some sort of problem with blogspot

hala hala
so i don't know what is going on, i haven't been able to log onto blogspot for a few weeks now. I was under the impression it was shut down in jordan because no one else could either. however, this one friend's house (where i am at currently) inexplicably has access to it. so i don't know what's up. it could be awhile before i write a real post. i may have to move the blog to a different website. we shall see. peace

turkey

just got back from turkey; it was amazing. too tired/lazy to talk about it right now but i posted some pics on my picasa site. unfortunately i had to steal them from friends because i accidentally deleted all the pictures off my camera. oh well. be back soon with a write-up. until then, enjoy:

heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyy

oh hey you're still there?

sorry it has been forever, also sorry that this new format is ugly, i'll get on changing it later, you can't expect me to suddenly be good at this blog thing in one day! so get off my back about it! jeeeeze.

anyway, i've been putting off writing another post. for awhile i wasn't posting becasue i was busy. then i was lazy. then busy again. then i realized that the longer i wait to post, the more interesting and worthy the first post will have to be. that placed entirely too much pressure on me and so i vowed never to post again. luckily for you all, however, i have gone back on that vow and decided to just underwhelm and not worry about it.

on that note: i've been doing some stuff. mostly fun stuff followed by periods of serious depression in the village. nothing for you all to worry about, there is just something immensely depressing about transitioning back to life in the village after living it up outside. what have i been doing that is so fun as to throw my daily life into despair? well let me tell you.

i was in aqaba for a little over a week doing an english camp sponsored by the embassy. there were 12 of us pc volunteers there to help with the activities and supervise the kids. my day started at around 8 when the campers got there and i spent the whole day in a classroom teaching 'environmental english.' this entailed singing songs, playing memory games with animal names, and facilitating games that made them use english. the kids went home at 3 and we had the rest of the time to ourselves. we stayed at a camp that had dorms which were about 2 minutes from the sea, so we would just walk down and swim and snorkel around the reefs all afternoon.

that would be the view from our kitchen in the dorm.

there were 3 days of camp with boys and then we had a day off, followed by 3 days with girls. the kids were between 11 and 14 and they were honestly really sweet. everyone complained about the boys being bad, but what can i say, i thought they were a lot of fun. they were a handful for sure, but they were enthusiastic and entertaining. the girls, as most girls are around age 12 or 13, were just kind of 'over it' and wouldn't really play along with our silly games, or act excited to be at camp. still, both sections were fun, and overall my time in aqaba was really great, a high point of my service so far. it really was just a embassy sponsored vacation, and we got to spend a good deal of it just hanging out in the water, or hanging out in town watching the world cup and smoking naarghila.

this was followed by a week of the previously mentioned crushing depression. it is hard to explain what it's like to go from having friends around 24 hours a day for over a week to being completely alone again. i mean if you look back on when you went to camp as a kid, or vacation, or anything, and that yucky feeling of 'now what' when you get home; remember how that sucked? now take away your friends and family that you came back to. it feels crappy. this doesn't mean that i am sitting here crying, wishing i hadn't come, or need to go see a therapist. it's just a crap transition and takes a bit of getting used to. wah wah.

so the next major event was the fourth of july. this was also a blast (get it, 'blast,' like fireworks?. buh dum cha), and was awesome because it was basically a huge reunion. there are around 40 of us that came in at the same time, and when we do trainings or anything that bring us together we are usually still separated by sector (english, sped, and youth development). so there are some people that i haven't seen since training. we all got to hang out together for the first time, and in what was essentially a mini america in the jordan. the party was on the 2nd at the american embassy, and they opened up the pool, had hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad, beer and lynyrd skynyrd. it was pretty amazing.

then it was my birthday. we went out for sushi at one of the two places in jordan where you can get sushi, and they have an all you can eat buffet for 22 jd on sundays. what did i learn there? you cannot eat 22 jd (about a quarter of our monthly allowance) of sushi. but it was still fun, and tasty.

since then, and in between these major events, not much has been going on. i'm teaching english classes a few times a week at a center in the village, still tutoring a few kids in english, and generally i'm just bumming around. since there is no school in the summer i'm pretty much on vacation, though i am not allowed to just sit around all summer, i have to have at least a few ongoing activities on the books.

coming soon: i'm leaving for turkey on the 16th, and i get back the 26th. i'm going to a neighboring village to visit my friend and her husband, which i'm really excited about. anddddd that's about it.

so that was the longest post ever. maybe i'll break it up into two. or maybe i'll just leave it this way and you will just never make it this far in, assume that it was all wildly entertaining and witty, and we will both win. either way, i've started it back up again and we can just continue with the day to day posts as usual.

current music: the black keys and this

reading: nothing much really, can't seem to commit

sandcastle

this one goes out to the pittsburghers. i was reminded today of Sandcastle while i was doing laundry. how are the joys of a waterpark and the mundane drudgery of a weekly (ok maybe bimonthly) chore related? the heat man.

so, as i do not have a dryer, i hang my clothes out on the lines on the roof to dry. i was not wearing shoes today when doing this, mostly because i don't like them, which was probably my first mistake. once i put my foot on the roof i realized it was blisteringly hot. here i was faced with a choice: admit defeat, forgo the joys of being barefoot and free, and walk all the way back downstairs and all the way back up, or suffer through it. guess which i chose. and so i put into use a technique perfected at Sandcastle.

this technique is two-fold. the first step is darting from one patch of shade to the next, while sort of doing a weird hopping, rolling step in which only the very outside touches the ground. the next step, which was much more successful due to the fact that the only shade was 4 feet away from the clothesline, involves creating little, oh so temporary puddles to stand in. so after i hung each piece of clothing i would hold the next item out and wring it so that there was a little spot to stand in while i hung it. this was moderately successful and after laying here for awhile inside, waving my feet around, i think they are back to normal.

p.s. 'bimonthly' means both twice a month and once every two months. how stupid is that?

a taste of the good life

so i went into mafraq today to catch the start of the world cup. to get to see the games here in the middle east you have to pay 120 JD, which gets you all of the games. because of this, the few who are able to afford this ridiculous sum are probably going to become very popular.

i was invited to go into the city to the house of one of the american families. there are a bunch of americans working in the hospitals as missionaries, which makes my life harder, but oh well. but that's another matter. anyway, they subscribed and had a bunch of people over to watch the games today. it was so much fun. i just spent the day with a bunch of americans, got to hang out with the guys who live in mafraq (who i never get to see due to gender separation), ate a lot of chips and pizza and junk food, rode around on razor scooters, just generally forgot i was in jordan for a day. actually, that is not putting it quite correctly. i never felt i wasn't in jordan, nor do i spend much time wishing that i was somewhere else. i simply enjoyed living in jordan with others who are going through some of the same things, and found a bit of respite.

i know this wasn't a very interesting story, but it was kind of a big deal in its very simplicity.

I realize it has been awhile since i have posted anything. do i have anything new to say? no.

still plodding along in the heat. kids aren't coming to the center anymore, they are on summer break till the end of august. soon i will be starting to teach 9 english classes a week, so expect me to soon be complaining a lot about feeling overworked and tired. cause that's how i roll. next week i go down to aqaba to do a summer camp where i will be teaching environmental english. i think this means i will be teaching environmental awareness stuff in english, but really, i have no idea. the camp isn't run by peace corps volunteers, we just sort of help them, more like camp counselors i think. clearly i am feeling very eloquent today. sorry.

oh the most important thing that has happened recently is that i discovered the band The Horse Feathers. love it. well i guess more importantly i discovered the npr podcast 'all songs considered' which is introducing me to all kinds of new music.

for reference this is what i hear all day. there are basically two types of jordanian music: the habibi women who i really dislike and won't subject you to, and the jeash (soldier) music which i do like. i wish i could find a song that i actually hear all the time (swear there are about 8 habibi songs and 12 jeash songs on constant rotation in the country, but this one is pretty representative.

and here are the horse feathers.

http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/s/Thistled+Spring/2JrXCQ

http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/s/Belly+of+June/2KFzFI

oh man

it's 101 degrees right now. in the shade. i only checked because i walked into my house and thought 'oh man it's so nice and cool in my house' then noticed the temp in the nice cool room was 85 degrees.

