Swimming in the Gulf of Aqaba, part of the Red Sea

Striking rock erosions in Wadi Rum

Impressive mosque (and a little glare) in Alexandria, Egypt

Wandering away from a tour guide at a crusader castle somewhere in Jordan

Walking along the Mediterrean in Alexandria

Riding Camels through Wadi Rum

Roman Ruins in the north of Jordan, near the Sea of Galilee

Daily Life in Jordan (with all of its positives and negatives)

Even though I live a neighborhood that I refer to as the Beverly Hills of Amman—a suburbanesque area peppered with palm trees, neighborhood grocery stores and heavily-guarded embassies—I still encounter the differences of daily life in a developing Arab country. Just walking around the University of Jordan reveals many of the differences in being a college student in Jordan. After a little more than three hours of Arabic class we grab lunch for about $.75-$1.50 in either an on-campus cafeteria or at one of the many falafel/smoothie restaurants just off campus. Walking back to the Language Center, where all the classes for non-native speakers are held, bears a striking resemblance to a catwalk—groups of Jordanians sit shoulder to shoulder down the street to people watch. For most students it seems like a university education is a just a good excuse to be out of the house and away from family. Interestingly enough, most girls have found that they don’t need any more school supplies than what fits inside a small clutch purse. Couples lurk quietly under weeping willows in garden areas where they can (scandal!) hold hands. The University of Jordan—the premier university in all of Jordan—actually has a restricted section in its library. Like something out of Harry Potter, students have to petition for access to the banned books (most address topics like the creation of Israel or sex).
I joke that daily life as a student at the University of Jordan feels as if I were back in high school—that is, if I were a lot cooler in high school. Mandatory class goes almost all day, leading me to spend a lot of class time thinking about my weekend plans, joke with classmates or look for activities to warrant being excused from class (“but it’s a once in a lifetime experience to hear the Pakistani ambassador speak Doctora Basma…”) I don’t have a car in a driving-oriented city. On the weekends I frequently find myself at the mall with friends. After school, American students with Arab homestays have to report where they are going, with whom and when they will be home.

Most days I am ecstatic if, by perching precariously on the edge of my apartment’s balcony, I can pick up our neighbor Abu Seif’s slower-than-dial-up wireless internet for long enough to write a few emails. Now being given an address like “The restaurant is near the first circle” is perfectly comprehensible. It’s almost impossible to avoid coughing after a large breath of the leaded fuel emissions produced by the rush hour traffic. I love coming home in the afternoons to watch Al Jazeera English, usually discovering an odd documentary or even just catching the headlines from a 24 hour news network whose top story does not involve a female pop singer’s messy private life. Although my apartment has carpet (a sign of status since most Arab households simply tile their floors for easy cleaning), I miss some conveniences like dishwashers, garbage disposals, spring mattresses and most of all a dryer for my clothes. Keeping the windows open (since very few places in Amman have air conditioning) invites a thin layer of dust on flat surfaces and, if we haven’t cleaned recently, a great number of bugs nesting in a pile of last night’s dishes. The only minimally adequate water heater has lead to quite a few frigid showers and chilly evenings as winter approaches.

I live in a three level house where fellow female students live with me in the bottom two levels of the apartment underneath our landlords. Our overzealous grandpa-like landlord, a former electrical engineer (who worked under Qaddafi in Libya “when he was still a good man, not crazy”), frequently surveys our house hoping to find burnout light bulbs or various appliances that need servicing. Happily, now that his wife has returned from a visit to Canada we only hear from him once every two days.
I could describe the dynamics of our apartment in various ways. We are good friends who check on each other if they haven’t come home by 11 pm and a little microcosm of interfaith dialogue (as my roommate put it “one Muslim, one Jew, two Christians and a partridge in a pear tree”). Our house is frequently host to dinner parties and bootleg movie screening sessions, a safe haven for other students whose tolerance for their homestay has worn thin.

