Perhaps it's time for another update

I've been busy with Arabic and a few other things, so I've been neglecting this blog. With a push from an avid reader (I'm looking at you, mom), I decided to spent a few minutes recalling some of the things that have happened recently.

Two Saturdays ago (7/24), we visited Petra. I knew nothing about the city (and still know nothing besides what the tourist brochure taught me) except that it was featured in the third Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. We got through the ticket booth and began walking down a hot and dusty road, through the outer part of the city. Robert and Craig saw a small stable/cave that they wanted to see closer, and once we all got that far off the road, we decided to keep going, resulting in Robert and me rediscovering our love of rock-climbing. We climbed the highest point outside of the inner city and took some beautiful pictures after we spent 20 minutes or so lying shirtless in the midday sun.

Once we finally decided to leave that wonderful little piece of God's earth, we kept trekking to the Siq, literally "the shaft", a nice geographic feature that served as a military defense when the city was still populated. It's a couple-mile-long canyon, often 15 feet wide, with a few interesting features like a mini-aquaduct that collects rainwater from the canyon walls in bathtub-sized pools located every hundred meters or so.

When we made it through the Siq, we were met by a dramatic reveal of the most famous building face in Petra: the treasury. It's every bit as fantastic as the pictures you can find online and the images captured in the movie. Moving past that, we went into the city proper, where we saw on every side small cave-dwellings for families who lived there millenia ago, and we climbed around a bit and saw a few other beautiful buildings. The city is most notable for its impressive architecture, as Wikipedia will tell you, and it truly is spectacular. The angles are precise, the lines exact, even so long after its creation.

We continued walking and climbed about 800 stairs to get to the Monastery, which is a huge building carved, like the rest of the huge buildings, in a sheer rock face. We rested in the shade for a while (the sun is oppressively hot in the middle of the day) before heading back to the bus. We spent about 6 hours roaming around the city, and I drank 5 liters of water and sweated most of it out. We were all exhausted by the time we got back to Amman, but it was a day well spent and I'm very glad of the trip.

Since then we've been going to classes and hanging out at the coffee shop, talking to people back home and spending our last couple of weeks with the other students in the program. I can't wait to get back home, but a part of me will always miss this place, since I've grown accustomed to it. Especially the ice cream, which is leagues better than anything I've ever had in the States. As a matter of fact, I just finished a big bowl of mango ice cream and my tastebuds are still in heaven. I'm off to make some eggs and sit outside for a while. Tomorrow I'll study for the final exam and relax a bit. Come Thursday afternoon, I'll be a free man and even more excited about coming home.

Salaam

A Very Brief Update

Last weekend we went to Jerash, a modern city built around the largest and best-preserved Byzantine ruins in the world. It was very hot, but walking down a road built to Imperial Roman specifications was surreal.

All week we've been conjugating verbs in both classical and spoken classes. My head is threatening to explode from an information overload. Hence the incredibly brief update. This weekend holds sleep and a lot of work organizing my notes so that I'm not so scattered going forward.

Other than that, all is well. Salaam, my friends.

Notes on Classes and Vacation

As a preface to everything else, listen to this song if you want to get a taste of modern Arabic pop music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfXIF2Mm2Kc. It plays every few hours at the café we frequent. Until watching the version available on YouTube, I’d only heard the Arabic lyrics. Only today did I learn that one of the messages of the song is “If you and your child are being run down by riot-shield-wielding police officers, don’t worry; Allah’s there for you!”

We have a midterm exam on Thursday, marking the completion of six credits of Arabic. So far we’ve learned the alphabet and harakat (literally “movement”, the markings are short vowels, silences, elongations, and “n” endings), many greetings and common questions, the numbers through one hundred, various fruit and vegetable names, grammatical rules for when certain letters are pronounced or unspoken, days of the week, month of the year, various time and calendar words (like last, next, this, after, before, etc.), and plenty of other things. And that’s all from the Modern Spoken Arabic (classical) class. MSA is usually only used in media and politics, though it is also used when formality is required and when Arabic speakers from different areas are addressed. In our Spoken Arabic (‘amiya) class, we’ve learned the counterparts to the greetings, times, and numbers, but most of the class in the last couple of weeks has been spent reading and speaking from written conversations. It’s very hard to go from writing and sounding out one or two words at a time to reading full sentences in an alphabet you’re still learning to recognize, but the exercise that doesn’t hurt isn’t effective.