and i keep being told that this isn't really summer yet.

lest you forget, i still have to wear the same clothes i wore in the winter.

learning how to do things the 'jordanian way'

I was over my neighbors' yesterday and we were eating hummus. this term could be confusing because hummus refers to either, the plant that hummus grows on, the actual fruit (bean?) that grows on it (chick peas), the hummus still in pods and still green (also edible and delicious), and the dip that you make out of oil and crushed hummus and spices. we were eating hummus akhthar (green hummus) that had been salted and put in the fire. it tastes, and has a consistency like, roasted corn. i mentioned that i want to start buying it. the little five year old kindly explained to me how one obtains hummus:

"give a laira...

no wait...

get a son

give the boy a laira

he will come back with hummus

put it in the oven

nothing else

that is the best way"

Princess Bed

So once, when i was just a wee lass, i had a canopy bed. it made me feel like a princess. for some reason that has escaped me now (maybe at the time i thought i was 'too grown up for it' or maybe it just didn't fit in my room; logical explanations which i will ignore), i think it was out of pure cruelty on my parents' part, it was taken from me. i have now found an acceptable substitute. a mosquito net. i had to hang it yesterday because the mosquitoes are already out of control and i hear that they will only get worse. so i hung it from the piece of wire that holds up my curtains on one side and on the other side i tied it to some hangers that i then hang on the doors to my cabinet thing. in this way i have made it a collapsable princess tent so i can still walk around my room in the daytime. it's genius i know. (thanks dad for teaching me that though there may be a simple way to do things, there is always a way to get more materials involved and make it BETTER)

anyway i included a slightly awkward looking picture here for scale, and to give you a princes-eye view of what it is like to sleep in it. i found that even though the net is only made to be a twin size, i can stretch it around the mattress to encompass my whole queen (maybe one day i'll graduate from princess) bed.

basically its awesome.

(also i discovered during writing this that i cannot spell 'mosquito' without thinking moss-kwee-toe, so yeah there's that bit of info for you too)

music

i was on the bus today, on my way home from a meeting in a nearby city, and was, as usual, extremely tired, sweaty, and generally beat down from the heat. so i decided to put on my headphones and peace out for a bit. i chose the pogues and was immediately transported because it turns out that irish music is completely, utterly incompatible with the jordan. it was great because usually when i listen to music in the car it makes the outside world seem closer somehow; somehow it connects me with the scenery streaming past, who knows why. either that or i end up feeling that i am in a roadtrip movie and the music is just the soundtrack. maybe that's just me. anyway, that was not the case this time. with this particular music i felt completely insulated from the rest of the world because the music just couldn't exist out there. there was no way to imagine it blaring from one of the paneless, square, concrete windows i passed and no one could have it on their phones that they use as mini boomboxes. they just couldn't; the desert outside my window and this music just can't coexist.

i was trying to think of why. at their most basic, irish and arab music are very similar; they use many of the same instruments, and have a similar beat to them. but the way that they are played and sung absolutely couldn't be more different. the feelings behind it, the structure, the...i don't know, the -ness of them are completely at odds. i decided that the major difference was....alcohol. irish songs are designed to get better the more you drink: the music gets more fluid, the words slur together, but it sounds better because that's the way it was probably recorded and intended to be sung. you just want to sing it at parties. even sad songs make you feel better when you sing them. of course singing irish songs also calls to mind green fields as far as you can see and, just as i am usually unable to picture my backyard covered in snow when it is summer, it is impossible to conjure up that image in the face of boundless desert.

so basically i put on some reel when i am bogged down and take a mental vacation. its nice and green and breezy there. even the unreasonable amount of rain is welcome.

a note about 'tk-ing'

just realized that the title looks like i am trying to write some weird swear word. in fact i just wanted to write for a second about the sound that the king is discussing in that video.

when i first heard it it took me forever to figure out that it meant no. this is largely due to the fact that you do not necessarily have to make the noise to communicate. it's like how in america you can shake your head 'no' without saying the word 'no' and people understand what you mean. what makes it harder for a first time interpreter to understand the 'tk' to mean no is that it is accompanied by raising the eyebrows and tilting the head back. however, just tilting back your head (which looks suspiciously like nodding your head 'yes') and/or just raising your eyebrows also mean the same thing: hell no.

you see the tk doesn't just mean no. it is more like 'what a silly question to ask, that does not deserve an answer in word form.' thus the use so often with the king in objection to attempting some sweeping social change (or small social change). of course it is also used in everyday situations like: 'is there maramia in this tea?' 'tk (read: stupid american, we ran out of maramia last week and obviously that is only used in the winter anyway because it doesn't taste good in the hot weather).'

needless to say i hear this sound a lot. i never know what is going on, what is the appropriate question to ask, and i tend to have crazy ideas about how to change the way things have always been done. thankfully i at least know what their response means now.

side note: watch out all of you at home, because i have picked up the habit myself and find that it is a very satisfying way to respond to questions you don't like and don't even want to bother finding an answer to. give it a try.

the king

this is king abdullah(the king of jordan) talking about the tendancy for jordnians to think that it is useless to try anything new. and explaining the dreaded 'tk' that is such a big part of a conversation.

hey from jordan

This is M3aweya. I love him. Thought he would like to say hey to you all. (he is actually waving goodbye to the bus, which he does until we are around the corner.)

more pictures

for those of you without facebook:

i nabbed some photos with me actually in them and put them in this album. enjoy

facebook steals

two ridiculous things

here are two things that i feel somehow encapsulate jordan and its commitment to professionalism very well. they entertain me at least.

first, my mudeer (principal) recently bought a new doorbell for the center. it's one of the ones that has a receiver that you plug into the wall that plays the music, and a battery operated button that you use adhesive to stick outside your door. or at leas that is where it is intended to go. my mudeer decided to keep the button in the drawer of his desk instead. that way, after people come in, he can press the button so the music announces their presence. it also allows him to draw more attention to the fact that our center has a doorbell that can play multiple different songs and is operated by battery. so now when someone visits the center this is what you hear: them knocking, someone yells "fuut (come in)", the door opens and slams, a big round of greetings, everyone settles into the office, doorbell rings, my mudeer laughs for a minute and a half, doorbell rings again, tea drinking commences.

second, i went with this woman who works at the government social-support kind of building. i'm not sure exactly what it is, but if someone needs a wheelchair or a walker or something they get it from them. i'm sure they do other things but i don't know what they are. yesterday i needed to go into the city to get my mail. the customs man who has to check all my packages ends his day at noon; my center closes at noon. so i had to leave work early to get a ride to the center of the village so that i could catch a bus to Mafraq. i asked this woman to take me in her car, and she said we had to stop in at her work first. so we walk into this two story government building. inside the first room we come to has about 10 women sitting in chairs, most of them with kids on their laps, shooting the breeze and drinking tea. we go upstairs past lots of empty rooms. on the second floor i hear what sounds like a hair dryer. we open a door and inside there is a mini beauty salon, five women and four little kids. a woman was getting her hair dyed and straightened. i didn't ask why it was there.

Thanks

Hey guys,

just want to take a second to say thank you so much to everyone who has been sending me cards and packages. You are amazing! i have the best support system, and i really appreciate you all making the effort to make sure i know it.

thanks

The pictures i haven't worked up the nerve to take

I lent my camera to my 13 year old neighbor for the day. Don't ask me why, it was a stupid idea and I regretted it immediately. I called her about 3 hours after she had taken it and told her that i really needed it for something so she would have to give it back. but while she had it she took a bunch of pictures around my village. i really want to post pictures of the people and things around me but i always feel weird doing so. she, of course, feels totally comfortable doing so. so here they are, i'll caption where they are for you. since she lives only a few houses away this is what things look like in my immediate vicinity. hopefully i get up the nerve to take a few more myself.