Living long enough in the Middle East to develop a daily routine and converse on a basic level in Arabic has been an excellent introduction to life in another culture that American media often portrays as strange, scary and oppressive. Although I look forward to the day when I will return to a country where I don’t have to take a taxi to school and where I can hug a male friend on the street or read a book for pleasure alone in a café without breaking social norms, I don’t regret taking advantage of the chance to live in Jordan.

A Room with a View (Eid El-Fitr Fii Misr)

Around the middle of October, after an entire month of closed Nescafe shops and boarded up falafel stands everyone in Jordan was looking forward to the long weekend holiday of Eid El-Fitr. The sizable minority of Ex-pats and Christians were rejoicing that food no longer had to be eaten as surreptitiously as miscreant high schoolers sneaking around bathrooms and abandoned hallways for a smoke. For Muslims in Jordan, the holiday is a celebration of revelation of the Quran marked by visiting family, eating special shortbread sweets made only once a year and giving gifts of money, toys or a new outfit for all the children in the extended family.

To take advantage of our four day weekend, I traveled with three other fellow students on the program to Alexandria and Cairo. My nearly two months of immersion in Arabic did me little good in understanding the Egyptian dialect. And even though everywhere we went we noticed the sizable difference in prices for Egyptians and what was charged for non-Egyptians…To those traveling to this area of the world, Egypt is an adventure not to be missed!

Our flight to Alexandria ended up being delayed for three hours (the reason? the flight crew had not yet arrived). Every time we asked an airport employee about the status of our flight we were first given a puzzled look (as if to say, “Why is it a problem when the plane leaves? The plane will leave when it’s ready to leave.”) and then told it would be leaving “in just ten more minutes.” (I may have mentioned this before, but I don’t think I can overemphasize how much I love the laid back atmosphere of the Middle East.) Happily, we passed the time with long conversation with a fellow English speaker who was reading Bear Grilles’ autobiography and told us the story of changing his life from being a high powered accountant in England to teaching English in a rural area of the UAE and now Amman. We finally arrived at the alley in Alexandria where our hotel was located at about 3am. We tiredly climbed up a well worn spiral staircase to our seaside room; the welcoming echoes honking cars and fighting street cats wafting though open windows.

Alexandria itself is a long thin city on the coast of the Mediterranean. Glittering streamers and brightly colored lights were strewn from the gritty apartment balconies of the crooked alleyways. It seemed as every Egyptian male under 30 was out and about in the streets until dawn. We had once again missed tourist season and freely roamed around markets to shop for colorful scarves and fake designer shoes with other locals. We went to a famous sea food restaurant where we ordering by choosing various kinds of fresh fish, shrimp and calamari straight from an ice box. It appeared fried or stewed with tomatoes, with bread and arab salads minutes later on our table. Islamic architecture, especially mosques, in Egypt are beautiful, intricate and ornately carved. About the equivalent of $.05 USD will get you halfway across the city on Alexandria’s version of San Francisco trolleys. Street food is amazing— we tried falafel, burgers and (my favorite) a mix of curry macaroni, rice and lentils. The proprietors of our hotel recommended a large garden/beach area at the far west of the city where for less than a quarter we swam in the temperate Mediterranean Sea (and were finally not the only women in sight without long sleeves and hijab). Our cash-only, $6 a night hotel reminded me of E.M. Forester’s A Room with a View, stoically overlooked the sea, a rugged shadow its former Victorian glory.

