I haven't been on my blog for a little while now so I thought today would be a good time to update it. The last two weeks have held moments that will forever impact my life- so let me start from the beginning.
From September 11 - September 17 my school was off for Eid Al- Adha. Throughout the week my roommate and I spent a lot of time roaming Amman, meeting up with friends from school, and taking many, many pictures. I think my favorite part of the break was when my roommate and I came home from a café to be greeted with a makeover from the 5 year old girl who lives one floor above us. She is beyond adorable and she actually wasn't too bad at putting on make up either. The best part though was that our host brother walked into the house right in the middle of her doing our make up, and the whole apartment erupted with laughter. I'll add some pictures to this post so you guys can see how amazing we looked. Anyways the reason why I loved this particular moment was because it reminded me so much of my sister and brothers back home. My sister is an amazing make up artist and my brother Petey always wants to help whenever she does mine. What I've realized while in Jordan is that I am constantly collecting small moments like this, that the other people involved might not remember forever but I will. Funny story actually, on our first night off my roommate and I went to Abdali Mall. We went and got freakshakes from Nutmeg and talked about our lives back in the U.S. After this we decided to go check out the indoor mall and when we walked in their were carnival decorations hanging from the ceiling and American Hip Hop music blasting through the speakers. We were kind of confused until we saw a sign that said "Eid Carnival". Then it happened, I witnessed the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life. When we looked over the railing to the floor below us we saw a bunch of families standing around a carnival themed set, teenage boys dressed as clowns were dancing in the center and a few carnival rides were on the outskirts. My roommate and I busted into laughter because neither of us were expecting to see this. We hoped onto an elevator and went down to the floor where all of this was happening and we just watched and sang along to the music, I even got to call back home so my Mom and my classmates could see all of the excitement. I don't know why but this moment has become one of my main highlights of this trip so far. We also finally got to try Mansaf, Jordan's national dish! My host Mom said immediately that she makes the best Mansaf, and I'm pretty confident that she's right. It was so delicious and the best part about it was that it was a family affair, we all ate together and talked and it was all around a great time. Having a week off also gave me a lot of time to reflect on this trip so far and think about my next steps. As many of you back home know, I love to plan. I mean I have had a plan for what I want my life to look like since I was eleven years old. Being an ambassador through the YES Abroad program is one of the most amazing opportunities any student could have and I am so honored to be in Jordan. September 21 marks 1 month in Amman, and honestly I still can't believe I am here. I can't help but constantly be excited about everything around me and things I am learning about this new country and about myself are life changing. Let's see what the next months have in store!
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The Boulevard is the Jordanian equivalent to Patriots Place. It's a Modern outdoor shopping center filled with cafes and hotel rooms that look over all of the shoppers. My roommate and I however were not there for shopping, we were looking for another café. We had tried walking to it a few days ago but could not find it. Why couldn't we find it, you ask, well we took a cab this time and realized that you had to go on a highway to get there. But at least we knew we were walking in the right direction. The part of Jordan we were in is often refereed to as the " new downtown of Amman " which I can understand. Tall glass buildings seamlessly cover the area and lights brighten the street. The area was beautiful, and although we had a cab driver who wanted to make sure we understood that he would give us a discount if we wanted to go to the Dead sea my roommate and I were still captivated. The first thing we noticed when arriving the Boulevard was the #LoveJo statue. Tourists were taking pictures in front of it, but because we will be here for 8 months we decided to wait until after the café to take our pictures... We walked up a staircase and we were greeted by the beautifully decorated shopping center. A fountain was the first thing I noticed but directly above it were decorations for Eid Al Adha which is coming up next week. Honestly this boulevard puts the Warwick mall at Christmas time to shame. After admiring the scenery we walked around until we found the café! I have seen so many pictures of the food and these milkshakes they have called "freakshakes". Freakshakes are these crazy giant milkshakes that are topped with so many things! I got a Cookie Dough Freakshakes and it was delicious! They were playing music from the early 2000's which provided a good moment for some laughter and stories. I left America for Jordan on August 21, 2016. I was beyond excited to experience a new culture, to hear Arabic all the time, to try new delicious food. I was sad to leave my family, my life back in Rhode Island, and the comforts and privileges within an american society. I was nervous that the girls I was traveling with wouldn't like me, that kids at Mashrek ( the school I'm attending) wouldn't be accepting of the exchange students coming in, or that my host family wasn't going to be as excited to have us. Once I got on the plane though all of my anxiety and stress kind of flew away with the clouds. I realized that eight months seems like a long period of time, but in the grand scheme of my presence on this planet, eight months is nothing. I decided to explore this country not as myself but as a character ( another wonderful piece of advice given by my Mom). Taking a step back from my normal and just embracing the lifestyles around me.