2010_04_25 Shahed

atrophy

hey everyone!

so i went in for a mini trip to amman this weekend. for what reason you ask? to play flag football against a bunch of marines. because i am capable of doing that.

in fact, i found out that i am not. there is a flag football league for the americans in jordan that takes place every year. there are teams from the embassy, the marines, the department of defense, etc. and the peace corps. needless to say we are a little out of place in the league. none of us get to play any sports in the village, and, speaking only for myself here, just sit around and get fat most of the time. this was the second game of the season, and the first that i participated in. aside from the fight to get over my long-developed reflex to only use my feet when playing (the best) sport, i had to fight over my more newly developed reflex to sit down and take a tea break after more than 5 minutes of any work. i'm pretty sure i'm mostly dead right now, and possibly have broken both ankles. how was it that i used to play five or six hours of soccer a day.? i am really excited about the next game though, there really is just nothing better than some good old fashioned competition. if you can even call a 40-something to nothing score competition. anyway i had a lot of fun, and got to frolic in the sun in shorts (sort of, i felt the need to wear long spandex under them) and a tee-shirt. yay.

New Baby!

My neighbor just had a baby! She's a little bitty perfect girl. I'm not 100% on what her name is, i think it's Alaaf. Little insight into Jordanian culture: there's no baby shower before the baby is born, so the party comes after. immediately after. my neighbor came home from the hospital today and what is essentially her viewing began as soon as she did. before she went to have the baby they emptied one of the rooms in the house and filled it with farshas and against one wall they put a twin bed. for the next few days people come in and out all day to see Esthma in the bed and her new baby and sit and drink tea. specifically cinnamon tea with walnuts in it. i spent about an hour there today, listening to all the women that live close by gossiping about the other women and having babies. i realized that none of them were more than 5 years older than me and they all had at least 3 kids. weird.

kids say the darndest things

the youngest student in my center is a tiny girl with down syndrome. any time anyone does something she doesn't like, or drops something, or sometimes for no apparent reason, she yells hiwan (animal). how do you think she learned that?

on an unrelated side note the director of peace corps, from america, the big director, is in jordan right now to reinforce some ties with the jordanian government. he's making a visit to some of the centers and tomorrow he is going to the center where i did my training and where one of the volunteers from my pst group is currently working. i'm going over for a little meet-and-greet. which is pretty cool. since jordan is the only peace corps post in the middle east it is getting a lot of attention in the peace corps and they are trying really hard to step up the number of people here. so they need more places to put volunteers. the next group that comes in is supposed to have 60 volunteers. sounds insane to me, but i'm excited. now if they can only get the people who are here to last through their whole service...

craig ferguson

craig ferguson. delicious. i have come to depend on watching at least a few minutes of ferguson every day to keep me sane. i even seem to start watching late at night to put off sleeping. its just like being home. i mean come on...

(apparently i'm not tech savvy enough to make that fit correctly, but go with it)

eh titles are tedious

soooo this is probably completely cliche, but i just want to take a second to describe to you how completely awesome the littlest things are.

though there are many, many things that make jordan an almost impossible place to live (the last group of volunteers still have a little over half a year to go and they already have an over 50% dropout rate), one great thing about living in a country that is developed is how applicable the lessons that i learn here are to my life back in the states (if i ever choose to return) (jk mom, breathe). what i mean is, i can see having revelations about how little you truly need to survive and be happy while living in a hut in africa. however, upon returning to the u.s. of a. you certainly are going to have access to running water and all of life's little amenities. however, here in the jordan we have almost everything that is available at home, albeit at unattainable prices. the point is: the things that i get used to not having, or realize that i do need to keep me happy can be transferred to my life at home.

for example. my mother (give her a hug for me if you can. no don't, she'll hate it, but maybe offer to shake her hand) sent me some sheets in the mail. for some reason i have not been able to find any fitted and topsheets here, even though a lot of people have regular beds. so i've been going without and just sleeping on the weird fabric the mattress (thats a lie its a thin slab of low-density foam) is covered in. i have no way of knowing if the family who lived here before me ever covered this mattress, washed it, aired it, anything, but i sleep on it every night. or at least every night until this one. today i got to put wonderful, perfect, jersey-knit dark blue sheets on my bed. i thought i was going to hyperventilate with happiness. i was skipping around whistling like snow white while making my bed. Making A Bed. it was heaven. and now i am sitting here, between the sheets, drinking a cup of spiced chai tea and eating easter chocolate, and i can't think of anything that could make me happier. well that's not entirely true, you can always think of things that you would upgrade to; we're just programmed that way i guess. but i can't think of anything that i NEED to make me feel happier. sheets, tea and chocolate. that's it.

now i'm sure i'll get home and go out and eat a burger a night, spend way too much money on a new computer, new (any) clothes, and everything else. and everyone will say 'oh see, isn't america so much better, look at everything you can have.' but i just hope that i can retain some of the joy i get here from the littlest things, and remember not to spend so much time thinking about the things that i want (a panini with lots of melted mozzarella) and more time thinking about how freaking delicious my tea is.

changes in latitudes changes in attitudes

just made the long walk back from the marqez shabat (girls youth center) on the other side of town (about 35/40 minute walk away) and about halfway back had a nice conversation with a lady who popped out of her house to say hey. This is about how the conversation went (translated of course):

Hi! Hi! Where do you live? Up the hill. No where exactly? Near Esthma's ducan. Where? Right next door. On the left? Yes. Oh, come in! Thanks, I can't. Why not? I need to go home. Why? To talk to my parents in America. (always gets me out of doing things, sorry parents) How? On the computer. You have internet in your house? Yes. Do you have a computer or a laptop? Laptop. How much did it cost? 200 dollars. Oh, come in. No thanks, goodbye. Goodbye.

Hope you could follow that. Anyway that was with a random woman on the street. Imagine a stranger yelling at you as you walk down the street and then asking you these questions. The funny thing is, I have been home for a half an hour now, and it just hit me that at one point i would have considered this invasive and/or strange. Now i didn't even notice, it's totally cool. She was really nice; if she invites me in again (and if i remember who she was) i'll probably stop in.

what's in a name

hey all you beautiful people

sorry there aren't more pictures from rum, but my camera died halfway through the first day. i apparently did not find it necessary to charge my camera before a 2 day sightseeing trip. however it was absolutely amazing. i actually firmly believe that it is better not to take pictures, or at least only to take a few. this is of course excluding all you professional photographers out there who im sure just 'see the world better through a lens.' i, on the other hand, think that spending your time trying to get a good shot, and inevitably looking at the screen and bemoaning how little it looks like what you are looking at, takes away from actually taking in where you are. memories are always better when you see them as actual moving memories and not the picture you have on your wall. this is of course with the luxury of having others who took pictures that i could rely on if i decided that was a stupid way to look at it. i also realize that at some point i will get old and forget (not that any of you out there would know what i am talking about) but hey, im 22 i dont believe in getting old so im staying optimistic.

anyway wadi rum was absolutely gorgeous. it is totally unlike anything i have seen. i guess you could say it is kind of like the grand canyon because there are big high rocks, and kind of like arizona because there is desert. but its not. it is bigger than your mind can take in, and i just kept thinking that it looked like a set painting. im not entirely convinced it wasn't. we came in on friday afternoon, stayed overnight in a bait shar (big bedouin tent), and left the next afternoon. we spent pretty much the whole time in a truck bed driving through the desert to the next beautiful spot where we could climb and take pictures and generally marvel. at night we decided to sleep out under the stars instead of in the tent, and when the moon came out over the cliffs that we were sleeping next to it woke me up it was so bright. totally unreal. i was just sitting there looking around for someone else who was awake to see if they were as amazed by it as i was. they were. we ended the second day by hiking up this huge, huge, huge sand dune and then rolling down it. it was amazing, i felt like the little kid in 'where the wild things are.' that movie, however, does not include the fact that every single part of you will then be filled with sand. ears, underwear, nose, hair, everything. it was worth it.

now im back in the village. im not super into it at the moment. its always hard to come back from amman and the pleasure of anonymity and other americans, but it was even harder this time because i was gone longer and was hanging out with 15 of 'em. oh well, things'll work out.

someone out there eat some sushi in my honor. im craving it like crazy.

wadi rum

went to wadi rum for two days. words later. pictures now.

