Shmeisani

I fully expected to stay in the hotel throughout the entire week for Orientation, but they kicked us out today and moved us into our apartments. I’m writing this now from my new living room (thanks to the new roomies who had the wifi set up already) and let me tell you, this place is a palace. Definitely nicer than a lot of student housing I’ve seen in the US. I unfortunately got the “bad” room, as I was the last to move in, but it’s still nothing to complain about size wise. There are three, yes that’s right THREE balconies attached to my apartment- one accessible from the living room, one from the kitchen, and one from another bedroom.

This morning was spent doing various Orientation activities, which involved a lot of sitting in conference rooms listening to powerpoint presentations. It also involved a whirlwind bus tour of the PSUT campus and the CIEE study center, which was not terribly helpful in showing us anything because we were “terribly behind schedule” and thus hurried between buildings rather quickly. I did get to see the library on campus, which is a fair amount smaller than beloved Suzzallo- all of the books fit in one room, and the reference section is comprised of a half-filled bookcase behind the Circulation desk, which is manned by one librarian. I’m going to miss the extraordinary resources I’m used to having at UW, but I think I will manage to become fast friends with this new library.

We shuffled around doing Orientation for the entire morning, then began moving around 4:30. My apartment building is located in the Shmeisani neighborhood in Amman, which is a 15-20 minute drive from campus. I think almost the entire building is comprised of students from my program and one other CIEE program, which is definitely nice. I’ve met just about everyone in the building already- and those of us from the LC program are going to gather outside tomorrow morning to figure out a way to get to campus. For the first week or two we will probably take taxis; hopefully after that we will figure out the buses well enough to find ones that will take us to campus. The good thing about taxis is that they will bring us all the way to the PSUT campus, which is about a 20 minute walk from the main gate of the University of Jordan. Buses will typically drop you off at the main gate, so that extra twenty minutes might be painful to budget in time-wise.

It was the first meal we were on our own for, so in typical Skye tradition it comprised of pasta. Originally I was hoping to gather all of us from the LC program together to go out to dinner, but I wasn’t quite sure which rooms the other students were in so it was rather hit-and-miss finding them. In the end Derek (shout out to my new Seattlite homie) and Jeiel (apartment across from mine) and Kai and Andrew (apartment upstairs) joined me on the dinner expedition. We weren’t quite sure where anything was but ended up finding a small row of family stores- there was a café, a small market, a pharmacy, and a dry cleaner- and ended up buying some pasta and spaghetti sauce from the market, along with some peas and green beans to round out the meal. There were definitely some strange looks garnered from our wandering through the streets- it isn’t very typical that one female will be out with four males- but other than that the trip was relatively unscathed.

I learned that Derek and I were the only ones with any prior Arabic knowledge, which became interesting and a little hilarious when the store owner attempted to ask the guys where they were from. Cue lots of helpless and bewildered looks in my direction. I swooped in with my obviously superior Arabic knowledge to save the day (not really, it was a one word answer: Amrikiyya). Each of us bought a few things, mindful that we are no longer being fed marvelous banquets, and we headed back to the apartments- promptly getting momentarily lost when we turned up the wrong street. I think I can say that we were pretty talented to get lost on such a short excursion, seeing as we only walked a few blocks away.

We had dinner, cooked by yours truly, watched some Arabic music videos of their version of MTV, which happened to be one of the two working channels on the television, and had a long and winding conversation about politics and current events and capitalism. It is really refreshing to be around like-minded people who are all focused on the same studies as I am and don’t get intimidated when heavy handed subjects or highly contentious politics are brought up.