On the first day of Eid Al-Fitr in Egypt, “feast day” which for political reasons differs from when it is celebrated in Jordan, we took an early train for a one day whirlwind tour through Cairo. Little did I know that one simple choice would determine the course of the rest of the day. After traveling two scenic hours through the fertile region near the Nile, I convinced our group that we should ask the tourist police to recommend a means of transportation to the Giza pyramids (I had heard horror stories of friends who’s “official” government tour consisted of going through a hole in barbed wire fences on camels while their guides bribed the Egyptian police). The tourist police walked us to a hotel nearby where we sat, drank tea and were canoodled into taking their official guide to tour the site. The official guide showed up in his beat-up blue station wagon, took us to a papyrus shop where we sat, drank tea and were shown how ancient papyrus was made. Then we were then to the “student discount” Giza Pyramid Tour office where we sat, were offered tea and then shown around the site on an hour long horseback ride. After insisting that we now wanted to go to on to the Egyptian museum to see some mummies, our friendly guide took on a “quick stop” for Egyptian hospitality at his uncle’s house. No surprise, his uncle’s house was also attached to his uncle’s perfume shop. We then sat, drank tea, ate lunch and listening to another pitch for perfume. At this point in the afternoon we simply arranged for our guide to drop us off at various sites in Cairo and become our own personal taxi. We haggled in Arabic at a famous sook, market, and walked the city (by the way harassment by Egyptian men makes getting stared at in Jordan look tame!) By the time our day came to a close we had grown quite fond of our personal tour guide who walked us around parks nears the Nile and through the downtown area, shooing away Egyptian boys hoping a conversation with us would improve their English and perhaps procure an American passport.

(I have to apologize for the lack of pictures on the blog, oftentimes my internet connection here is Jordan is not fast enough to warrant the posting of an entire album's worth of photos. If you happen to be friends with me on facebook, however, there are quite a few pictures there!)

Warm People, Warm Climate

People in the Arab world are known for their hospitality and warmth. Everywhere I go, whether it’s running into a female college student on the University of Jordan campus or just about every cab driver who hears me butcher the Arabic language says “Ahlan wa Sahlan,” or welcome to Jordan. People I have just meet are concerned that I am happy and well taken care of here, each feels at least a little responsible for ensuring I having a good experience in their country. Of course, having to sit down and have a 15 minute conversation with my landlord just to ask him where the nearest ATM (in which I repeatedly have to decline his offer to just loan me any money I need now) is can be annoying to this American who prizes efficiency. However, I’ve had so many experiences with people who amaze me at how they have opened their homes and most often their kitchen cupboards to strangers.

In Aqaba, my friends and I were in a small music store and after we had purchased some CDs we asked the young guy standing behind the counter where a close coffee shop would be. He insisted on not just giving us directions to the place, but walked us to the establishment and played card games with us for an hour…and my friend Sarah has since met up with him and his friends when she returned to Aqaba! My roommate Ashley goes to the gym around if-tar time and frequently runs into the gym owners (who now know her on a first name basis) eating dinner; she often jokes that in attempts to get in shape for a marathon she will end up eating a full meal and having several cups of tea. Another one of my roommates, Nikki, is an absolute beginner in Arabic but loves saying the greetings she just learned to our neighbors while walking past their house. A simple marhaban, hello, once got her invited in for dinner, tea, sweets and several hours of watching wedding videos of the mother’s many children. I’ve eaten dinner with Summer, my American-Jordanian roommate, and her entire extended family quite a few times now in which her aunt Fatima has taught us to cook the sweets Jordan is famous for and her cousin Qabas has become an informal Arabic tutor to me using arabic movies and children’s fairytales. All in all, I've enjoyed the kind people here in Jordan and had some wonderful experiences, even with my limited command of Arabic.

Weekend Vacations in Jordan

By far the best part of studying abroad in Jordan has been the chance to escape the bustle of Amman and venture out the varied territory that lies outside the capital. Even when things don’t go the way we plan, my fellow American students and I always have a good time.

One of the first weekends our program was here, about 20 of us rented a bus to take us to a reputable nature reserve in the north to spend the day hiking in olive hills. Even on this short hour and a half drive outside the city I got to see the city of Jerash and the ruins of a crusader castle in Ajloun. But of course nothing in the Middle East ever turns out the way you plan; for when our group arrived at the Ajloun Nature Reserve we were informed that all the local guides had gone home for the day and we could not find the trails without a knowledgeable guide. Searching for some comparable hiking in the area lead us to what was is best called a large picnic site that the Lonely Planet described as having some “lovely unmarked trails.” (Translate “unmarked trails” into forging through small, thorny brush followed by a caravan of small children selling gum and men offering rides on their “air conditioned taxis,” i.e. horses, while we attempt to get a view of sparsely wooden, but pretty, hills).

