Its 9:30pm and me and Lauren hear a "tweeting" sound (much like a bird) and if you were a stranger (or us for the first week living here) you could mistake it for a dying bird that happened to land right outside our door, but no its our doorbell. Here in the Middle East a "ding dong" sound just does not cut it, they prefer dying animal noises. Matt and Mustafa are at our door...well rather by the street 20 feet from our door, because that is the location of our doorbell, and they want us to walk down the street with them to get dinner. So we go. Now our street is locally known as The place to go if you want to pick up a Lady of the Night (or if you are unfamiliar with slang associated with the "worlds oldest profession" I am talking about prostitutes). So I live on a street of ill repute and across the street, a little to the right, under this nice pleasent olive tree is where the madam sits and makes 'appointments', but at night the ladies come out in the flesh and so if you are walking around outside and see girls in burkas (the black dresses and head scarves that cover the entire face) you can be sure that they are prostitutes. So back to my story...we are walking down the street and across the street we see this women (complete with a burka) that is talking to this man in an orange constuction truck and he is waving here away and so were were like 'oh he is saying no to her services', so we went to the little restraunt, got some burrittos (think of Mexican burrittos and they are not that), went to the grocery store and then about an hour later we are walking back down are street and we see the same orange construction truck but this time we see this women leaving his orange vehicle! She is in there and he bends down and kisses here and she decends and he starts driving away, and this is what he sees: the four of us, standing in a line, staring at him with our mouths open and then we proceeded to have a staring contest with him as he drove away. Now as soon as he drove away a car that had also seen this transaction pulls to screeching halt in front of the girl and the car behind him runs into him. I thought it was funny.
Second prostitution story: So as some of you know, and many of you do not the U.S. beat Egypt 3-0 in a soccer game, but the previous game was a complete miracle for Egypt because they had beat Italy and it was a huge deal out here. So everybody was like "how in the world did the U.S. beat Italy"...well the next day we read in the papers that sometime between the two games the Egyptian soccer team was somewhere in Africa and $250,000 was stolen from their hotel room and they blamed the hotel workers, but cameras showed that they had a bunch of prostitutes in their rooms and they stole the money. Karma. And stupid, do they not know how many dieseases there are in eastern/central/pretty much the whole continent of Africa especially with prostitutes!
About a week ago the field in front of our house caught on fire (don't worry the olive tree that gives shade to the Madam is still standing) and I was outside with no shoes on watching the spectacle and wanted to go across the street to take a picture so I decided to go back into our house to grab some shoes. I havent mentioned before that our apartment faces the street and so there is the street, then the sidewalk, then about 4 steps, and then 20 feet of narrow patio before you get to our front door which is a sliding glass door with a rod iron door in front of it. So I run down the sidewalk, I run up the stairs, and I run down the walkway and I see that the gate is open and that the sliding door is open and I go to run into the house and then BAM I slam right into the sliding door which much to my surprise was NOT OPEN. I did not break the door (surprisingly). But it hurt and I got a bloody noes and I was crying for about 15 minutes and I either bruised my noes pretty badly or broke it a little because it still hurts. A lot. I want sympathy, but I don't get any, people think its funny. I don't.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
These pictures are out of order and random...but before you complain that there is no rhyme or reason to them just think for a second how long it took me to get these blasted things up!
This picture was taken from the building where I have my classes and its a picture of the University of Jordan where I am learning for the summer.
Me. On a Pyramid. Chillin.
This is me and my roommate Lauren. We are standing on a Pyramid. For realsies. We are about 4 blocks up and each block comes above my elbow...as you can see...they are huge.
All around Egypt are these "Tourist Police" and they just take naps in these shacks and sit on their camels all day long....sounds like the life to me. This fine officer of the law is at the Pyramids. And you can kinda see the drastic change in landscape, the land behind him is the Nile River valley and then about couple miles out it abruptly changes into sandy desert.
This house is in Ciaro and I took this picture because I wanted to show how a lot of buildings look. This building is a school for young children and most institutions are walled such as this one.
