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.