Al hamdulillah, thank God for blogs. Every day is SO packed with exciting moments!! With the ridiculously sketchy memory I am able to proudly call mine, I would absolutely never remember. Ode to blogs done. So, today was our first official day of classes! However, we must first make it known that Vanessa has been awake since the 3am prayer call. It reached me within the depths of my dreamland this time. As (beautiful, I'm sure) prayers to the mighty Allah were sung to the campus, I read my book from 3:30-5 and could not fall back asleep for the life of me. And somewhere around 6am I decided that it was much more worth my time to surrender, eat a banana and hit the gym. And so after ridiculously adorning myself in a long skirt over my running attire and sneakers to complete the (truly breathtaking) look...that's exactly what Reshma and I did! It was great by the way. Nothing like an 8am gym sesh to prepare you for 3 hours of speaking straight Arabic. Our first class is entirely in spoken Arabic (while we've been spending the last year learning purely formal..large difference) and is taught by a wonderfully adorable professor named Mahmoud. Our second is all on reading texts and discussing them in spoken (taught by an equally adorable professor named Isma...she's potentially the sweetest woman in the world). Our last is a conversational class centered on media and film. They're all perfect. I can honestly say I've never been so happy in a class while simultaneously being more challenged than the cumulation of my lifetime...which pretty much sums up Arabic for ya. All in all, the first day of classes were an absolute success! After finishing around 2:30, we began to walk back to our dorms, completely ignorant of the fact that we were supposed to be waiting for our bus to do this job (we're impatient Americans). P.s. in all of my graceful glory, I of course managed to be completely blind to the substantially sized pipe thing jutting about a foot out of the ground and now have a nice Jordan scar to add to the collection I have on my legs (It's adjacent to Puerto Rico and just a stretch away from Shaving Hazards of showers past). Once we made it back to the dorms, Christine and I collapsed onto our beds while Kaitlyn productively made us all a fruit salad. She's alright that one. We're devouring the wonderful pineapple as I type these very words. <- Blame this evening's dramatics on my lack of sleep.
Around 5pm, our kind bus returned to take us into the city of Irbid for dinner. We were also reunited with Waed and Muhammad, who had been visiting their families. It was a long 24 hours of heartache without them. We love our professors. For dinner, we went to a cafe/hookah bar called B-12 (it's a bingo thang) and ate extremely delicious hummus, pita and kibbeh. I hope I dream about that tonight. It was amazing. The cafe was also beautiful and looked out over the city. Later on, we were moved into a separate part of the cafe, (pictures to follow!) some of us smoking hookah and all of us just talking until we were to meet up with Waed and Muhammad again. After some waiting outside of the cafe and attempting to avoid the men who all wanted to marry us or something, we were treated to a dessert of Jordan called Kanafe, which we were promised would turn over our lives as we knew them. It was indeed delicious but alas I was too full and incoherent to finish it or appreciate it to its full Godliness.
Finally, at around 10:30 we were back on the bus to school. We dropped off our bags and got to go over to Waed and Muhammad's apartment next door to our own building and have (amazing) tea like the big, happy family that we are. We talked and laughed and it was wonderful. For my own Jordan memory bank, I shall write the following funny thing: Muhammad was telling us about the "ozone-filtered water" that he had found for us to be delivered to our dorms next week and when asked what the significance of this ozone cleaning was, he responded "no, not the ozone..isn't there not enough of that or something?! That's not what they're using!" Hehe. It's okay if you, my general reader, did not openly chortle at that because it was for my own benefit and I would like to remember that I laughed very heartily. Anyway! Thank you for your time.
Ma' salama from another beautiful day in Irbid :) Tesbaheen ala kheer! "Good night/May you wake up with good news"
Around 5pm, our kind bus returned to take us into the city of Irbid for dinner. We were also reunited with Waed and Muhammad, who had been visiting their families. It was a long 24 hours of heartache without them. We love our professors. For dinner, we went to a cafe/hookah bar called B-12 (it's a bingo thang) and ate extremely delicious hummus, pita and kibbeh. I hope I dream about that tonight. It was amazing. The cafe was also beautiful and looked out over the city. Later on, we were moved into a separate part of the cafe, (pictures to follow!) some of us smoking hookah and all of us just talking until we were to meet up with Waed and Muhammad again. After some waiting outside of the cafe and attempting to avoid the men who all wanted to marry us or something, we were treated to a dessert of Jordan called Kanafe, which we were promised would turn over our lives as we knew them. It was indeed delicious but alas I was too full and incoherent to finish it or appreciate it to its full Godliness.
Finally, at around 10:30 we were back on the bus to school. We dropped off our bags and got to go over to Waed and Muhammad's apartment next door to our own building and have (amazing) tea like the big, happy family that we are. We talked and laughed and it was wonderful. For my own Jordan memory bank, I shall write the following funny thing: Muhammad was telling us about the "ozone-filtered water" that he had found for us to be delivered to our dorms next week and when asked what the significance of this ozone cleaning was, he responded "no, not the ozone..isn't there not enough of that or something?! That's not what they're using!" Hehe. It's okay if you, my general reader, did not openly chortle at that because it was for my own benefit and I would like to remember that I laughed very heartily. Anyway! Thank you for your time.
Ma' salama from another beautiful day in Irbid :) Tesbaheen ala kheer! "Good night/May you wake up with good news"
Sounds awesome! Thank you for sharing the experience.
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