Here is a Pyramid and you can kinda see the hole on the bottom of the picture where people go inside into the tomb.
Remember my post about Marada and the "girls with hair" well this is Marada, taken while we were lost.
This picture was taken from the building where I have my classes and its a picture of the University of Jordan where I am learning for the summer.
Me. On a Pyramid. Chillin.
This is me and my roommate Lauren. We are standing on a Pyramid. For realsies. We are about 4 blocks up and each block comes above my elbow...as you can see...they are huge.
All around Egypt are these "Tourist Police" and they just take naps in these shacks and sit on their camels all day long....sounds like the life to me. This fine officer of the law is at the Pyramids. And you can kinda see the drastic change in landscape, the land behind him is the Nile River valley and then about couple miles out it abruptly changes into sandy desert.
This house is in Ciaro and I took this picture because I wanted to show how a lot of buildings look. This building is a school for young children and most institutions are walled such as this one.
Here is a Pyramid and you can kinda see the hole on the bottom of the picture where people go inside into the tomb.
Remember my post about Marada and the "girls with hair" well this is Marada, taken while we were lost.
So all he wanted for his Father's Day gift was pictures on my blog, so...
Dad, Happy Fathers Day, Love Angie
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Madaba...and girls with hair.
A few days ago some friends that I had made awhile back when we first got to Jordan invited me and two other girls (Nettie and Rebecca) to their homes in Maraba...the following is what I experienced:
Yesterday was a Jordanian national holiday celebrating the anniversery when King Abdullah took the thrown and so we had the day off! Very exciting. So we decide to go to Maraba, which is about an hour long bus ride away and see our friend JuJu (can't pronounce her actual name) and so we leave at about 9ish and take a taxi to the bus station where we find a bus that we think is going to the Maraba (being in a foreign country takes a lot of guessing work) so we get on and and call our friend and then she talks with the bus driver and then we talk to her and we are still a little confused, but the overall consensus is that we are going to stay on this bus. So we chill on this bus for about an hour and a half - as with the U.S. the bus system is the slowest way to travel - and just for your information the buses are not airconditioned and they are 70 years old and way crappy, but with red velvet curtains haha. So JuJu had told the bus driver to make sure we get off at the right stop, but obviously our welfare was of no concern to him...as shown by the fact that he let us get off the bus too early. We make this stop in Madaba (which is a small dusty town in the middle of the desert) and this guy starts talking to me through the window telling me that we need to get off now...so what do I do when a random guy off the street tells me to get off the bus? I get off. So we pay and decend and then it turns out that this guy wants to know if we need his services...I guess he drives a 'serviice taxi' (a taxi that goes between cities). great. now we three white girls (well I look Arab, but my other friends are very caucasian looking) are in the middle of this city and we have no idea where to go and so we start walking and asking for directions and walking and getting stared at and walking some more and there is nothing to see but dusty roads and dirty houses, but no worries at this point I am still optimistic...i've been in worse situations than this before. So we finally find a taxi and we call our friend and they give directions to the cab driver and he drives us to this road and stops by this man and gives us a "okay get out" look and so we pay him (and he charges us three times more than an arab...that is difinitly getting old) and get out. Now here is this random guy and he is motioning for us to go down this small alley way and i'm like "okay this either is going to lead us to our friend or we are gonna get kiddnapped"....lucky for me it was the former. So we go down and walk through this small gate and then there is this girl...now this is embarressing to say but I really couldn't tell who it was...I mean it looked like my friend, but she wasn't wearing a hijab (the scarf that arab/muslim girls wear around their heads) and up to this point I had never seen one of my friends without a hijab on and girls look very different with hair! It turns out it was a sister. So we meet the family and there is lots of kissing (like 10 kisses per cheek) and we sit in this room off the courtyard and then there is a moment of silence when me and my friends look at each other and think "crap. now we have to start talking in arabic". And thats what we did. For 6 straight hours. It was the most intense thing I have ever done. One of the sisters and one of the brothers spoke a few words in english, but it was 99.9% arabic. We sat in this room for a couple of hours....you know, just chit chatting....but then we were moved into another room that was actually apart of the house and this room was rad. We had to remove our shoes and there were couches lining the walls and they were on the floor - bedouin style - totally perfect for lounging around. So we sit in there for awhile and chit chat some more and then they served us lunch! The guys left and it was just us girls and the sisters and we sat on the floor and ate stuffed grape leaves (they were the most delicious thing ever) chicken and bangin pita bread (can't even compare to the crap they sell in the U.S.) and yogurt and this salad stuff and mango juice. It was amazing! So afters we all were sitting down again and it was about 100 degrees in the room (and I was in all black) and I was full and so tired from speaking arabic and so they were like "you look tired" and they brought me a blanket and pillow...which i had to drap over me...it was not the highlight of the day. The last hour was kind of painful...we had totally exhausted our arabic vocabulary and had killer headaches. Eventully we got to leave...they wanted us to spend the night, but luckily we have to have visited the family more than once before we get to spend the night. The culture here is very hospitable and they are so nice...but its different because in American culture you would not spend that much time visiting a person and so it felt very forceful, but overall it was a very good experience.
