Empathy

It's been a busy last couple of days packing all my stuff up and saying good byes to all my friends and family who I know I'll see again, but won't be seeing every day like I have been for the past semester.

The one word I now use to describe Arab culture is empathy. I do not have time to elaborate now, but I hope to later. What an amazing semester it's been here, making new friends, getting to know my family and this region of the world even better, and becoming more proficient in a foreign language. 

Salt--not for your food.

Yesterday I went to the town of Salt to visit my peer tutor, Nimr, who lives there.  Salt is the oldest city in all of Jordan and has been inhabited for about the past 3 or 4 thousand years, since before Christianity or Islam even existed.  Right now the town is mostly Muslim but has a larger percentage of Christians than most of Jordan, the relationship between the two communities is really good. It's about 30 minutes outside of Amman and is the 4th largest city in Jordan, I'd call it a large town. It was originally intended to be the capital of Jordan, but the town elders at the time didn't want it to become all commercialized dirty and have large buildings, like Amman is today. So although Salt is a larger metropolitan area of the country, it doesn't feel very urban, or at least it's urban yet still green.  Kinda like Paris, how you'll walk down the street, and buildings are obviously the main thing you see, but there is no shortage of trees or green everywhere you look. Pictures below. It's kinda the town that everyone makes jokes about, like dumb blondes, or polish, but of course they don't like you saying that =)

Nimr was saying how there's about 100 or so tribes or clans of about 5000 people each that are still living in salt today. His last name is Abu-Rumman, so he shares the same last name with a lot of other people in Salt. To get more specific about who he is he'd say he's from the house of his father's name. Everyone in Salt is connected by no more than 2 degrees of separation, because you're bound to know at least one person from each of these large families, so if you don't specifically know the person you're talking to right then, you know at least one person who they're related to, and that person who they're related to most likely knows the person you're talking to because when anyone in a tribe gets married, or dies, everyone is invited, or goes to share condolences.

The main plaza of salt is called Hammam plaza, because it is at the end of Hammam street.  Hammam is bathroom in Arabic, so if you learn one phrase before you come here, it should be "waen al-hammam" (where is the bathroom) but if you do ever come here, practice squatting beforehand. Using the bathrooms here has provided some of the more...'formative' experience of my study abroad.  I'll upload some pictures of good ones later. Unfortunately the smell isn't transmittable via the internet...someday...someday.  ANYWAYYYY back to Hammam street.  It's called that because it used to be where all the Turkish baths were in Salt. It's on the side of a hill and all the water for the baths was just routed from the nearby stream, through the baths and continued out of the buildings into the creek in the middle of town. How cool! There aren't Turkish baths anymore, now it's just the main souk of town. Which is sweet cause there are no tourists, and it's not too big, and you can see super old churches right nearby. Near hammam street is commonly used for movies when they want to simulate being in Jerusalem. Nimr was saying that one production blew up a car right by Hammam plaza, the director got a couple thousand authentic extras for free that day.

Later that afternoon we were at a random cafe in Salt and it was just us and two ladies, maybe mother and daughter, in the cafe.  They started asking Nimr if he was a tour guide or what, then they asked me name.  Once I said Yazan Fattaleh the younger lady almost fell out of her chair.
"Do you know Rawan Fattaleh!?"
"Yeah! that's my aunt!!! you know her??"
"Yeah we were really good friends growing up! Your dad used to drive us around before we had drivers licenses, your grandparents are so nice, oh I miss them so much. Rawan and I still stay in touch and we always have a blast every time she comes back to Jordan to visit!  Oh my god, I haven't seen you Yazan for 20 years!"
I couldn't believe it. My aunt's friend is originally from salt and was back for the weekend to see her family who still lives there. And was randomly in the same cafe as me. How small is this world!

Also, while I'm on meeting random people who know me, last Thursday my friends and I were at a choir concert (in Amman) that one of our friend's was singing in and the old lady sitting next to me was good friends with my Dad's Mom, and distant cousins with my Mom's Mom.

The Boys high school in Salt, the oldest school in all of Jordan: 

All the signs for the stores in Salt must be wooden with white lettering like this.

