شاورما!

I'll never be able to think of myself as a blogger, but here goes my first post. Be patient with me if I start to ramble, but Amman is pretty cool, and my life occasionally has some pretty cool highlights when I shut up long enough for God to do things with it and get credit for it.

Traveling is usually pretty exciting for me, especially when I get thrown into sink or swim situations because that's when I seem to learn the most about God and myself and all of these crazy cultures that I've become so obsessed with. Sink or swim is definitely how I would describe this entire trip so far. I don't know if any of you have ever had a connecting flight through London-Heathrow, but when you're flying by yourself and you decide not to check which airline you're flying with beforehand, London isn't the easiest place to navigate, so that's where I started my semester-long swim. I had 5 terminals to guess from and I guessed the right one first, and even guessed the right airline first, which God deserves credit for. After paying for a $15 piece of French toast (the cheapest thing on the menu, mind you, all thanks to America's awful int'l trade deficit, but that's a rant for another time), I boarded the most exciting plane of my short uni-lingual life to Amman, Jordan. Apparently not exciting enough to keep me awake for the flight over southern Europe, but I couldn't help but stare out of my window in complete awe once the pilot came on the intercom and said that we were flying over the Medditeranean, over Israel and Palestine and eventually over the deserts of Jordan. Realizing that you're looking down on the mountains and towns that Jesus walked and taught on, where Moses looked across the promised land, where John the Baptist was executed, is something to weighty for my little brain to handle.

I don't know if swimming is the best analogy, seeing as I am an awful swimmer, but it seemed like I was back to doing it when I landed in Amman. Planning ahead isn't one of my strong points either, I'm sure a lot of you know, and I flew into Amman a day before everyone else in my program was planning to get there. I didn't have a phone on me or anyone who knew that I was at the airport and I didn't know which hotel to go to, so, I used what little Arabic I remembered and got a cab to the only hotel I knew of in Amman. What's life without a little adventure? Long story short, I used the hotel's internet to get a phone number and called with their phone and got to the right hotel, yadda yadda yadda. Out of either an overwhelming sense of adventure or of boredom, I spent the day before everyone else came wandering around Amman on foot (almost nobody walks in Amman, you can tell because they've planted low-branched trees right in the middle of all of the already-narrow sidewalks) looking for a restaurant that a friend told me about. Asking for directions here seemed to be pretty hard for a newbie because they only named a lot of the streets a few years ago and no one knows the names of the streets.
After about 5 days of orientation and touristy things, I was all oriented out and my host family (yes, I got to live with a host family!) came and saved me from the hour long sessions teaching the girls how to deal with harassment. After that it was, again, back to swimming because they don't speak any English! I think it's awesome now because we chat bil Arabi bas, but the first night was overwhelming with 5 guests coming over and all of them speaking in the fastest Arabic I've ever heard. The incredible food more than made up for it. I could eat hummus and pita bread and olives for breakfast everyday (which we do, among other things) for the rest of my life. Classes start on Sunday, so I don't have much to say about that yet, but 9 hours a week in the classroom working on Arabic and living with a family is going to work wonders for my awful conversational Arabic. Very excited.
About 2 weeks from now I'll be driving out to see Petra, Wadi Rum (camping with Bedouins), and the Red Sea, and a couple of weeks after that I'm taking a tour of a ton of Biblical sights around Jordan: Mt. Nebo (where Moses stood and saw the promised land), the spot in the Jordan River where the Pope claimed that Jesus was baptised, Herod's summer palace where John the Baptist was beheaded. It's enough to cross off most of the things on my bucket list. Anyway, there won't be much more to write about until classes start, and I've already written too much, sorry for the lengthy and late first post, but it is what it is. مع السلامة والله معك

-Christian