17 May 2012

Busy day today yet again, but a little bit less of class (Only one class today). We had class again this morning until around noon, and our class went out on a mini fieldtrip to just outside campus. We went to practice vocabulary in the little tunnel that goes below the street (We take the tunnel to get to school so we don’t die in the busy street). There are little shops there and so we went and pretended to buy things at one shop. The man there was really nice. I don’t really wear make-up, but he gave us all a free thing of eye-liner. Then Ustath Nour took us out to slushies/smoothies. It was pretty great.

Then we (the whole group) went out on a real field trip. We did a couple of things, but first we went to the old citadel. It started out as a Roman castle built on one of the giant hills in Jordan. Throughout the changing empires, the castle changed and the architecture was “updated.” Twelve-thousand people lived on the mountain in this “complex.” All that’s left now are ruins. I’ll have to put pictures up. Because it was on top of one of the hills/mountains, we had such a great view of the city. I can’t really describe it, but it felt like you could see the whole city. It was so beautiful.

After that we walked down to the Roman amphitheater. That was, unsurprisingly, pretty cool as well. It is big enough to house 8,000 people, and like other amphitheaters, if you stand in this one spot in the front, at the bottom, the whole theater can hear. We even tried it with us being at the top (some people decided not to climb). There were three Jordanian boys around ten years old and they were pretty amusing. The kept playing American R&B songs (they seemed to like Usher), and one shouted up to all of us to take a picture and danced to the music. He definitely took at least a couple. It was really funny. He shouted all in Arabic and I understood all of it. It was quite a bit of a confidence booster.

Then we went to a sook (market) in downtown, which was just a bunch of stores lined up together. There was so much there. I had kanafeh and tamarind juice, which were both pretty darn delicious. Mostly we just walked around and looked at the different stores.

Then we just had a group dinner downtown at this really nice restaurant. We had traditional Jordanian food. So much food. It’s rude not to eat it, but there’s just so much. It’s really ridiculously good, but still. When you’re full, you’re full. There have been three dinners like that just this week and then both tomorrow and Saturday. First world problems.

I just realized that I started three of these paragraphs with "then." Interesting. But this is all, take it easy, and I’ll be back soon.