Wadi Rum

lucky for you im skipping work

so today is palm sunday (i think) and so schools in the ministry of education are required to give their christian workers the day off. of course i decided to take them up on this nice little break from school, which in effect gave me a 5 day weekend. i was in amman these last few days for a training with peace corps so i haven't been to work in awhile. lucky for you all, however, i am currently feeling a little guilty about slacking off work to do nothing so i figured i'd get in here and write a lil somethin.

nothing really interesting or different has been going on around here. i can't remember what my last entries were all about but i have been a little...down lately. not seriously depressed, or anything like that, more like irritated. cranky. and you all know how cranky i can get. so i have come to the realization that this comes from the fact that i am getting too busy. all the talk among the other pcvs is about visiting. its almost like a point system with some unattainable goal. "i visited 8 families this week" "14 families called to invite me for dinner on sunday" "i visited for 19 hours yesterday." now i just don't see the point of this. i personally need my own space. i have always been that way. i don't need to say i have 37 bestest best friends or 1,723 friends on facebook; i think all the talk of visiting had me thinking about it too much and forgetting this basic fact about myself. so now i am in the process of cutting back on my visiting and tutoring english because i need a little bit of time by myself in my house. the trick now is actually making that happen.

i think in the beginning i was so content with my me time/visiting time ratio because there was no one trying to force me to visit more. people must have just thought i was this crazy american that didn't want to go visiting anywhere (kinda true). but now that people have seen me coming back from other people's houses, and hear other families bragging about how the american has visited them twice, they are becoming more insistent that i come visit them. and a refusal of an invitation is much ruder than pretending that you don't know that you should be visiting. so this is going to be a very tricky, and probably really slow, process of decreasing my visit time. but i'm already happier now that i have identified the reason i've been cranky and have a bit of a plan of how to fix it.

in an unrelated note, watched the 'hurt locker' and it was great. you probably don't need me to tell you that being that it apparently won oscars and stuff, but just sayin. also it was filmed in the jordan! i also read a book called 'who speaks for islam' and it was not great. as in really bad and i only wanted to mention it to give it a whatever is the opposite of recommendation (condemnation?). if you need to be convinced that muslims are actually human beings who live in families and not pods or something, then go for it and i would appreciate it if you let me know so we can have a little talk. but really i was excited to read it because it is basically a collection of surveys from millions and millions of muslims in different countries, and i was eager to see the differences between what is jordanian culture and what is muslim culture. i certainly couldn't get that out of it and...yeah i just think it was a generally useless and poorly written book.

since i can't stand knocking a book like that and not offering something in its place i'll go ahead and recommend 'professor and the madman.' it's about the creation of the oxford english dictionary. maybe it was just a lack of common sense that kept me from realizing that something like that would be freaking hard. i can not understand how people got on without computers. anyway a sizable chunk of the dictionary was submitted by an american officer in a mental institution in england. he was completely insane with paranoia and hallucinations; and yet he was a total bookie with lots of free time so he was able to make enough entries to be the major outside contributor. the creation of the book itself and the time it took (70 something years if i remember correctly) along with how the idea of a dictionary was arrived at is also really interesting.

well that's all i've got for you folks. enjoy the day!

living the life

This is what happens if I refuse to come out and play:

And what I have to look forward to if I do:

once you open the door...

today i had seven jordanian girls in my living room. i am not entirely sure why they came, who they were, where they live, or if they plan to return. i'm not even sure that i let all of them in myself. guess they just thought they would come by and check out the american's house; everyone else was doing it. we discussed how dirty my house is, and how haram it is not to have a TV. then they just up and left. i feel used.

i'm back baby

sorry for the petulance in that last post. bygones. thanks for all of you that responded, i'll try to get on keeping up with the posts.

so i have not had internet for the last 2 1/2 to 3 weeks. i took my new jordanian outlook to broken things: eh, oh well things break, maybe i'll call a neighbor later to come fix it. when none of my neighbors knew what was up i just waited to go in and pay my bill for the month that i barely had internet for, and asked if they could come fix it. turns out all i had to do was change a setting on my computer. oh well. things have been great; i've been keeping busy at my center making projects, and have been meeting a lot of new families in the neighborhood. more later, i'm in the middle of an ally mcbeal marathon that was so rudely interrupted by the joys of internet.

where have i been? ...jordan

so so so, i have not had internet, for no reason that can be determined exactly or that the internet company is particularly worried about, for the past week so i haven't been able to update. i say this as if any of you out there care, which i am beginning to think you do not. i have a little hit counter thing on the bottom of my page, but i'm thinking it's just my mom checking it 20 times a day. if you are reading, enjoying, hating, bored by, morally against, my blog go ahead and leave a comment every once in a while so i feel affirmed in my efforts. fudtalee (welcome, come on in). actually i believe i read in miss manners or somewhere that the proper way to acknowledge a blog entry is to send a package. i'm just saying. anyway on to the gripping life stories.

the weirdest thing that i have experienced up to this point happened in this past week. it is the best example i have ever heard of to show the extent of jordanian hospitality. the extent being pretty much unlimited and, from an american point of view, often unbelievably invasive. but i love it. so what happened was: i was doing my laundry on saturday. my new friend's family called me to invite me over for lunch. as nice as free food is, i was just not in the mood to run out right then because i was cleaning my house and was just feeling kind of lazy so i told them that i had just finished doing laundry (true) and that all of my pants were fe mai (wet, in Stephanie Arabic, and not entirely true) so i couldn't go out. they said that was okay, they understood. about five minutes later my doorbell rings. standing there is a six year old boy holding a pair of black pants. fudtalee (here, take it) he says. what are these i ask. he says i dunno, my mother says to give them to you, then you should come with me. so i put on the pants and went out for a walk with the family. what else could i do? my presence is so valued that pants are delivered to me to make sure i don't miss out.

tomorrow the kids from my center are going into Mafraq (the city we are outside of) to do a field day with two other PCVs centers. my kids and the kids from another special ed center will be doing different games and activities and the girls from my friend's youth center will be running the activities. we hope that by having her girls run it they will have some exposure to kids with special needs, have a better outlook in regards to them, and, thinking optimistically, will be nice to the kids with special needs they have now met if they are out walking around the community.

i had a bunch of things that i wanted to write about, but of course i have forgotten at this point. which is probably a good thing for all of you since they must not have been interesting enough to remember.

buuuut what is definitely an interesting thing (inshallah (hopefully)) is that i get to meet vice president Joe Biden on friday! i am going into amman to the embassy for a lil meet and greet then photo op. hopefully we all really get to meet him. either way i'm excited to catch a peek. figures that i would live in DC for years and never see anyone important, then go halfway around the world and be introduced to a big deal dude.

big things

so lesson learned from the last post: just because my eyes are open does not mean i am awake; blogging is not a good way to pass the time when i can't sleep in the wee hours of the morning. sorry for the rambles and general lack of coherent sentences.

moving on.

i haven't updated in a bit because i have actually been busy. imagine that. not only have i been busy but i also have some big news so if i don't get to lazy to finish it this should be a nice action-packed entry. shocking i know.

first thing, good things. i spent five days in amman working with operation smile. if you don't know, op smile is an organization that gives free surgeries to children to repair facial deformities. mostly they work on cleft palates and lips, but they also correct other problems such as birthmarks, scars, burns and the like. i knew very little about the organization, other than the movie Smile Pinki (which i highly recommend), but was excited to get a chance to hang out with some kids. i can't think of a much better job than just needing to play with kids, which is basically all i had to do. operation smile in jordan not only serves jordanians, but also palestinians and iraqis (though this mission did not involve any iraqi kids, rumor is that they are establishing a post in iraq as well). apparently peace corps has been partnered with op smile jordan for a number of years now and we are basically in charge of the palestinian group. what this means is that we go to the border to get the palestinians and bring them to the hotel in amman, jordan. we are then the liaisons between the hospital and the op smile team there and the patients. on this mission there were 32 patients, they each came with one family member (in theory, in practice many came with both parents, and maybe some siblings, also many of them had family in jordan that then came to visit and possibly stay in the hotel with them), and we were charged with making sure they were fed, got to the hospital on time, and mostly with keeping the kids entertained.