On Monday we left Amman to fly to Sharm el-Sheikh, a resort city on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea. What should have been a relaxing week turned into a trip after which I had to sleep 15 hours to recover. When we weren’t lying out by the pool or swimming and hanging out with the dozen-and-a-half or so who came on the trip, we were snorkeling, eating fantastic food, and finding respite from the oppressive sun in the rooms, where we watched movies in the late afternoon.

The snorkeling was my first experience. We swam about a hundred yards out from the beach before we found any live reefs, but when we found them we spent about five hours diving 25+ feet to see them and the sea life up close. I remarked to Craig after we got out for the day that if someone tried to sell me a waterproof disposable camera for $30, I’d buy it with no hesitation. For the rest of the day my ears hurt from being that deep under water (even equalizing the pressure doesn’t mitigate all the ill effects).

I say “For the rest of the day”, but the days ran together because of an all-night trip on Tuesday. A few people were really interested in hiking Mt. Sinai, so we found a tour company that agreed to give us a special trip off of their usual schedule. We left the resort at 10:30 on Tuesday night and rode a bus for almost three hours before arriving. We got out of the bus and began the trek at 2, passing by St. Catherine’s Monastery on the way (read up on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine's_Monastery,_Mount_Sinai). Not having hiked in quite some time, I climbed with difficulty, but I made it up at the front of the group. The trip up was seven kilometers of uphill walking (I was originally laden with three liters of water, of which I drank two before reaching the peak) followed by 732 steps, and it took us about three hours. We got to the top, climbed to the roof of the old church there, and sat to wait for the sunrise.

It was sublime. The stillness that settled over the place when the light broke over the horizon was thick and beautiful. On a part of the roof shielded from wind, only the light of the morning sun was accessible to my senses. Separated from the world below, broken apart from the rest of the group, I felt an unparalleled calm.

We decided on the trip back down to take the stairs after the 732 steps instead of the longer downhill walk, so we raced our guide down about 3,000 steps, saw the highest mountain in Egypt from a distance, passed by the house of solitude built by the monks of Saint Catherine’s, and took pictures of Craig posing on high rocks against a background of blue sky.

I had been very excited to see the massive collection of documents and icons in Saint Catherine’s, but we would have had to wait about three hours for it to open to the public, and the rest of the group wasn't very keen on that idea. Ever since the field trip to Dumbarton Oaks last semester with Dr. Bayer’s Christian Political Thought class, and the small collection of art from the Age of Iconoclasm we saw, I’ve been interested in seeing more, and this would have been a perfect opportunity but for timing and the will of the group against it. If you didn’t read the Wikipedia article, I’ll mention that The Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai (yes, that’s the full, formal title) is a competitor for the title of oldest working monastery in the world, and it holds the second-largest collection of early codices and manuscripts, outnumbered only by the Vatican. I was very disappointed to have missed it.

The rest of the trip was more snorkeling, more swimming, more excellent food (including Lamb Tagine, which holds the title of Best Meal I’ve Ever Eaten), and more movies. We flew back to Amman yesterday and I slept from 11pm until 2 this afternoon before coming back to the café for the two quarter-final World Cup games with a few people.

I’ll try to keep this updated with slightly better frequency going forward. Two weeks is a long time.

Salaam

Last Friday we (the group of American immersion students and a few of the expats taking language classes with us) went to the Jordanian shore of the Dead Sea and a place called Wadi Mujib (Wadi means “valley”), where we hiked to a waterfall. As a point of note, let no one tell you that the Dead Sea isn't too salty, or that you should put your head under. It took fifteen minutes for the “water” to evaporate off of my face (leaving granules of salt as it went) and stop burning my lips and eyes.

What fills the Dead Sea is thick enough that it’s really more like salty soup than seawater, and the slightest breeze on a wet face causes a heating sensation rather than a cooling one. That being said, it’s pretty amazing to float atop the water like you’re lying in a hammock on a sunny day. A few people cut themselves on the salt crystals that form on the rocks jutting out into the water (I suspect the crystals form from the breeze coming across the water, but the water may just get to a much higher level than that at which we saw it), but the cuts closed up within a few minutes in the water. We collected a few smooth souvenirs off of the beach (charitably called such—the beach is essentially rocks that have washed up) and walked a hundred yards or so to a freshwater waterfall where we cleaned the salt from our skin.