A weekend getaway to the Jordanian town on the Red Sea was a completely different mix of sun, coral and an eccentric hostel owner. A smaller group of us took a ridiculously cheap bus to Aqaba and stayed in a kitschy hostel only a few meters from the beach and 10 km from the Saudi border. Snorkeling and diving in the Red Sea is supposed to be some of the best in the world and we got a personal tour of the reefs that begin immediately off the rocky shore. Swimming among schools of fish and floating past sea anemones filled with life that one might only see on the Discovery Channel was one of the coolest experiences of my life. To complete the day, we ate relatively inexpensive seafood at a five star restaurant with a view of the twinkling neighboring Israeli and Egyptian coastal cities. We ended up being entertained by our hostel owner’s stories of his bedouin youth at a late night bonfire-like gathering of other CIEE students on the beach. A lot of Aqaba was rather low-key due to the month of Ramadan, but we still explored downtown the next day in search of unique antiques, 1 Dinar copies of cheesy Arab music and a café serving various forms of caffeine and (my favorite) lemon mint juice.

Lastly, in search of an escape from the quick-tempered taxi drivers and the lack of “normal” life so prevalent during the month of Ramadan lead our program directors to plan a big trip to Petra and Wadi Rum. Bouncing along in the back of jeep through the desert, I observed the stark contrast of mountains rising from the sand dunes And although I firmly believe that walking through sand is only a rational act if a beach is at the end of the trek, contemplating the beautiful culmination of colors in the sunset in Wadi Rum over the uniquely eroded rock formations was another one of the best highlights of Jordan thus far. That evening we stayed in a Bedouin camp complete with tents constructed out of goat hair blankets, traditional food, live music and dancing. The next two days were a whirlwind of camel rides (the camel I rode for the first hour was one of the most unpleasant of the bunch and kept trying to sit down, buck me off and continually roared as loudly as it could…however the next two hours were great when I rode a more even-tempered camel) and travel through the famous ancient city of Petra. By some stroke of luck (or rather wasta, arab connections) we walked through the long rock corridor early in the morning which meant that we were able to see and take pictures of the Treasury, of Indiana Jones’ fame, before any other tour groups were allowed into the park. Most of the sights in Petra are ancient royal tombs of the trader civilization that lived in Petra predating Roman times. We climbed up nearly 1,000 steps to a site called the Monastery with an excellent view of the rugged terrain that lies between Petra and Israel (and quite a big selection of Bedouins selling camel bone jewelry). In some spare time I also chatted with quite a few genuinely friendly “free spirits” that are part of the Bedouin tribe that maintains the park (including a seven year old local who through American TV and movies had a perfect American accent, in addition to the knowledge of several Bob Marley songs).