it was a lot of fun, there were kids from just a few months to 16 years old. of course we all had favorites. mine was a little guy named Anwar with a cleft lip and a head that was way too big for his body. he was 2 and he tended to just topple over backwards if he was sitting, and to stand up he would put his head all the way to the floor and use it for leverage. i think he reminded me of my little brother adam who, and my family will all remember this, also had a ridiculously large head and the same huge mess of curly hair. i was there for the first five days of the mission which is mostly screening (unfortunately some patients got sent home without surgeries), which is mostly downtime and playing. the day that i was leaving the first wave of patients that had gotten their surgeries were coming back to the hotel. i got to see a few of them and i hope that next time i get to participate in a mission i can be there for the end when everyone has gotten their surgeries. it would be nice to see what it is like after everyone has finally gotten what they have been waiting god knows how long for. the first day we went to the hospital the tension, anxiety, anticipation, all of it, was palpable in the bus and i would like to see the payoff of all that worry. anyway it was a great time with a great organization and i was very fortunate to be a part of it.

now for some bad news: the teacher at my center has been replaced. i can't remember right now how much i had written about my teacher, but i really liked her. i still like her, she's not dead or anything, but i had really enjoyed working with her. she was not extremely skilled at dealing with the kids and didn't know very much about special education, but she was very eager to learn and was always open and excited about new projects. i had big plans for her and knew that after 2 years of being pushed a little she would be a really amazing teacher. she no long works at the center.

apparently, and i have yet to figure out if this is solely the policy of my center's director/principal, or if it comes from higher up, my center has a policy that no teacher works there for more than 3 months. which is just completely ridiculous obviously. this is horrible for the kids, and horrible for the center. it also makes me completely irrelevant and useless. if there is one word that we as peace corps volunteers should be saying in our sleep it is 'sustainability.' the goal of everything we do is to make sure that it can and hopefully will continue to be done and function well after we are gone. as special ed volunteers this means giving a teacher enough tools that they can run the classroom successfully without us. considering that it will take the kids at least a month to get used to the new teacher each time, that means that i will have approximately a month and a half to work with the teacher and the kids before that teacher leaves. which is ridiculous and not going to be productive in any way. i called my boss at peace corps to tell them about this 'policy' and they said they will get back to me...we'll see what happens. i'm worried because of course i have grown really attached to my kids at the center and, right now, i feel like peace corps will assign me somewhere else, somehow, if they really intend to change teachers every few months. i'll keep you updated on that.

on a much better note, had my first visitor in my house today. though others have been in my house before i am calling this my first official visit because it is the first time i served someone tea. i know i've told you all about the importance of tea on visits, and not to brag but she told me that it was very good tea. 'she' being a thirteen-year-old from the next street who i met while walking around the neighborhood. (side story: when i come back from the city of mafraq, i take a bus, and this bus drives all around mansheya when it returns. when you want to get off the bus, you tap your coins on the window and the bus stops. it will stop as many times as people tap, and people will tap less than 10 feet from the last stop so sometimes there are many many stops. however you can only get off on the streets where it decides to go. unlike the states, there is no set route for the bus; each bus driver is different and each day they may take a different route. so as of late i have been staying on the bus longer and longer, past places i know, hoping that it will circle around and at some point get closer to my house because at this point i get off two hills before my house. anyway this means that sometimes i realize that it is only going to continue to go farther away and just have to get off. so i tap in the middle of nowhere and walk new routes home.) on one of my big walks i ran into this girl and she walked me home. she speaks very good english and is in eighth grade. we had a great little talk on everything from religion to america and the virtues of spaghetti to obama (there is just as much debate here about whether or not he is a muslim, and just as much coverage of his every move: apparently in one interview he was shown slapping and killing a fly which was much discussed and not approved of). she is a very intelligent and feisty girl and i'm excited to talk to her more. i gave her an application to a leadership camp peace corps holds every summer for young women in jordan and i hope she gets in. also she is very worried about me living all by myself (who isn't) and after seeing the state of my bare cupboards in my kitchen promises to start bringing over plates of food. i hope she does, i'm getting sick of msg-flavored rice (my staple) and potatoes.

i just watched 'everything is illuminated'. don't. read the book instead. that's almost always true but it is especially true here.

i wish i had some sort of spiffy send-off. but i don't. i want it to be 'jane you ignorant slut,' but i guess that's not really an ending. maybe i'll just let it drag on. if i just never stop talking i'll never have to figure out an ending. that would certainly be easier. though i think, in the long run, not so pleasant for you, the reader out there in cyberspace. and really all i wanted was a pleasant way to end it....sigh

damned if if don't almost know an almost universal language

today i went with the teacher from my center to her sign language class. she knew that i have been wanting to learn some sign language to use in the classroom (i actually think she is taking it because i freaked out a little bit the first day i met her because we had a deaf student and no one in the center knew any sign) and i just like it, so she told me to come tag along with her to class. it turned out to be really fun because...i actually understood what was going on for once!

i took a year of ASL in college and even though i forgot a lot of it, most of it is intuitive and the more you try to use something you thought you had forgotten, the more it comes back. so i was able to have a nice chat with the sign language teacher, and learn some good new vocab. i actually think that i would learn the spoken arabic better if i could learn it all along with the signs. that's partly because it is much easier for me to learn something if i have a practical application; it is also much easier to communicate via sign language because you have to be so expressive. even signs that aren't based on the actual gesture you make while doing or miming something usually require you to make a sound or an expression to go along with it, often a hugely overstated expression so that you can see it even while focusing on the hands and not the face.

i don't think it is generalizing too much to say that jordanians tend to be very very reticent in expression or animation in speech. this makes it hard sometimes to interpret what is being said if you don't know the vocabulary, and incidentally has made me stand out even more with my american tendency to throw my hands around, be loud, and generally put on a whole performance every time i speak. so sign language and i are a perfect match.

anyway it was a really nice break to understand and be understood and almost as nice to actually be considered intelligent. everyone was very impressed with how quickly i picked up words and the fact that i was able to talk with the deaf students and the teacher. my teacher was actually bragging about me and calling me shatra (smart, basically) instead of apologizing for the fact that i am new and don't speak any arabic at all (which is what she typically says).

we had a nice afternoon together aside from the class as well. to pass time before it started she helped me look for velcro and chocolate chips; my desire for either made no sense to her. until i had such a hard time explaining why i wanted the velcro, i hadn't even realized how little she understood about the classroom props i have been making. most of them revolve around having the kids follow the weather, the date, the schedule, things like this, and putting up or changing pictures to match these things each day. anyway i thought she knew what i was going for until i was like, no it will not work the same if we just glue them on. she was equally confused as to why i would want chocolate chips to make chocolate chip cookies when they are available for purchase in packets that only expired a few months ago. i couldn't convince her that homemade are not even comparable, and i have heard horror stories about americans sharing their delicious home-baked cookies with their jordanian friends and being told that they are not sweet enough. (everything here is super super sweet)

hopefully that all made sense, i am just typing this to pass time while i can't sleep. i have also watched way too much six feet under, and started like six books. that's the only problem with the kindle: it is too easy to start multiple books and too hard to tell how far in you are or how much of a book is left.

also, this weekend i am going to help with an operation smile mission, which i am really excited about. honestly i haven't read all the details about it yet, so i don't know how many kids are involved or really anything like that, but i'll have to read all about it tomorrow before i go.

peace loves.

cocoa pebbles

i had cocoa pebbles for breakfast. thank you amman. and ate it with milk that doesn't go bad for a year. thank you science.

so i have this blog

i totally forgot about this thing. not as a result of being too busy (my day is over at 12:30), not because i'm studying too much (i have honestly not looked at an arabic book since my first week at site), or because i've been out and about visiting (neighbors are probably pissed). i just completely forgot. i seem to be getting more and more involved in my own little routine in my house, and fear that i am quickly turning into the crazy cat lady. i just need to get a cat, which is honestly a goal of mine. getting a cat here, however, would involve stealing a kitten wandering the streets. this act, should a neighbor notice, would probably result in more than a few gossip circles.

aside from planning a kitten kidnap i haven't been up to too much. i went into amman this past weekend, don't tell the peace corps. technically we are still under 'house arrest' which means we aren't supposed to be out of site. especially not in amman. mostly because amman is america and it is easy to blow all your money, get homesick, and start hating on your village because of visiting it too much. at least this is the theory. i, however, felt like although it was amazing to have more than falafel as the choice for eating out, amman is just kinda sleazy and overwhelming. not to mention to expensive to exist. don't get me wrong, it was fun to be there, but mostly because when we are there we can all hang out, even if there are BOYS. and no one notices or cares. it's certainly freeing. but something better left as a very occasional excursion.