One end of Hammam Street:

Old guys playing Mancala under a tree all day every day:

Where that one movie blew up a car in "Jerusalem":

An old sweets shop that's closed now:

An old house:

The other end of Hammam Street:

Some good Engrish:

Garlic Anyone?

Over view of the city, it was super dusty that day:

Nimr's living room:

And unrelated, here's a picture of a backpack coffee guy from the Friday Souk in Amman:

Cup of Tea for your Mustache?

Today I got lunch with my language partner Nimr, and we chatted in about 90% Arabic! Not just about the weather and our families, but about what we want to do when we graduate and what we're learning in our classes and how we're both not very excited for finals.  It was one of the first time I've felt more than a couple of moments of speaking in arabic, and not stuttering out arabic words that make sense while trying to pull my tongue out of the back of my throat after I may or may not have insulted my listener by mistake.  But in all truth, the only time I've said something rude that I didn't realize was rude till after the fact was when I made a racist food reference to Palestinians in front of a group of 50 or so local students...thank god they realized I didn't know what I was talking about and laughed at me.  I've never been so happy to be laughed at.

After lunch Nimr asked me "kassat shae a-shawarib"  which literally translates to "cups of tea for our mustaches?"  It's an expression not super well known, but well known enough that it made the guy laugh who we ordered tea from.   Then he almost wouldn't accept Nimr's money for the tea.  So ensued the typical Jordanian fight over who was in fact going to pay for our tea.  The man who was actually going to give us our tea or Nimr.  Me? Never! If I wanted to stand a chance at getting in the middle of two Jordanian men fighting over the check, I would have had to quietly slip in before we even showed up, given the man our 20 cents for the tea, and told him "when I come back later with my friend, just give us the tea, me and you have a deal buddy" preferably in a film noir mobster voice for added effect.


Nimr was telling me about how in Jordan, you don't have the control over your future like you do in the states. The system kinda takes you for a ride and if you don't go along with the whims of whatever situation you're in., whether you like them or not, you'll just be spit out hopeless.  An example is the Tawjihi exam senior year of high school.  Seniors in high school take this monster of all monstrous exams called the Tawjihi.  If you decide to stay in Jordan after graduating high school (which is the only choice for most Jordanians if they want a college degree...which not all do.  I've sat in more cabs than I can remember where the cabby was younger than I am) The score you get on the tawjiji determines, not only which school you can go to, but what you can study at that school.  You really don't retake it either.  "So you got a 96 out of 100? sorry, you have to have gotten 97 if you wanna be a doctor...have fun in business or law school"  What about following you passion? Well I guess you just hope that you did well enough on one standardized test to do so...


The taxi driver on the way home today spoke pretty good English.  He had lived in Lexington, Kentucky for 14 years as a delivery driver for papa-johns.  He was telling us about how much he missed mowing his lawn, living in a house, meeting all the nice american people, the green, the hills, stopping at stop signs when he was driving, staying in his own lane when he was driving, and saying phrases like "hey man, what's up dude, how you doin bro." The last one kinda surprised me since many conversations in arabic just equate to saying those exact words in about 15 ways in the span of 2 minutes.  Once again I am reminded of how lucky I am. 

Easter

Day before yesterday was Easter Sunday here in Jordan.  Greek Orthodox Easter is a week after Easter in the US so my cousin Karim jokes that it takes Jesus a week to get here from the US.  My family all went up to my uncle's house in the hills north of Amman and spent the day out in the country eating food =)  After we ate lunch my cousin Nadine and I and her second cousin Ra'oof went on a hike down to the natural water spring that farmers still use to irrigate a bunch of the land my great grandfather used to farm on.  On the way down we saw this pretty field of wheat and hung out there for a little bit:

After we made it down to the spring my cousin Karim came and picked us up in a car and on the way back to the home we saw these old caves that the PLO used to use as a headquarters of sort during Black September and the following civil war in Jordan in the early 70's. The gate is not actually locked so we spent about 20 minutes running through the man made cave system.  We ended up exiting through a different entrance than we entered from.

