Marhaban!

Oh so sorry about the delay! Extreme technical difficulties were encountered last night. And you know when you see that spinning rainbow wheel of death on your Mac, it's best to just allow it a hiatus. Anyway, this is Sunday's recap and Monday's will follow. "Today" (time warp) we returned to classes. I think it's safe to say that we're all still fighting through the effects of jet lag. Despite an adequately full night's sleep, we were yielding our "don't come near us unless you possess coffee" faces. Or at least I was, for that matter. And as a foreigner, I can tell you that while speaking Arabic is normally a pretty hefty challenge, speaking Arabic when you're tired is just borderline comical. Everything just kind of starts to seem unsure and you can't trust yourself anymore. It can be an extreme emotional journey trying to learn another language. The amount of internal conflicts are just unreal. Actually, there was a point in class today where we were coming up with sentences and due to my severe lack of ideas at that point, I said something along the lines of "the seas in Jordan are wondrous"………..because we're not in the desert or anything, Vanessa. Alas, then there was coffee, the world was a brighter place and things made sense again. After we got out of classes, we stopped by the on-campus store. This is relevant because we found peanut butter!! And it was massively exciting because 1) peanut butter is delicious 2) I was in desperate need of easily accessible protein and 3) I thought I wasn't going to see it for the entirety of six weeks, but it was there and we reunited and there was a moment. To all of my family who is reading this, I miss you guys too. It's just that peanut butter is yummy. 

We then proceeded to do homework and go on a walk to the beautiful library and take pictures of everything we passed while no one was there to find us strange for doing so. It was also an absolutely perfect day outside. By the time we got back, it was time to make dinner. Our apartment attempted a spaghetti with green-beans kind of a meal...it came out a bit strange but we quite enjoyed it. Everyone else successfully cooked slightly fancier meals and we all ate together in the guys' apartment with Waed and Muhammad. It was wonderfully fun as always and then we were presented with stalks of the plant that produces chickpeas! It is a unique treat to be able to eat the baby chickpeas which grow inside of a kind of pod and they were very good. As Kaitlyn so accurately described, it was like "nature was right in our mouths". Thank you Kaitlyn. And thank you nature.  

After dinner, we finished up the homework for the night. However, that statement did not give the level of difficulty of our homework enough justice. I shall try again. We went back to our common room and laughed our way through the translations we were coming up with which made negative amounts of sense for about an hour and a half. At one point, Christine had translated something to "August watched over his daughter with the grandfather descended from above"...this particular passage was about women in Jordan working in the judiciary system. Anyway, no worries at all! Eventually, we righted our tired brains and made sense of the reading. By the end of that, it was very much time to go to bed. And that we did. Al hamdulillah. And to those in America, sabah el khair  because I realize it is only morning for you lads. A beautiful day/evening to all! :)