by far the most amazing thing that has happened to me is the kindle. that thing is heavenly. my uncle sent me one from the good ol u s of a and despite only having it for two days i would guard that thing with my life. i was all indignant about it before i left, its the death of books, publishers can't afford to produce actual paper books anymore, blah blah blah. all of which i totally still believe. and so i am making myself a hypocrite and worshipping the damn thing anyway. i'll still buy books again when i get home, and i still think libraries are the best places in the world, but you can not beat the convenience of this thing when you don't have the luxury of a library, or lugging one around in your suitcase.

so in a nutshell, i'm still truckin. sorry it has been so long. stay tuned for an oh so exciting upcoming entry on laundry!

a note about juice

there is an unbelievable lack of juice in the jordan. there is no lacking in juice cocktails, nectars, or juice drinks, but it is nearly impossible to find a bottle of juice that contains more than 30% actual juice from an actual fruit. this has been a considerable tax on my mental health since i tend to buy and consume multiple boxes of orange juice a week in the states. however, somehow (probably due to a lack of nutritious yummy juice) i was unable to think clearly enough to realize that the tons of fresh fruits available could be made into juice whenever i chose. this oversight has been remedied thanks to a suggestion by a friend and i now have juice in my house! i bought an entire box of oranges for 4 JD, which is more than i usually spend on food in 2 or 3 weeks, and proceeded to juice the crap out of them with a little bitty juicer that looks like an upside down lemon. i had completely forgotten the existence of these wonderful little pulp-scrapers; with the emergence of modern juicing machines ("you can juice ANYTHING!") it just kind of dropped out of my consciousness. now it is my most used utensil and i feel like it is the greatest step i have taken since being here to feeling like a am really owning my life and not just seeing how it turns out. coming soon my philosophical novel on how hand-run juicers are the symbol of modern mans quest for self-determination.

a change in the weather

well it's warming up just a bit here, humdillah. it was nice enough that the teacher at the center decided that we weren't going to do any teaching today because we were going outside. the no teaching thing isn't a huge change; as much as the teacher clearly loves the kids, it would be more appropriate to call her a babysitter, or a maintainer of the lowest level of chaos. anyway we went outside to go for a walk in the fields around the center, and have a little picnic with chips and coffee. it was a beautiful day and the kids enjoyed getting to run around a bit.

it was a nice enough day that my neighbor called to see if she could come over and join me for a sit up on my roof. as i've probably mentioned before, whenever the sun is out and the temperature is warmer than my house i head out to the roof and read or just lay and soak up some sun (via my hands and face, the rest of me is oh so modestly covered in case someone on the other hill happens to look down my way). she just sat up there with me for a bit and we looked at pictures on my camera of my family at home. i was especially glad she called because she caught me talking to a boy on the phone a few days ago. i thought she hadn't heard the voice on the other end so when i hung up i said 'oh that was just my friend calling to see how i was doing' and she was a little appalled that i was so loose. i had tried to convince her that, despite what she may see in american movies and gossip girl, boys and girls can be friends without sleeping together. she didn't seem to buy that at the time and i'm glad that, even if she thinks i'm a slut, she still wants to hang out with me.

two questions

so these are the two most pressing questions in my life right now, please weigh in if you feel you have an answer to either or both:

How many times is too many times to watch The Hangover?

Is it true that the less you wear in a sleeping bag the warmer it is (because they are designed that way or something, this is the rumor circling the cold areas of jordan right now)?

that's all i have for you today, i'm still just chugging along at work and trying to convince my neighbors that my life is not the same as lindsey lohan movies.

cultural exchange

it doesn't take much to act like an american. my 5-year old neighbor decided to drop in for a visit, and immediately picked out everything worthwhile in my room and settled in: i-pod, headphones, laptop and bed. he was then lost to me.

my first snow day in jordan

we had no school today because it was too cold and none of the students showed up. so i have been sitting in my room with all the curtains drawn for the past seven hours. the curtains are drawn because i feel that it helps to retain the little bit of heat that is in my bedroom. the rest of my house is 40/42 degrees, but its a bit warmer in my room. i have had my heater on all day (big splurge) and have a choice between using one, two, or three of the heating panels. my default is one and i crank it up to two when i can see my breath too much to see the computer screen clearly. this system seems to be working.

all in all though it was a pretty nice day; it felt like a snow day at home. i spent the whole day just curled up reading and watching movies. i made a bomb fried noodles, veggies and eggs dish for lunch, and some stuffed cabbage (malfoof) my neighbor dropped off for me for dinner. the night couldn't have ended any better either: i made some popcorn on the stove (thanks mom for preparing me for life without a microwave) which i flavored with these essentially solid msg chicken cube things thanks to a suggestion by a fellow pcv which turned out quite zaaki (delicious), and watched the big lebowski which never, ever, fails to make me laugh and leave me in a good mood.

the weekend starts tomorrow and my big plans should be to do laundry but if it keeps raining/snowing that is out of the question. in which case i will not be looking too sharp next week. we are currently in 'standfast' mode here in peace corps jordan, which means that i am not supposed to leave my house. this is part of the emergency plan if any kind of adverse event occurs, and it is in effect now because there is supposed to be a big snowstorm. hopefully its lifted by saturday though because i had plans to have a get-together with some of the other pcv's in the area. gooli inshallah (basically: wish me luck, literally: say with the will of god) for me.

a note about shebob

so shebob. i don't recall if i have explained what shebob are up to this point, and that is leaving out a major focal point of my life here. so shebob (sheb being the singular form) are young men. the men that fall into this category are somewhere between 18 and 30 and usually unmarried. however, i have come to find that shebob-ness is not a demographic so much as a state of mind and course of behavior.

one almost always talks about shebob, it is unusual to hear about the actions of a single sheb, and that is because a key aspect of shebob culture is the group. shebob wear tight jeans, often of the sparkly variety. they are not above rhinestones and the more useless zippers and rivets on the jeans the better. most of the time the jeans seem to be borrowed from their younger sisters. shirts are tucked in, usually some shade of purple, and similarly sparkly or shiny. they prefer their hair to be unrecognizable as a natural thing but instead coat it in handfuls of gel that is bought in jars the size of the mayonnaise sold at kostco. the hair can be swirled into a kind of faux-hawk, spiked, or the more basic and always classic combed straight back and weighted down with gel. they travel in packs, never less than three, thus the oddity of a single sheb acting alone. there is a very clear correlation between the number of shebob in a pack and their confidence.

when shebob are confident they will yell. they seem to yell whatever is on their mind, though there are predictable phrases. usually it starts with a simple "hello." one will assert himself as the brave one and yell at the passing, sweaty, grocery-laden Americee "hello" "how are you?" "whats your name?" usually a few others will take it up as their rallying cry. through puffs of smoke the yells get steadily louder and followed by more laughter. depending on where you are, and how crazy the shebob feel, it may turn to propositions in arabic, or insults. in the cities it may go so far as to lead to one breaking from the group to go for a butt-grab. this is only attempted on the crowded streets of a city and is something that many of the girls here have already had happen. by the time that you process the fact that your butt was just grabbed the offending shebob have already melted back into the crowd.

in my particular village the shebob are not bad at all. humdullah. they seem more entertained by watching me then trying to interact, and usually im past them and out of earshot before they can pick up enough steam to move on to more insulting fare. or maybe they are just more polite than most shebob, in which case they could cross over into the category of "good shebob." good shebob are elusive. you usually can only identify them if you meet them in their parents home, and then they are out of their element and are behaving as a sheb all on their own.

this brings me to the point of defining shebob not so much as men of a certain age, but an entity onto itself when young men are together. shebob are to be avoided if at all possible. it goes without saying that you cross the street if there is a group of shebob ahead of you, and streets where shebob tend to hang out are better left untraveled. these streets are usually those with bus stop shelter things (these are particularly frequented when it comes on towards night and all the shebob are out and looking for places to sqat), auto shops, and obviously those with high-schools. its not that the shebob are dangerous, or really all that threatening at all, its more just an annoyance that you can do without; like avoiding the greenpeace dudes with clipboards at the top of the escalators on the metro lest they trap you.

