In Jordan

I know it’s been over a week since my first entry, but I have not forgotten about this. The hotel where everyone in our group stayed during orientation is the Al-Manar. They had wireless in the lobby, but it was excruciatingly slow and eventually stopped working with my computer. Also, this website is in Arabic so it was difficult to navigate. Most of last week was spent at orientation, nothing very exciting.

I arrived last Friday, January 30th after a ten hour flight from JFK. It’s only the second time I’ve ever flown and was not a great experience. It was hard to sleep and a bit bumpy. Luckily it was mostly empty so there was plenty of room. The Amman airport is surprisingly far from the city and is pretty much in the middle of the desert. It was about a forty-five minute drive to the hotel. Once we arrived we had dinner and then I went to bed.

Orientation week was generally not very noteworthy. We had a lot of information sessions, most of which were redundant and uninteresting. Some of the highlights included (on Saturday) a train ride where we ended up at a Bedouin tent where we got a presentation on the indigenous way of life. On Monday there was a scavenger hunt. Our group had to go find the South Bus Station and Bennigans (which apparently is pretty coutoure in Jordan, complete with valet). It was about an hour bus ride to get to South Station, which is located in a pretty shady part of Amman. From there it took another hour to find the Bennigans, since nobody knew where it was. When we finally returned to the hotel where we were having dinner and making presentations, we were over an hour and a half late. For our troubles my partner and I got a pocket Arabic dictionary.

On Tuesday we had our Arabic placement tests. Since they were for people from all levels and I had only had two semester, I was able to answer next to nothing. It was very distressing. Apparently I did well enough to place into Intermediate I, which was exactly where I wanted to be. Hopefully it’s where I belong. We generally spent a lot of time at the University of Jordan, which is the Harvard of Jordan and one of the best universities in the Middle East. The campus is pretty nice, though it looks a bit outdated compared to a lot of American universities.

The most striking thing about Amman so far is just how sprawling it is. Imagine being in the rolling hills of the northeast, except instead of trees, fields, and a few houses, it’s nothing but white, cube-shaped buildings as far as the eye can see. In reality, the city only has about 2,000,000 people living here and when you look on a map you realize that it isn’t all that big. In person, however, it’s discombobulating.