We hopped back in the bus and drove another few kilometers to the Wadi Mujib Nature Reserve, paid the fee to get through the gate, and started the kilometer-or-so walk to the big waterfall. We were advised to leave our cameras in the bus because they’d be ruined, and the warning was not an exaggeration. After a couple hundred yards we were walking through shin-deep water and after a few hundred more we were all but wading. We quickly entered a canyon, the walls of which soared a good hundred or hundred-and-fifty feet above our heads. After climbing up four sets of small waterfalls (and sliding down them a fun few times in the process), we got to a deeper part of the canyon and saw a waterfall about seventy-five feet high. Trying to stand up straight under it, without buckling or being pushed out, is terribly difficult, but we had a great time trying. After a little while sitting in the waterfall pool, we trekked back and boarded the bus back to Amman. We were all exhausted when we got back in the late afternoon, so we slept, thinking we’d get up in a few hours and go to the coffee shop. We didn't wake up until the next morning.

Arabic classes continue to challenge us, but we persevere. Robert, Craig and I have an odd way of cementing pronunciation. When we learn a new word, we say it to each other a dozen times or so, going back and forth in a manner befitting, in the words of Nicole (a Villanova senior), “the seagulls from Nemo”. It may look odd to observers, but once we learn a word, it’s rare that we all forget it the next day.

Rami, our classical Arabic teacher, has spent the last four days (and plans to spend Sunday through Wednesday of next week) playing a game with us for an hour and a half or so each morning, wherein he says a word (sometimes a nonsensical one) and we have to tell him how many letters it contains and how to spell it. Our pronunciation and ear for the language (likely interdependent, if my slight knowledge of human psychology and pedagogy is accurate) have progressed very far very quickly. Looking back on the two weeks we've been here, I'm amazed

Christine is our spoken Arabic teacher (spoken Arabic, 3amiya, is a somewhat simplified version of classical Arabic, the name of which I don’t know how to spell, and we learn both because no one speaks classical except in news and politics), and she’s much more effervescent than Rami is, though they’re both incredibly nice and very good teachers—I’m quite certain I lack the patience necessary to repeat simple phrases over and over again only to hear them butchered by half the room. It may be the result of our spoken classes being in the afternoon and after three hours of classical classes, but the atmosphere is significantly lighter and more prone to distraction, tangent, and the mental state that accompanies as much class time as we have.

In the two weeks we've been here, we've seen two weddings near our apartment. First, it’s really odd to hear a man half-chanting/half-singing into a megaphone with bongo drums and bagpipes backing him, but the sound is surprisingly good and the rhythm gets into your head. Second, these songs go on for a very long time with no break. The crowd is clapping and dancing and singing along as the bride and groom stand on a dais and watch, and we've stood and watched for twenty minutes without ever seeing a pause. Weddings here are much more fun and exciting than Christian weddings back home.

One last thing: Christine crashed our classical Arabic class this morning to teach us all, as Rami frowned at her, how to say tame Arabic words that sound like English swear words (faak, `ass, shita, etc). She laughed devilishly as she walked out of the room.

An Update And a Note on Dissonance

Classes are more fun now that we've learned the alphabet and how some of the letters interact with each other (all letters have multiple forms depending on their placement in the word, but some letters change depending on what precedes or follows them, and some just have multiple forms depending on various sentence characteristics we haven't learned yet). I have somewhere around 100 vocabulary words in my notebook, as well as a growing number of greetings and common phrases ("How are you?", "I want...", "How do you say...in Arabic?", "What is your name?", etc.), but the more interesting indicator of my progress is that I can read signs around Amman and break them apart into letters, enabling me to sound them out. The benefit of language and culture immersion is, as anyone who has been in a program can tell you, the fact that one is surrounded by the language--learning the language is accomplished largely through classes, but enforced by the osmosis of walking around.

The Yemeni restaurant across from CGE has become the default lunch spot for Robert, Craig, and me. We eat until we're full and pay 2JD (about $2.80 US). We learned on Monday how to say the names of the dishes we like, and today we added enough words to turn our order into a sentence: "`ordii khobz, kabd, [we say "and" in English because we haven't learned the Arabic] ful."

T-shirts are rare in Amman, as are shorts and flip-flops. Men wear jeans or dressier pants and collared shirts, with closed-toe shoes. And yet the streets are lined with garbage. For a society that cares so much about appearance, dissonance makes itself evident in how they treat common space. Having no compunction about littering and no apparent desire to live as cleanly as they dress, their trash only makes it to a bin when convenient. This is much more obvious on the bus ride from our apartment to Philadelphia University (where we have our morning classes)--the sides of the highway are piled with garbage of all kinds, some of it unrecognizable after so long in the sun. The only time the aroma of trash in the city is unnoticeable is in the evenings, when from every restaurant and cafe wafts sweet-smelling hookah smoke.