Fast forward 2 weeks, and I am still certain that I made the right decision - that ten year old me was destined to be here and that's why I found this program so long ago. I still can't believe I am here. I can't believe my years of sticking to the path and choosing academics and work over typically fun things paid off. There were moments where I doubted if I was doing the right thing by investing myself in becoming a YES Abroad student, but right now in this moment I don't regret any decision I've made to get myself here. Being in Jordan is ten times cooler than watching any movie. Don't let me fool you though. I have only been here for two weeks and I have already been confronted with challenges. Being in a country that is the second poorest in the world in terms of water changes a lot of a persons daily routine. For example, I never realized how much tap water I drink in the U.S. Here in Jordan you can drink bottled water or filtered tap water because the tap water here is not clean. But your family also only has a limited water supply because in Jordan water is delivered to a neighborhood once a week. You take five minute showers once/ rarely twice a week, ( five minutes is the maximum) but outside it is over ninety degrees and we walk almost everywhere. That is a challenge especially for someone use to taking a shower every morning or who takes one long shower back in the states. Having to take cabs to get to places but not being able to give directions is another challenge. Also, making sure your driver has the meter or "adad" on so you are accurately charged, and making sure that you have change or 1 JD bills in order to pay because cab drivers often don't give change and get very angry when they have to. Yeah taking cabs gives me a lot of anxiety here in Amman. I think the biggest challenge for me has been the school however. In Rhode Island I attended a far from traditional school. We don't have these structured sit down classes where retaining unnecessary facts is the name of the game. We go out and learn about what we love and bring it back to the community to help us all grow. But at this school it is very different - it's a private school, that offers an IB Program ( students can earn an international baccalaureate degree upon graduation), and is very, very textbook oriented. It is similar to my school back home in ways, for example students have internships over the summer, complete personal projects, and they choose classes based off what they want to be in ten years. I love academics don't get me wrong and the classes I am taking here are fantastic, I feel beyond grateful to have this opportunity - I mean some kids in Jordan would kill to come here. But the school just doesn't work for me. I love small classes - my math class has thirty students in it and I have never been in a classroom with more than 20 students. There are so many people in this school and things easily get crowded and loud. I do however love my Global politics class, which makes up for the things I dislike! Now again don't let me fool you. Living in another country is difficult... but amazing. I know I will have days when I miss home a lot and I will also have days where Shmesani is like my second home. In a month I will be seventeen years old and will officially be the oldest on my trip. In a month I will be able to give some direction to cab drivers inshallah and maybe talk with a store owner for more than two minutes. In a month I will hopefully be able to order treats from that bakery using the real names. I have so much to look forward to and all of the little things you overcome while abroad make you so much more appreciative. Actually what kind of motivates me throughout my day are the students at the Refugee dream Center. I am in Jordan for only eight months and I have some privileges while I'm here. When I was in china I got a small taste of what it's like to live in a country you know little about, to not know the language or how currency works, In Jordan it's the same thing. Although I cant 100% understand, I now have a small idea of how a refugee feels when they arrive in a place they must now call home. Today was not only my second week in Jordan but also the first day of school for the week in Amman! I was very excited about school today because I love the two "social studies" classes I am taking. My global politics class is a great space for debates and diving into topics, and my history class is extremely interesting. We were going to spend the school year studying the Civil Rights Movement in America and the Apartheid in South Africa. I was interested in these topics because I thought it would be interesting to learn about how people from another continent viewed these historical events.
I arrived at my school around 7:30am, walked up a lot of stairs, and settled into my homeroom when I was interrupted with enraging news. THEY REMOVED THE HISTORY COURSE!!!!! Yes only eight juniors took the class, but history is a very important subject. I don't know, I am kind of angry about them taking away the class but it just leaves more time for me to work on my research. After school, my roommate and I set out to find this café called Nutmeg ( look it up, it seems great). We walked for about thirty minutes but couldn't find it, so we turned around and hiked up the hills to our new favorite café Mindhub. We both got our usual chocolate coffee and then a mint lemonade. We spent over an hour sitting and calling our families back home and showing them the drinks and the scenery. When the sun started to set we used Careem ( Jordanian Uber) paid 2 JDs ( $2.82 USD) and ventured back into the comfort of our host family's home. The weekend has finally arrived, and my roommate and I decided to start our first day off with another mission: to find a café. The neighborhood we live in is beautiful but in order to get to the main streets you have to walk down what I refer to as the " hills from hell" because they are beyond steep and sometimes slippery. You have to really commit yourself to something in order to go down those hills. It took us a good half an hour to get to the area of the main street we were searching for.
After a quick stop to the ATM we decided to walk up another hill, maybe we would find a market or store that will forever change our lives... and guess what we did! We discovered our very first café! One of my goals for this trip as to find a non-American coffee shop that would be a great space to do school work in and a place that I could reflect on my weeks, months, days in. When we walked in we immediately felt at home because of the "hipster/western" vibe. Mason jars, creative drink names, and costars have never made me so excited before! We both ordered two very different drinks ( which in some ways also described our personalities) - my roommate ordering a mint lemonade, and myself ordering a chocolate coffee fusion. The drinks were great ( we actually both ended up going up and ordering more drinks this time I got the mint lemonade and she got the chocolate coffee fusion) and the atmosphere was even better. We got a chance to relax and really think about how crazy the last week has been (not before taking a million pictures of our drinking and giving a million compliments to our surroundings). Cafes are very popular in Jordan - it's actually really embedded in the cultural. When traveling through Jordan you will see a wide variety of them; some cafe's are only for men ( which is kind of an unspoken rule), some are replications of American/Canadian cafes ( Starbucks is 100% represented throughout Amman, there are also a lot of Costa's which I have never been to but are very popular), and some are purely Jordanian. I am so excited to find more cafes throughout my time here, but I am also happy that there is one relatively close to my where I am staying! |
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