rum, Aqaba and Petra

More details: I got here on Monday at about 5 PM, which is 7 AM Portland time, after having slept for approximately six hours out of the previous 48. I was so tired I almost fell asleep in the car from the airport (where I arrived, obtained a visa, found my luggage and got through customs without any problems). There were ten or fifteen CIEE students on my flight (direct from Chicago - twelve hours!) so there were lots of people and cars there to meet us. There were two other students in the car, but it was entirely silent all the way to the hotel, except for one occasion, just before we arrived, when the driver pointed out the commercial district nearby where we could find shopping and - of more interest to most of us - coffeeshops where we could go to smoke sheesha (which, for any family members reading this, is simply flavored tobacco smoked in a water pipe - it's legal in the US).

We got to the hotel, got checked in and met our roommates (I'd actually met mine in the airport in Chicago - it was pretty to pick out the students on exchange from the other people on the very uncrowded flight), bought Jordanian phones, got our orientation packets and so forth. It's Ramadan right now, so only really touristy places serve food during the day, but by the time we got to the hotel we didn't have long to wait before iftar - the evening breaking of the fast - was served at 7. The food was good, nothing particularly bizarre, at least among what I tried, but my hands were shaking I was so tired.

Afterwards, a big group decided to go out to a sheesha bar. I wasn't really sure if I wanted to go, but my roommate and a couple other girls I'd met on the plane or eaten dinner with were going on a walk with some of the (female) student interns from UJ. Most of them speak three or four languages (a couple are studying Spanish and Hebrew in school, and they all have really good English), and they gave us useful advice about living in Jordan. Eventually they had to go back, and the rest of us wandered on to the coffeehouse where the other CIEE kids were hanging out and smoking water pipes. The waiters pulled a table over to the end of their table and we sat and smoked and talked for a while. I was tired so the sheesha made me light-headed really quickly, and eventually it got rough and made a lot of us start coughing, but it was really cheap and lasted a long time.

We went back and I tried (and failed) to get on the internet - so many Americans trying to get online at the same time had totally destroyed the wireless network at the hotel. Eventually I gave up and passed out in bed.

We had to wake up early this morning in order to eat breakfast before being bussed to the Dead Sea. There was a mixture of Jordanian and Western food available - pita and hummus, eggs, corn flakes and milk. It took about an hour to get from Amman to our first destination, the Dead Sea Panorama Complex (exactly what it sounds like - a museum with a spectacular view of the Dead Sea and across to Palestine). We had a guide who told us many interesting things about Jordan, most of which I don't remember. When we got close to the Dead Sea, I started to get texts on my new phone from the phone company welcoming me to Palestine and urging me to "Smell the jasmine and taste the olives." I love this country already.

At the Panorama Complex, we had a chance to take pictures before we were all herded into a windowless meeting room for our orientation. We heard about strategies for coping with being in Jordan (don't forget you're not in the US!), some of the major obvious differences between the US and Jordan and their implications, reviewed the schedule, played a mass 'getting to know you' game, had a lovely coffee/tea break with yummy pastries, and at the end had some time to see the museum and explore before the bus took us down to the sea itself.

We were taken to a four-star resort hotel on the shore of the Dead Sea, where we were served a fabulous lunch buffet along with all the wealthy European tourists there. It was incredibly hot - much hotter than Amman - probably because the Dead Sea is the lowest place in the world, leading to warm temperatures year round. I had to wait to get in the water because I had a meeting to talk to the directors about internship placement - I have two interviews that I'm really excited about, and I really hope I get picked for one. After that, though, I had almost two hours to swim in the sea and the less salty swimming pools nearby. It is incredible how well you float - I didn't really get it until I actually felt it. When the waves were strong, it was really hard to stay standing because your body just wanted to float up. Also, the salt really stung around my fingernails, where the edges were a little raw.

I didn't get the black mud put on me, but there was a guy there with a bucket who would if you wanted. I did have to shower off the salt before going up to the other pools - my skin was slippery with it. Because it was a tourist place, in addition to getting lunch we could wear our American swimming suits, and luckily I picked my one-piece, because there was a lap pool and I was desperately in need of some exercise. In one of the other pools, there was a water slide, but it ran almost horizontally and if you tried to go down sitting up you had trouble making it to the bottom - I figured out that you had to go down flat but the girl in front of me hadn't, so we briefly became very close friends. The next time around, she worked out that you could go down very quickly if you went headfirst, so that became the new method and there were no further collisions.

Coming back, we went by a more direct route. At the north end of the sea, across the Jordan River, we could see Jericho, and the guide said that you could see the lights of Jerusalem in the hills above - maybe when it gets dark? I dozed part of the way, tired from sun and general lack of sleep.

Back at the hotel, I managed to get internet (hooray!) but didn't do anything useful and then we had dinner - fried fish and dates in addition to the ever-present hummus, pita, cucumber and tomato. There were crescent cakes filled with coconut and walnut, which I guess are traditional at Ramadan, as are the dates. Post-dinner, I went with some girls to an ATM and then to try to find a shop selling phone cards. We ran into another group who said all the little stores were closed, so we went to a grocery instead. They had phone cards there, but there were so many of us they were starting to run out and I decided to wait until tomorrow to get one. Other than the Arabic lettering all over the place, though, the store could almost have been an American grocery - just as well stocked, many of the same brands, bright clean modern facility (and you know, a lot of grocery stores that I can think of in America are located in square, tan-brick buildings too).

And then I came back, gave up on trying to study for the placement test (no matter how much I review, I just don't remember enough for it to be useful) and got on the internet - and this time I actually communicated with people!