before we left we hung out in the tree house right by the people house in Dibbeen.  We're comin back this weekend to spend the night there and explore those caves more the next morning =)

Eastern Desert Castles--Brothels

Yesterday CIEE took us on a day trip to the Eastern Desert Castles, and the Al-Azraq Oasis.  If you imagine Jordan as a half t-shirt, we were in the arm part that extends out to Iraq.  These two desert castles were along the ancient trade route between Damascus and Baghdad.  It was cool to imagine old traders on camels splonking (that's the best word I can think of to describe how camels walk) through the desert, with nothing in sight but rocks, bushes, and sand.  The night before my aunt was telling me about how it's rumored that those castles were actually brothels along the old trade route.  like I said, there really was NOTHING out there for those ancient traders haha.  Sure enough the placard in front of one of the castles that read something like "even  though the purpose of this building has never been proven, it is commonly agreed on by historians that they were used as "inns" for ancient traders on the route between Damascus and Baghdad".  Sure enough there were pictures of Dancing women on the ceiling of one of the buildings.  Also in the larger of the two buildings the windows of the second story rooms were floor to ceiling facing the inner court yard.  There was no balcony or anything, you just walked to the edge of the room and the floor dropped away and you were just standing in this rectangular gap in the wall, able to see everyone in the courtyard...and more importantly for everyone in the courtyard to see you. Brothel theory, exhibit A!  Also those rooms were just about big enough for you know what...Brothel theory exhibit B! It was just too similar to Amsterdam's red light district with the women on display for those weary travelers in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Damascus and Baghdad.  The world's oldest profession must have existed in the place where the world's first civilized state took root.

After lookin at the castles we biked for about 20K's through the desert on an old sand and rock double track road.  It was great to have CIEE take care of everything for us, we just showed up, ran around some castles, grabbed a bike, and then ate lunch at the Al-Azraq Oasis.  Or what's left of it.  It's an oasis in the eastern desert that has now become a Jordan's version of a national park.  The water was pretty gross...a friend and I stopped playing Frisbee after an unfortunate throw ended with the Frisbee in the "water".  We could retrieve it, we just decided to play it safe. The Oasis used to be full but lack of water use laws has left it well on it's way to drying up.  The small museum explaining about the Oasis was saying how there used to be super diverse animal life there: Rhino's, Syrian Ostrich's, Hippo's...but now there's just a few water buffalo's...who leave behind some really big pies. They were worth taking pictures of:

Spring Break--Mansheet Nasser

Two weeks ago was spring break for all of us here with CIEE at the University of Jordan.  My friends and I took advantage of the week to travel to Lebanon and Egypt.  It has already been about a week since I've gotten back and I'm realizing that I only have a month here left! literally, it's April 14th today, and I fly out May 14th. Still so much that I want to do, there's no way I have time to write in depth posts about everything we experienced in the week of spring break. So please ask me to tell you more stories next time we see each other in person! Here's a message I sent to a friend back home about one adventure we had while we were in Cairo. If you want to see pictures, look on Facebook.  My friends and I uploaded tons of pictures last week.

Little kids almost ate me over my spring break. My friends and I were in Cairo for a couple of days. And while we were there we visited the garbage man's neighborhood, Mansheet Nasser.  It's a slum of Coptic Christians just outside the main city of Cairo, and the government has been basically forgetting about them since as long as anyone can remember since they're Coptic. All the garbage of the largest city in Africa, AND the middle east (Cairo) ends up in this one neighborhood where all these Christians sort through everything and either pack it into bags to be driven off to the landfill, or continue sorting recyclables until they can just melt them down and sell the shredded plastic, or melted aluminum or re-make paper with the old paper that was thrown away. We visited a local Egyptian NGO that works there and were shown all the work they do to promote recycling efficiently, empowering women to work, and working to cure Hepatitis C in the slum since the Mubarak Regime used to re-use needles to vaccinate the people there. On our way out of the NGO's campus we stopped by their school for the kids of the women who work there, and my friends and as we walked by one of the classrooms the entire class 30 or so kinder gardeners came running out wanting us to take their picture with them. So we were taking pictures with them and I picked up one of the kids. Next thing I knew the entire group of them were pulling on my t-shirt wanting me to pick them up next...all at once haha. It was just a matter of time before I ended up with one or 2 kids on my shoulders, and another one or two wrapped around my waist and and a group at my feet that I could barely help but not fall on and crush. For a moment I kinda felt like Godzilla. They asked us when we were coming back.

