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!)