Orientation Day

After sleeping through the 5am prayer call and the apparent family of pigeons who have been loudly disturbing the sleep of our fellow camels downstairs, our trio rolled out of bed at 9:30 am and made it outside by 10 for our day of exploration. We were able to walk and ride around JUST, an incredibly beautiful campus filled with landscaping that pretty much blows away the majority of schools in America. There are also hedges trimmed as dolphins around every corner. Pure art. Most astounding was the library, which is being built to be the largest in the Middle East (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Facts). It is absolutely beautiful, with towering pillars marking its entrance, a courtyard to house its hard-working students and floors and floors and floors of books. It kind of made my soul sing. It also heightened my expectations of Conn, who is also renovating their library...time to shine. (Nothing will ever be as beautiful as the JUST library, it's fine.) We were then given a tour of the gym, which was also impressive and wonderful for me, who has been dreaming of dumbbells. Following our official orientation, we went into the city of Irbid where we exchanged our money, had our photo ID's taken, bought mini cell phones (all of the functions are in Arabic...it's quite interesting) and went grocery shopping (All we bought was fruit, it was wonderful). Since then, we have returned to campus, where we did our first night of homework and all had a nice family dinner together, cooked by the extremely talented Michael and Reshma. Now, I am more exhausted than ever and cannot wait to fall into yet another deep sleep. Inshallah, tomorrow will be an exciting first day of classes!

P.s. we also just killed our first Jordanian bug. It was large and had frightening looking pincers. It's possible it was a mini scorpion.

Ma'salama from the desert ;D