Jordan Day 1

I must say that I didn’t know what to expect. I looked for some pictures, I did a little reading about the city and Petra, but I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. The city is beautiful, the people are extremely nice, and the food is kick ass. With jet lag kicking in fast, we were definitely not fast to wake up in the morning. We were meeting with the folks in our partner organization in the afternoon, which gave us an opportunity to sleep in (even if we didn’t intend to), have a lovely breakfast at the hotel, and then meet up with Brandon for a coffee.
We walked around Rainbow Street, which has a nice night seen, but also a few good coffee shops. It’s on of the nicer streets in the area, and many of the coffee shops are quite posh. We sat in a lovely one and discussed the state of the world, and each of our works. We met another friend of his who has been living here for several months who is learning Arabic and teaching musicians how to make a little bit of a career out of their music here. We had the most amazing mint lemonade and then departed to meet the folks at the partner organization.
They are very well situated in society. It was very nice to get the inside scoop on being in Jordan and Jordanian culture, from very open minded Americans who have been living (and loving it) in Jordan for quite some time.
Here are some fun facts I learned today. The king is loved. He actually put a mosque and a church next to each other. The government seems to think that everyone should get along. There’s one mosque, which is a sarcazian mosque. Even though the sarcazians have been living here for many generations, they’re not Jordanian. You can’t be Jordanian unless your father is. Your family can have lived here for 7 generations but not be Jordanian. Each neighborhood has a distinct community, they function as separate units. The head of each community basically dictates how things will work. If he says no to something, then it definitely won’t happen. There are 7 originals jabil (hills) of Amman, but it has grown. Jordan is the 4th driest country in the world. The conflict makes their water supply even less. The country as a whole actually has no natural access to water. Rumor has it that they’re pumping water from underneath Wadi Ram.
Arabic here is beautiful. I love the meanings. There are responses to everything. When you say good morning, a person responds with, a morning of light. When you say cheers, the answer is on your heart or two healths. We keep eating amazing food, hummus, falafel, taziki, Turkish coffee, and tried kunafe, a typical Jordanian sweet that has cheese with a soft crust on top sprinkled with pistachios. It was amazing!
That was a mini regurgitation of the many things I learned today.