Experiencing Ramadan for a day

Having been invited to my roommate Summer’s Uncle’s house for the sundown break-fast meal of Ramadan, the if-tar, my two roommates and I decided to try what it was like to fast all day during the lunar month of Ramadan. Luckily, I have a pretty full schedule at the university from 9-5 so stoping to but lunch at a nearby vendor’s stand was not too terribly tempting. However, fasting certainly makes you more tired and irritable! At about 3pm, over a half an hour past when my Paths to Peace in the Middle East class was supposed to begin (but not yet begun) I started loudly grumbling about the “ridulous non-linear concept of time in the Middle East.” On any other day the slower pace of a major metropolis like Amman is rather refreshing, if not welcomed. The cab ride home (by “the shortcut” route) with four cranky roommates who just want to eat was also not the chipper experience it normally is. I was glad I participated in that experience though since I don’t think the if-tar meal would have meant as much to me if I had not fasted all day.
Arriving at Summer’s Uncle’s house in East Amman, the four of us were welcomed by Summer’s 22 year-old cousin, Qabas, chopping cucumbers for salad in front of an American TV show. Since I don’t have the ability to chop vegetables to the tiny size required in Jordanian salad, I most just watched while everyone prepared the meal for about an hour. I was able to make a little conversation in my limited Arabic vocabulary. At sundown, around 6:45, the family turned TV to the live stream of the King Hussein’s Mosque sundown call to prayer. The formal living room was then transformed into the dining room as the family of six and the four of us sat around the large coffee table in a large free-for-all meal. Some noodle soup and salad started us off, followed by sweet and sourish chicken and rice and pizza. For dessert later we had Arabic ice cream (essentially frozen milk with pistachio) and Chocolate cake I helped make from a box. Qabas then gave us a tour of the house and we watched the quality film Material Girls while her parents when to pray at the mosque. Although many people from Jordan stereotype East Amman as a low-income or lower class area, the buildings and shops in this area were comparable to the quality of those in West Amman. The house did not have carpet, just tile floor, and the kitchen was small for the six person family but overall it was similar to my apartment. It was a lot of fun to participate in such a big event as the fast during Ramadan and to share a meal with nine other people who had also fasted all day. The practice’s surrounding Ramadan intend to remind Muslims that they are to feed the spirit not just the body, reaffirm care for poor (those who may have no choice but to eat only one meal a day) and bring families together. From what I have seen many people in Jordan look forward to the month of Ramadan as a time like the holidays, while more secularly-minded people in Jordan dread the changes in daily life. Ramadan in Jordan blends classic practices with modern life; Jordanians families eat pizza for dinner some nights, put up glowing cresent lights and drive by Starbuck’s signs that wish one a happy Ramadan.

Sexual Harassment

Before the spring semester ended a few months ago, my university conducted a study abroad orientation session where they warned us about culture shock and gave us tips on transitioning into another living situation. They spoke about experiencing a ‘honeymoon’ period in the country followed by a period of ‘hostility’ after which a person comes to terms with the new society until it eventually feels like home.
One aspect of Jordanian culture I am currently hostile to is the long stares and comments women (white women and Jordanians wearing hijab alike) get while simply walking down the street. The impression I received from travel guidebooks and CIEE study abroad information was that, as long as one dressed respectfully in deference to local mores men on the street would leave you alone. So I was surprised when even wearing long sleeve button up shirts and pants I would receive comments of “pretty girl” or “hey duck.” Or when walking in a small group of women we heard young men making kissing noises as we passed.
Today I was privileged enough to see a film made a local Jordanian woman filmmaker debunking and challenging catcalling in the street. The filmmaker had made a short investigative documentary with excellent cinematography and post-production that spoke to taxi drivers and other young men who catcall women in the street almost as a hobby. She searched for the rational behind making unwelcome advances to women in the street, taped enthusiastic arguments with people who found this practice acceptable, spoke to lawyers about the legal parameters of harassment in Jordan and concluded with a strong feminist challenge to objectifying women.
Our program’s friendly resident director interpreted this film as both an indication that Jordanian culture, while hierarchical and often patriarchal, is dynamic and at least small segments of it challenge the prevailing convention wisdom that women belong in the home and therefore can be harassed in the street. Many others in our group felt reassured that sexual harassment in Jordan rarely, if ever, goes beyond an annoying comment in the street.
What bothers me most is not the occasional chauvinistic comment or honk of a car’s horn made by some jerk but the far more common long, objectifying stares I get from men as I walk down the street. In actuality, demeaning or annoying comments made to women in Jordan are rather infrequent compared to many, many other places in the world like Italy or Morocco. Essentially I have concluded that treating women as objects is angering, not matter where in the world you are. Now, in some small act of challenging this practice, when I feel a man giving me an uncomfortably long stare I don’t just ignore it or brush it off or skulk off insignificantly—I stare back.