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| Our last day of class for the first session with our Professor |
This week marked the halfway point in our grand adventure into the Levant. The lyrics above seemed to make an impact upon me as I watched dear new friends disperse back to the United States and the world. This week was an amazing chance to wish these new friends well as they continue on their individual journeys in this language and in their lives. Life is simultaneously long and very short. I find that this month is a very small part of my overall life and yet I will hold onto these stories and memories for years to come. Daily life here holds more weight than I could have ever fathomed. I try to not fall into a daily schedule for fear that being half around the world will begin to feel mundane. As these daily activities become more routine I must constantly remind myself that in the larger scale of life, one month is nothing but a blip but the experiences and the people are the things you hold onto for the rest of your life.
Before I continue recounting the things that we have done over the past week I must say a special thank you to our friends who left and returned to real life. Tyler, my roommate, and I miss our building mates very much. Christina from LA and Coco from London have both been a blessing over the past 4 weeks. Truly beautiful and kindhearted people who made the cab rides through massive amounts of traffic bearable. The ones who laughed at our dumb jokes and never ceased to be at least 5 minutes late every morning. Tyler and I wish you guys all the best as you continue on in your adventures this summer.
This week, as I mentioned before, was a week of saying goodbye to new friends while simultaneously completing research papers, taking tests, and finishing up a semester of learning in just under 4 weeks. We spent each night doing slightly different things that truly highlighted the beauty and the diversity of this city. We traveled to the Prince Hashem Bird Garden in our neighborhood, which is a beautiful park that has hundreds of beautiful birds for children to come and look at. We spent another beautiful evening at Hashem’s Rest in the Belad, a world famous restaurant known for its “annoying service” because the servers will continually throw food on your table unless you can stop them fast enough. We spent the rest of that night walking around the central mosque in the valley between all 7 hills of Amman, the citadel beaming above us as vendors called out prices. The Ramadan lights twinkling from apartment buildings all over the city, giving the city a shimmer and glow with Iftar fireworks ringing in the distance. The next night we experienced another Amman famous restaurant known for its 24/7 service of the most unique falafel you will ever try. For those who do not know what falafel is, it is a famous dish of smashed and fried garbanzo beans mixed with parsley. After that we enjoyed Kenafe, a dessert made from a layer of fried cheese and a wheat mixture topped with pistachios. Thursday was the last night for a large amount of the program participants. We gathered in the downtown area, which is called the Belad, here we walked around as some of our friends bought last minute gifts and souvenirs for themselves and family. We walked to another neighborhood and ate sesame bread sandwiches with clay oven baked eggs, a truly unique food to Amman. The night ended with 6 of us enjoying a spectacular view of the city with live Arabic music and argheela smoke drifting on the summer wind. The nights in this city are beautiful with temperatures falling into the 80’s, the smell of bread baking and diesel mixing together. Overlooking this city at night I am constantly reminded how small I truly am in this world but in particularly in this city. We finished our night with a glass of Arak, a famous aperitif drink made in Jordan, the cloudy mixture that gives off a scent of sweet dark licorice.
In the morning we got on a bus with a sense of excitement for the weekend but also a sense that something was missing without some of our friends. We traveled to the southern most part of the country, a 4-hour ride through the desert to arrive at the paradise, which is Aqaba. A city that rests overlooking the Red Sea and surrounded by mountains is absolutely breathtaking. As we arrived at our hotel and the temperature outside approached 120 we couldn’t help but have our breath taken away by both the heat and the views. Sitting on the beach overlooking Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Jordanian coastline. With freighters slowly gliding through the deep blue waters and the mountains in Egypt blurring in the afternoon haze. We spent the afternoon swimming in the sea, trying to avoid sea urchins, which plague the coral right up to the beach. That night we went into the downtown area and ate fresh caught fish and walked around the local markets until late into the night. The entire city and resorts surrounding it were nearly abandoned given that it is off-season as well as Ramadan. The next day we got up early and ate our breakfast by the pool with a slight breeze coming off the sea, the temperatures never dipped below 95 during our stay. We walked along the beach to meet our guide for scuba diving. We then spent the rest of the morning swimming in the sea in preparation for scuba diving, it was the first time for most of us, being able to swim under water with hundreds of fish around you was simply amazing. The water is crystal clear for nearly 15 meters down to the bottom. We explored reefs as well as a sunken freighter ship. Our guide was a British man named Paul who has been diving in the Red Sea for the past three years. He is another example of some of the interesting people you meet along the journey of life. As we ventured throughout the coral reefs and returned to the surface I had to force myself to come to the realization of what we were currently doing. It is not most days that you can say you spent the morning scuba diving in the Red Sea while looking at a sunken Egyptian freighter with a scuba instructor from Britain. We spent the rest of the day relaxing on the beach and trying to even out the tan lines. All in all this weekend was a much-needed reprieve to something that felt oddly like a vacation I would take back home. I ate food that reminded me of home and heard more English than Arabic for once in a month. It was relaxing and invigorating that has prepared me to return to class this week in level 302.
As I am writing this I cannot help but remember the song that is playing gently in the background. That when I am old I want to tell these stories and the experiences that we are all having. I find it hard to constantly remind myself where I am and what I am doing. I am thoroughly convinced that study abroad changes everyone in different ways and no two people will experience it the same way. For me I am learning that the stories and experiences are what you hold on to and that you must simply do your best and forget the rest. If I constantly worried about doing all the things I know I should be doing I would never open my eyes to see the things happening around me. I can learn all the theory, I can learn all the language and cultural practices, I can learn to plan and execute, I can master a skill set, I can read a book and write a paper, I can have a conversation and write an article, but all of those things mean nothing if I do not understand the world around me. I have taught myself to care less about the details and to not stress about the things I cannot control. Jordan is a strange place and I am nothing more than a foreigner passing through but I already know that although I may not change Jordan, Jordan will change me. In some ways for the better and I am sure in other ways not, but if nothing else I have learned to understand what is around me so that when I am old I will have stories to tell.
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