Still, I'm very happy to be here and immersed in foreign culture.

`Assalaamo 9aliikom, friends. Peace be upon you.

A Brief Update

I arrived in Amman on Thursday night, met up with Craig and Robert (my friends from PHC, also here to study Arabic, also having no prior experience with the language) within an hour or so, and rode to our apartment with Fred, the director of CGE [Consortium for Global Education] Jordan (that's the program we're participating in). I hadn't been able to sleep more than a half hour or so on the planes (and I certainly didn't want to sleep during my layover in Milan - I had a great panini at a cafe and ate the best gelato I've ever tasted), so I was exhausted by the time we got to the apartment. We met the guys who are living next to us (three are participating in the program, the fourth teaches ESL at the office), unpacked enough of our suitcases to clean up and get to bed, and then slept from midnight to 3PM the next day.

We were only awake for about 9 hours yesterday, which meant that we woke up rested this morning, in plenty of time to get to the orientation session at 9:00. We were at the office ("the office" is the phrase I'll be using for the CGE office suite, which includes several classrooms and a common area for students to hang out--basically it's the base of operations and the locus of most of CGE's activity) until almost 5:00 this afternoon, and on the way back from dinner we found a WiFi spot we could leech a connection off of. Thus I'm posting this update. I have some thoughts on the culture here, and my reaction to it, but I don't think it's fair to post them after only two days. I'll give a full debrief of my impressions and reactions when I think they're more informed and honest.

Oh, one last thing. For lunch, 10 of us went across the street to a Yemeni restaurant where we ate family-style for 2JD apiece ($2.82). Ful is one of my new favorite foods. It's like refried beans if they were better-seasoned and served with hot, crispy flatbread instead of tortillas.

That's all for now. Thanks for your prayers, everyone. I'm getting more acquainted to things here and settling in for the long-ish haul.

Salaam

Getting Ready

I'm packing up the parts of my life I want to bring with me to Jordan, and I'm struck again by the recognition of the peripatetic, almost nomadic, nature of my life. From the comfort of home to the home of school to my family to a friend's family in another state, back to school, back to my family, and now off to a foreign country for more than two months, I've traveled a lot since January and I've had a lot of fun doing it. The result of all this traveling is that I have packing down almost to a science. Underwear, socks, and undershirts on this side of the suitcase; t-shirts and shorts rolled up on that side as a foundation for the flat-laying polo shirts and jeans; Dopp kit with hygiene essentials over here; extra razor blades and extra bottles and tubes of this and that over there; don't forget the deodorant. Pull out the garment bag, lay out the jacket, shirts, and slacks; don't forget the collar stays in a pocket. The laptop bag holds the computer, the iPod, the Kindle, and chargers of all sorts. My life reduced to a few bags.

I don't know what the next two months will hold. Of course I have a rough outline of class time, weekend trips, and a mid-term vacation to Egypt, but this summer is an exercise in ceding control. After all, I'm not even guaranteed language credit from participating in this immersion program and receiving satisfactory marks--I have to take the ACTFL to satisfy the registrar. I was talking to a friend last night, and she told me that my anxiety about that uncertainty is, in addition to being an unproductive pastime that serves nothing but its own degenerative cycle, an indication of my lack of willingness to trust God. In the first half of Matthew 6:34, Christ says, "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself." Anxiety is not just a waste of time and effort; it is disobedience to God. In exerting undue care for the future, I engage in a separation of my will from God's and a removal of my soul from God's order. In attempting to control everything around me, I ignore the lesson I learned last semester: that my relationship with God hinges on my ability to accept my place in the order of things and my willingness to subject myself to him.

Thus, my goal for the next few days, and going forward into the next couple of months, is to mitigate this anxiety. Spiritually, this means I'll be refocusing from myself to God, from the reasons for my worry (my desire for control, my desire for comfort, my desire to fulfill my appetites, &c.) to the reason for my hope. Practically, this means spending more time reading my Bible (yeah, that book I should pick up more often) and meditating and praying, in addition to the more philosophical work of spending some time each day in authors like Lewis and Chesterton (assuming I have any free time).

In this sense, this imperative of proximity to God, this summer may be just what he wants for me.