just a regular day, but a good one

i feel like it is easy to end up sounding really negative in journals and blogs (and i view this to be somewhere in between) just because when i am happy i don't tend to dwell on it, i take it for granted that 'this is the way life should be' and just let it pass. shitty days on the other hand lead me to sit and brood, which leads to venting. so on that note i decided to share my ordinary, pleasant, overall fulfilling day.

the past few days i have been feeling a little down because i just came back from aqaba where i was reminded just how alone i am here at site, it had been about a month since i had been amongst friends who speak english and so the shock of coming back to site was kind of harsh. (end of negativity) so i decided to suck it up today and when i got home from work i sat out on my roof and read, which is always my favorite thing to do, for a few hours then called my neighbor. im still trying to get used to the fact that the whole hospitality, visiting process is kind of the opposite here, so i have just been sitting around waiting for someone to call me and invite me over. i realized that i just need to get over that quickly when i saw my neighbor at a wedding and she was really mad at me; when i asked why she said it was because i came to visit her only once and never came back. i tried to explain that i was waiting for her to invite me, but since that is not how it works here she was more than dubious. (we've smoothed it over, don't worry.)

anyway, i called my favorite neighbor and was just like "i want to visit you today." actually, what i really said, in arabic, was "you want to visit you (masculine form) today." i was a little nervous about my first self invite. after an awkward silence and my correctly stating my needs she was like 'great!when?" me: 'when do you want me to come?' her: 'now.' so i changed into my visiting pants (literally, not like 'put on your party pants') and went over at about 2pm.

i was ambushed on my way over by one of her kids, who is the absolute coolest kid i have met here, one of the coolest kids i have met ever actually. his name is abdullah rahman and he is five i think, almost six. already the idea of leaving him here when i go home makes me feel like crying. so he came barreling at me as i walked next door screaming "steeeeeeeephneeeeeeeee" which is amazingly close to the real pronunciation of my name. he led me into the house and i was greeted by the delicious smell of sambusik. which i believe in 'murica is called sambusas, they are sandwich-sized triangles of bread filled with spinach and onion and spices. Asmah (my neighbor) was in the middle of starting another batch and so i was like 'oh yeah i want to learn how to make them.' surprisingly she did not invite me to participate in that batch as i had just finished telling her that 1)i hate cooking 2)pretty much the only thing i have cooked here are sandwiches and rice and 3) i hate doing dishes so my sink contains all three of my dishes and both my pots (at which point she mimed bugs crawling around the sink and told me i need to wash them). so i bided my time chitchatting and such before i offered again to help/have her teach me. this time she accepted and you know what, i am a sambusik-making machine. all except one which was really ugly that she proudly displayed on top of the pile when we were all done.

of course after we were done making them we had to eat some, then we had to eat some with shai (tea) because its better that way. then we waited till her husband came home to eat some more for the official lunch. basically i spent the whole day on the floor of her kitchen just chilling, doing our very best (which is noticeably better than just a bit ago) to communicate about whatever passed our fancy. i hung out with the little love of my life, and helped his older brother Takeet (that is an impossible name to transliterate, its pretty hard for me to even say), who's seven, with his english homework.

we then moved into the tv room to eat some sort of sweet flaky bread stuff that her husband got at the bakery and some roasted chesnuts. this roasted chesnut thing is really big here and i love it, i sing the christmas carol the whole time in my head while im eating them. however here they are not roasted on an open fire, they are piled on the metal top of the gas heaters, and they often explode and send red hot chunks of tasty chestnut everywhere. still, they make me feel somehow old-timey.

over the course of a few hours, we watched: gossip girl, castle, a six year old preaching from the Koran, footage of mecca, and a special on national geographic on the use of maggots and leeches and the like in modern medicine, not in that order, none of them for very long, and interspersed with the inevitable tom and jerry for the kids. i also had a very interesting non-committal discussion with my little friend about why i don't cover my head. in the past he had asked me my favorite line of questions in regards to my religion that went something like this: "do you pray? (pointed at his mom who was praying)" "no, i don't""do you eat breakfast?" "yes" "do you brush your teeth?""yes." confused silence. for him the idea of praying five times a day is absolutely no different than eating, and the fact that i did everything else put me somewhere in the realm of human, but not exactly. so tonight he asked me why my head wasn't covered. i found myself stumbling because, although i have been asked this question many times before by many people, i'd never talked to a little kid about it before. basically i couldn't come up with an answer for him because he's just a kid and at that age your parents are just trying to teach you whatever religion they feel is the right one and for the kid it is just acceptance. there is no dialogue about cultural relativism or different approaches to respecting god, there is just 'haram' (forbidden by god) or not. so i went with "i like my hair, don't you?"

in the end i slipped out at 8:30 to 'talk to my mom in america on the computer,' which is a tried and true way to end a visit. of course they asked me to please stay longer, six hours is so little time, and they sent me away with a plate of sambusik for tomorrow so i dont have to eat another cheese sandwich. humdullah.

maybe im getting spoiled

well i realized that that last post was pretty whiny considering that i got to go to have a little mini vacation sponsored by the peace corps. to make it clear, i had an amazing time in aqaba, it was great to get out of the cold and to somewhere where it was at least comfortable to walk around in just a long sleeved tee-shirt, and i can't believe that i have made it all the way over to the red sea. i swear im not all jaded and ridiculous about traveling. humdullah (thank god) i have the chances i get.

a holiday at the beach

thought i'd give you all a little update on what i've been doing the past few days. we had our first IST (in service training) this past weekend. all 37 of our cycle of volunteers met up in Aqaba for what was mostly a language workshop. though i was a little disappointed that it wasnt being held in Amman, if it was there it would have been easier to get to, i could have gotten some shopping done, and more importantly i could have gone to the peace corps office to pick up some dvds and books from the swap shelves, i was pretty excited to go all the way down to aqaba. i had actually heard of aqaba before coming here, and i knew it was a pretty big tourist area on the red sea. now that i have been there i would never recommend it to any traveler in the area. here's why.

maybe it was my own fault for picturing something when i have really no idea but i thought it would be this beautiful beach with lots of green and, i don't know, something close to like an exotic island or something. what it is is a lot closer to the jersey shore. there is only something like six miles of beach there, and the beach itself is only about twenty yards from where the ocean ends to where the city streets begin. the private beaches, where you could actually (maybe) wear a bathing suit, or at least go swimming with clothes on, are owned by hotels. the public beaches are filled with mostly young men (shebob, you will probably hear me talk a lot about shebob) just sitting around. and i mean filled, there is approximately 3 feet of space free between every person. im not saying i didnt have fun in aqaba, i had a really great time, but if you are planning to take a trip to jordan, avoid aqaba, and if you are planning to take a trip to the red sea, i hear the israeli side is great.

anyway i did have a really great time there, we had four days and three nights there and it was amazing to get to spend that much time with my friends. most of the others in my group i hadn't seen in about a month, and that was a huge change from how much time we all spent together during the first few months of training. letting my hair down (literally) and getting to spend time not worrying about what people were thinking about what i was doing, who would find out about it, and having to be demure in all that i do was a great relief. aqaba is so far from where i live, and there were so many other tourists there that i felt confident that nothing that i did will get back to my village. not that i did anything crazy by my own standards, but i did go to dinner in mixed company every night, go out dancing a few nights, wear shirts that showed my collarbones, and generally did not behave like a good jordanian girl.

we were in classes from 7:30 in the morning to 6 at night, and we spent most of the time on language classes. i was not so psyched about having language classes at first, because at the moment i am a little overwhelmed by the whole language learning things and did not want 3 days worth of vocab thrown at me to remind me of how little i know. however, it turned out to be really great because we worked on the things that i really need. we mostly got to ask questions about the issues we had run into with sentence structure and grammar and things like that, which i still don't really understand but am getting better at. the teachers were rotated every lesson which i thought was really helpful because they are all from different areas of the country and so have different accents, and they all have very distinctive teaching styles so it was nice to not be stuck with a teacher you are less than compatible with.

i didnt even take any pictures because i left my camera at home, but i will try to snag some from my friends and post them up here.

stay warm homies.

jordan gets cold

it is 43 degrees in my bedroom right now.