As we walked from the NGO to the churches they have built into huge caves in the mountainside, we were almost trampled by a stray cow, saw a pig being gutted on the side of the road--the man gutting it then grabbed the heart right out of the pigs torso and put it in his mouth.  Right after that we almost were squished by a pickup truck overloaded with enormous bags of garbage because we were so shocked.  We also saw a lady sitting in a pile of trash, sorting trash, drinking tea, picking trash out of her tea as it fell in, and simultaneously chatting with her family/friends/neighbors.  Their lives here truly do revolve around garbage.

Midterms and Neil!

What a past couple of weeks! My Mom and Sister came in town for two weeks to visit family.  And a bit more than a week ago my good friend from Seattle, Neil Baunsgard, sent me a Facebook message saying that he found a round trip ticket from Seattle to Amman for 700 bucks! what a deal. I told him I'd never seen a deal that good so come on over if he can! He booked the ticket, took his last finals, and hopped on a plane to Amman all within a matter of two or three days.  He was here for his spring break and just left yesterday! He squeezed quite the trip into just over a week in the middle east.  In about 10 days, he went to the dead sea, spent time getting to know Amman, went to Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv for 3 days while I took some mid-terms, we went to Jerash and spent an afternoon climbing at a sport crag nearby the roman ruins, and we spent last weekend in Petra and Wadi Rum.  Right before he left we visited the al-abdullah mosque walked through the downtown fruit market at night and took some awesome pictures.

Mother day in Jordan is March 21st, the first day of spring, and it's a big deal here. Maybe because there's no father's day so twice the festivities are squeezed into one day haha. I was lucky enough to be here with my Mom and both my grandma's for mothers day this year...so we all ate a lot of food =)

Here are some of Neil's pictures from the past week's adventures:

On the way down to the dead sea:

Roman theatre in Jerash:

Main Road of the ancient city.  It's so easy to imagine a bunch of traders shops lining the street! I can just hear the bargaining =)

Climbing near Jerash:

The shepherd who told us he was going to call the cops on us for climbing haha:

The spectacular wall inside a carved out room in the ancient city of Petra:

The Monastery in Petra:

The cutest little rock salesman...note his mom in the background. She knows his smile could sell more rocks than she ever could haha.  Also, what a genius little entrepreneur! "you should buy these rocks"

Our camp in Wadi Rum that night:

Khazali canyon:

"I'm not very good at sideways sports"--Neil Baunsgard

Hutta Salesman in Downtown Amman:

The coolest part of downtown Amman--the fruit market:

"Hey! that girl has red hair! let's go take a picture with her."

The only food I ever need: Falafel:

As most of you know I am studying abroad this semester...and (un)fortunately CIEE takes the studying part fairly seriously.  I have had midterms for the past two weeks, and it's been quite a learning experience since I'm taking poli sci and language classes, instead of my typical Economics and science-y classes.  Both my poli sci midterms are in-class essays! what are those again? well they sure make my fingers hurt after an hour of writing straight under pressure.  I think the last time I took an in class essay exam was on my AP exams in high school! It's taken me a bit of time to re-figure out how to study for exams where there's not one correct answer next to a bubble that you just fill in.  It's also been cool for me to take classes in a subject that I've had no formal educational experience in yet.  It's shown me that there's always so much more to everything than meets the eye.  No wonder politicians have tons of aids who specialize in one thing.  So many interests in everything, so little time. Economic, Diplomatic, Corporate, Environmental, Humanitarian, Military, just about enough to make your head spin.

Next week is spring break and friends and I are traveling to Beirut, Cairo, and finishing off by some beach time/scuba diving in Dahab! can't wait =)