3 June 2012

Gotta make this quick. Crap ton of homework today plus a presentation on Tuesday. I wanted to update a bit, though, because it’s been a little while.

This past Friday things closed down as usual (a little bit of an exaggeration because things usually open up in the afternoon). We went out late to get lunch this time and one of our favorite shwarma places (the shop owner is so ridiculously nice). We encountered Arab time yet again. Five minutes turned to a half an hour, and then we just decided to get shwarma because we were already late to meet our group.

We all went downtown again (wast al-balad) and went to sook jara. It was just a nice little open-air market open on Fridays during the summer. It was really cool, but I may have spent too much money.  Not really, though, because I think I have made a huge dent in getting things to bring back for people.

Things got a little crazy, though. Not in a bad crazy… well not in a dangerous way, but just as an example, Ustaz was hit on by a prostitute when we went to down to downtown after sook jara. Very interesting. Nothing happened to me or my group though. We walked over to a side rod and it was so cool. Tables and people were everywhere and people were shouting prices of their things. There was a man standing on top of his table.

Saturday was another field trip day. As usual, we went everywhere (another slight exaggeration). We stayed mostly around Amman (within an hour) and saw quite a few different mosaics. Quite a lot. There was so much detail. For those of you that want to look any of these places up, we went to Umm ar-rasas, which is an old castle with 16 churches. The other was in Madaba. We went to both a Greek Orthodox church (which is the more well known. There’s a map of the Holy Land with all of the places of note to Christian pilgrims) and a Catholic church (Which had more mosaics and a sweet basement/passageway). I’ve seen so many churches here, but it was really cool to see a Catholic church again. Even if it was still really different, but as far as church architecture goes, Catholics win out.

Then the day was over. We got back around six o’clock which is practically unheard of. We decided to make use of the free time and go downtown again to Rainbow Street (shari3 Rainbow) and had dinner. It was a cute little caf and then some people had hookah. It was really nice to just sit out. It was a really nice night.

Now we’re going to go to a FIFA game tonight (Jordan v. Iraq). Pretty excited, if you watch the game, keep a lookout. We’ll stand out. ;)