After traveling for hours on end, I was too exhausted to
fully appreciate reaching my destination on Saturday night. Sunday morning I
woke up feeling like I had slept an entire night. A quick look at my clock
revealed that it was only 4:30 a.m. in Amman. I had only slept 3 ½ hours. So I
dozed through the early morning calls to prayer and church bells ringing in the
day of worship.
Finally, the sun rose and my roommate and I started our day.
Our wonderful host mother fed us a
delicious breakfast of pita, spreadable cheese stuff, olives, and a type of
breakfast cake. We then had to face the first challenge of the day.
Taking a taxi to school.
Taxi drivers in Amman don’t speak much English and
apparently don’t know their way around the city. They resort to pulling over
and asking random people on the sidewalk for directions if they don’t know how
to reach their destination. Our hosts gave specific directions to the driver
but yet we still ended up getting lost. Emily and I couldn't help him much
since we only speak broken Arabic and had never been to the academy before.
He asked multiple people if they knew where the school was
but no one had ever heard of it. To make matters worse, we had forgotten to
bring the phone our professor had given us to make local calls. So we turned
around and headed back to our host’s house, only to realize we didn’t remember
how to get back. Fortunately, we had her address and a local on the street gave
our driver directions. After getting the phone, we called our instructor and he
guided us to the academy.
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| Our taxi driver |
This adventure totaled about 45 minutes and 5 JD (expensive
taxi ride!), so we missed the opening orientation at the academy. Everyone said
it was boring though so I didn’t feel too bad about that.
I thought that being lost in a foreign city where I didn’t
speak the language would be terrifying. But I actually found it to be exciting
and…fun. I live for challenges and this definitely tested the limits of my
Arabic speaking abilities and ability to stay calm in stressful situations.
Emily and I even took a “selfie” of us while lost.
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| We're lost! |
The rest of the day was great. We had about an hour and a
half of classes. Mine was taught entirely in Arabic and I understood most of
it! Afterwards we had lunch at a famous falafel store and visited the various “souqs”
or markets. When we returned home, our host mom took us to a local bookstore to
get an Arabic-English dictionary and then gave us a brief tour of churches in
her neighborhood. She even gave me an Arabic bible!
All in all, not a bad first day.
Catherine A.
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| Falafel from Hashem |
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| Amman panoramic! |
Floating in the Dead Sea was a really unique sensation. It was
impossible to stay down in the water for more than a second. We floated around
for a while, flipping over or trying to stand up the water. I tried a drop of
Dead Sea water – it wasn’t that good. While we were swimming, one of the
students asked if there were sharks in the water. That quickly became the quote
of the day. 
