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Published: October 5th 2007
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Its been a little while since I last wrote, but there have been a couple of interesting experiences since. Hopefully next time I can show you some pictures from outside Amman.
Some of the good things that have been happening are that I have been spending more time with the other students at Qasid and meeting Jordanians that are really nice and allow me to speak to them in Arabic so I am not as lonely nor do I have as much time on my hands as I used to. Unfortunately that means that I am spending more time in cabs here and am not tolerating being swindled where the meter is "broken". I got into a pretty big argument with a driver today and ended up not paying him the exorbitant price that he was asking for but just giving him a little more than he deserved and leaving the cab. I had a night on the town last week and went to a really huge restaurant called Jabri which is 1/4 dinner food and 3/4 sweet store. The food was alright and we got extra bread because the people working there were happy we spoke Arabic. The deserts are also amazing during Ramadan. You might not be able to eat them during the day, but that doesn't detract from their taste at all. However, one of them us rumored to be 770 calories for a 3 x 3 inch square which seems a bit much to me, but it sure is good. After the dinner my friends and I went to a show at the Jordan Cultural Center and saw a Sufi band which was pretty good. There were 5 musicians and two singers who would change in and out. It was interesting seeing the different styles of singing and understanding more and more of the songs (to be fair there is a lot of repetition of religious words). One of the singers was blind and wore the closest thing to an Arab Santa hat I have yet seen in my time here. It was a fez with a fuzzy white band on the bottom and the a red middle and a little white bit coming off the top. I only stayed for the first half because I had to finish my work, but apparently during the second act people in the audience got up on the stage and danced which I am really sad to have missed.
Another great event in my life here is that I finally managed to install and Arabic keyboard on my computer and can type in Arabic الحمدلله although I have to make the font bigger as you can see. You can understand how amazing this was by knowing the frustration that I went through before it actually worked. I have had Arabic stickers on my keys for months and could not install the keyboard because my system was missing files. This caused me countless hours of frustration until it was finally fixed here and now I am trying to learn how to type which is no easy process but bit by bit I am getting it.
My other excursion was a trip to Mecca Mall outside of Amman in an attempt to go go-carting. The go-carts were closed, but Roger and I spent a while just wondering around the mall amazed at how expensive everything was in comparison to the prices downtown. They also had a center called Aladdin's Castle which was set up in the middle of the mall and resembled a market downtown (the balad) and sold the same types of wares (for much high prices) and even had a woman there making bread by hand. It was all kinda sad really, because the balad is filled with so much more life and this place just felt sterile and artificial like it was just a hoax. I really didn't like it and it just made is so that the upper crust of Amman doesn't have to make the trip down inside the city and contact those people there. We then went down to another mall area just to see how equally ridiculous it was. We were greeted at the door by a woman on a Segway (there was one Segway-riding advertising distributor on every floor). After throwing away the advertisement she gave us we saw another one who was trying to go down an escalator on his Segway which was just hilarious. After that we visited the 2 story Wallmart equivalent called Carrefour and then left, happy to be leaving such a place.
The last noteworthy action that I have done here was today. One of my friends (Blake) got an internship at Al-Dastur (Star) which is a local newspaper. She was doing a story about the work of the United Nations Human Rights Council in the area and so we went over to an area that was known to have more Iraqi refugees than other locations in Amman. As a side note, one thing is that not being really covered by our wonderful news media are the effects that the Iraq war is having on countries other than our own. It is easy to think of how much suffering we are going through in Iraq, but easy to ignore what this war has done to the countries in the region, especially in relation to refugees. There have been over 700,000 refugees from the Iraqi war that have entered Jordan alone, which might not seem like a lot but Jordan's population is only 5-6 million so those numbers do matter. Jordan has a reputation for being accepting (much of Jordan's population is made up of Palestinians who came after Israel kicked them out) and has taken in the refugees but is struggling to deal with them. They cannot get jobs or often continue their schooling in Jordan because the mainly state-sponsored education system is already over loaded as it is. This reality is not debated in the halls of congress or in the media and is something that must be taken into consideration when examining the costs of the war in Iraq. This brings me to what we did today. We went to a school that is working with the UN and Caritas to help educate the children with lower incomes many of whom are from Iraq and receive no education at all here. This program brings the children to another school twice a week and provides education for them for free which is great. We spent a couple of hours with the children from the program talking to them in English and Arabic (the begin learning English in the 1st grade and continue till they finish high school, I wish our schools did that) trying to find out what they thought about any number of things. It was an educational day and I might end up volunteering at Caritas over the next two months if they take me.
Well, thats it for this update, once again the pictures can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/luke.bolton514/Week3MallsAndSchools I hoped you enjoyed reading this and signed up to receive an update when this comes out.
ma salama مع سالام
Luke لوقا
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Crystal The Great
non-member comment
Woo!
Hola Amigo, Estas siguiendo divirtirte. Que bueno. Te lo mande un video en espanol. Que te guste! Gracias por la carta que me dijo todavia no me he inscribido en su "blog".... Lo hare en un tiempo cerca. Lo siento que no hay accentos. Mi computadora no funciona asi en los comentarios.