Waiting for the Gasman

the day before yesterday my soba ran out of gas. my soba is a little space heater that has a 3 ft tall tank of gas in the back of it that runs three panels of basically live fire. so two days ago it starts to sputter and goes out, which left me in my uninsulated, cinderblock, 52 degree room without any way to warm up. which was not too big a deal because i am essentially in bed by 7pm every night, unless i am out visiting in which case i am paying for heat with the entertainment of my very existence. so yesterday it was really cold again (of course we are going through a particularly rainy, cold week right now) so i went next door to borrow a wrench to disconnect my gas tank from my stove to put the tank in my heater instead. it is impossible to visit a house for any reason, or to speak to someone on the street even, and not go into their house for a visit. so i visited for a hour or so, at which point they proposed that i go visit the husbands family. i politely decline, and they politely ask why i hate his family so much that i cant go down the street to visit for a minute. i stay at his family's house for a few hours, until their kid falls asleep and we have to come home. when they drop me off i ask where i can get a new gas tank. they tell me to come back to their house tomorrow when i get off work and they'll make "the call" and help me get it.

today when i got off work i went straight over to their house, as planned, and she wasn't there. i give her a ring and she's like, im at my family's house, come here and we'll get the tank. so she sent her little sister up to get me and we head down for what i know will be another long visit. we start by having breakfast, and after six hours, three rounds of tea, one round of pepsi, one round of coffee, and another meal, i head home. without a gas tank.

she told me come over tomorrow and we'll sort it out.

More pictures

so i dont know how easy it is to get to my picassa site so i posted a few

pictures here. they are all of skyscapes basically, because the sunsets

here are completely unreal. just click the pic to get to the whole gallery.

burning city

fine i'll write something

so i have been chastised for not posting more and told that i need to just write something; it doesn't have to be earth-shattering. This is what i have been told so dont go reading this and then sit back in your chair and wonder "why did she bother to tell me this, i should have been reading perez hilton instead".

i have been starting to settle into my new community. I think the town is about 10,000 people, but i'm not completely sure of that. It feels a lot smaller for a number of reasons. The most obvious of these is that it is extremely hilly so the town is sort of separated into these little segments. i, for example, live "foug". foug means on top basically and is used to indicate the whole quarter of the town that is on top of the highest hill, sort of in the back of the town. I am at the very top of the top, behind my house the empty hills start again, which are the domain of the wild dogs. these dogs look like regular dogs, i guess they were at some point, but they would not be amiable to you slipping a leash around them and calling them Rex. They usually don't venture into the town, but you can hear them howling all the time and i can only imagine that they get a good bit of the nutrients from the many goats that are raised in the area. The goats on the other hand are all over the town. they are herded from the backyards where they spend most of their time to the outskirts of the town where they can graze, leaving a little trail of goat poo everywhere. Luckily my major walking route that takes me down to the "supermarket" follows one of these herding routes; this is when im happy that you have to take your shoes off before going into a house because i dont have to worry about tracking goat poo in my new friends' houses.

I guess i haven't even really explained what it is like here at all up to this point have i? the whole of jordanian culture centers around being with other people. this may seem like a no-brainer, what culture isn't centered around people right? no, a jordanians life is empty if there is not at least one person in the room with them at all times. They just love to talk all the time, especially about food, how much things cost, and the local gossip. in order to facilitate a good flow of information on current prices and the goings on next door they like to keep a steady rotation of people coming in. they also cannot abide the thought of someone walking alone, coming home to an empty house, or passing up the opportunity to talk so they will invite you in off the street when you pass. This is not just me, they will invite fellow jordanians in off the street as they pass as well. As you walk and greet people standing in their doorways you hear a constant call of "tfudtali" (come in/welcome). they are especially insistent that i come in because they know that i live alone in my house and just know that i must sit around and cry all day because how could anyone stand to be alone that much? so they ask me to come in, they tell me i'm welcome 5 different ways, and sometimes i let my American impulse to always refuse help or generosity for awhile to make sure they really mean it go by the wayside and step in for a few cups of tea and many questions. My arabic is certainly progressing but it is still probably really painful to listen to, nonetheless everyone is very proud of me when they find out i only started learning 2 months ago, and overjoyed and shocked that i plan to stay here for 2 years.

The jordanian fear that you will die if you are on your own for any amount of time has really helped me out since i have moved into my new house. the fact that i am 22 ("bes isreel"/ just a baby) and a woman has really kicked the famous jordanian generosity into overdrive. my neighbors have been consistently bringing me little plates of food or inviting me over for dinner, especially in my first week here. that has been a lifesaver since i didnt have any food in the house, wasnt really sure where to get it, and didnt have any pans to cook it in for the first week. i only just bought a plate and a bowl this morning (i have just been using the plate that a neighbor brought food over on until that one needs to be returned and i get another neighbors to replace it and so on), i have bought a pot and a skillet and have been handling the food situation pretty well when i haven't managed to wrangle a dinner invite.

my neighbors have been absolutely wonderful with everything. my house has a courtyard to the side of it which has three other houses around it. all of my neighbors have come over to check on me, in fact i think i caused one of them considerable distress when i left my phone in my house while out visiting another family, didnt check it when i got in, went straight in the shower and had to cut it short because someone was repeatedly ringing the bell and calling my name. when i answered my neighbor was standing there looking worried and asked what had happened where was i, what was going on? i didn't understand her concern until i looked at my phone and saw i had 6 or 7 missed calls. they are just not sure that i will be able to survive in a whole house on my own, who knows i may drown because i didnt know that you need to turn of the water faucet when you are no longer using it. (this is really the kind of advice i get, they are just adorably afraid for my life) But the mothers of all three of the houses around me are really young (i think they are all in their early to mid twenties, though honestly they look older) and have one or two kids.

Ok more later but im tired now (its after ten, late for me here where you have to stay in your house once it gets dark at 4:40) and i have to get up early tomorrow for work (7:30).

I am also going to start adding the book that i am reading, movie im watching, music im listening to, or something like that at the end of each post to 1) make it relatable to my adoring readers and 2) keep me interested in updating in case that adoration is not quite enough of an incentive.

Reading: Paula, by Isabel Allende

Obsessed with the music of: White Stripes

whoa

so i realize that it has been a ridiculously long time since i have last posted. all kinds of new and interesting things have happened and i am going to try to go back and fill you all in at some point in the future. i am putting it off again because i still do not have good access to the internet (this is the first time i have been on since i got to get a few hours in at christmas) and so i want to just get the basics across. here they are:

-i have moved into my new house. im putting a pictorial tour on my picasa account now, which should show up over in that little slideshow thing, and if you click on the slideshow it should bring you to my picasa page. my new house is extremely well furnished for a peace corps house, not to brag but i am probably in the top ten nicest houses of my group of volunteers, at least as far as i know. be jealous. but not too jealous because i didnt have a heater for the first few days, and its damn cold here. i had both an electric heater and a gas heater in my home but neither was capable of producing heat because i didnt have a gas can and my electric one melted (see pictures) which produced a bad smell and some interesting smoke so i left it alone.

- i have gotten a post office box, so if you had something against Amman (and who doesnt) and were waiting for a new, high-class, Mafraq address to send things to me at, here it is:

Stephanie Paulick-Maloney

PO Box 155

Mafraq, Jordan

-i do not yet have internet but chances are high that i will be able to get my house wired within the next month. i am currently using a friends computer at her house on the other side of my village so that is promising that someone nearby was able to accomplish it. the hardest part about getting internet to your house (and the reason that i have yet to do so) is that you have to tell the internet man in the nearest big city where you live. no problem you say? well that is because you are living your coushy, address-having, road-following, ordered lives in the good ol u s of a. jordan, on the other hand, does not believe in this and so i honestly dont think my house even has an address in any capacity. you have to go in and say "i live in this village" "you get to my house by going up the first street, past the blue ducan, to the fourth mosque, turn left and my house is the third one with the green gate." this is not how you actually get to my house, i have no idea how you get to my house if you are not coming from one of the three places that i have been in the town, and i also would have to be able to say all of it in arabic and everything. so when i get that together ill have internet. in shallah.

ok maybe more later but i have to go now. hope everyone had a happy new year and christmas and everything.