Yesterday was a Jordanian national holiday celebrating the anniversery when King Abdullah took the thrown and so we had the day off! Very exciting. So we decide to go to Maraba, which is about an hour long bus ride away and see our friend JuJu (can't pronounce her actual name) and so we leave at about 9ish and take a taxi to the bus station where we find a bus that we think is going to the Maraba (being in a foreign country takes a lot of guessing work) so we get on and and call our friend and then she talks with the bus driver and then we talk to her and we are still a little confused, but the overall consensus is that we are going to stay on this bus. So we chill on this bus for about an hour and a half - as with the U.S. the bus system is the slowest way to travel - and just for your information the buses are not airconditioned and they are 70 years old and way crappy, but with red velvet curtains haha. So JuJu had told the bus driver to make sure we get off at the right stop, but obviously our welfare was of no concern to him...as shown by the fact that he let us get off the bus too early. We make this stop in Madaba (which is a small dusty town in the middle of the desert) and this guy starts talking to me through the window telling me that we need to get off now...so what do I do when a random guy off the street tells me to get off the bus? I get off. So we pay and decend and then it turns out that this guy wants to know if we need his services...I guess he drives a 'serviice taxi' (a taxi that goes between cities). great. now we three white girls (well I look Arab, but my other friends are very caucasian looking) are in the middle of this city and we have no idea where to go and so we start walking and asking for directions and walking and getting stared at and walking some more and there is nothing to see but dusty roads and dirty houses, but no worries at this point I am still optimistic...i've been in worse situations than this before. So we finally find a taxi and we call our friend and they give directions to the cab driver and he drives us to this road and stops by this man and gives us a "okay get out" look and so we pay him (and he charges us three times more than an arab...that is difinitly getting old) and get out. Now here is this random guy and he is motioning for us to go down this small alley way and i'm like "okay this either is going to lead us to our friend or we are gonna get kiddnapped"....lucky for me it was the former. So we go down and walk through this small gate and then there is this girl...now this is embarressing to say but I really couldn't tell who it was...I mean it looked like my friend, but she wasn't wearing a hijab (the scarf that arab/muslim girls wear around their heads) and up to this point I had never seen one of my friends without a hijab on and girls look very different with hair! It turns out it was a sister. So we meet the family and there is lots of kissing (like 10 kisses per cheek) and we sit in this room off the courtyard and then there is a moment of silence when me and my friends look at each other and think "crap. now we have to start talking in arabic". And thats what we did. For 6 straight hours. It was the most intense thing I have ever done. One of the sisters and one of the brothers spoke a few words in english, but it was 99.9% arabic. We sat in this room for a couple of hours....you know, just chit chatting....but then we were moved into another room that was actually apart of the house and this room was rad. We had to remove our shoes and there were couches lining the walls and they were on the floor - bedouin style - totally perfect for lounging around. So we sit in there for awhile and chit chat some more and then they served us lunch! The guys left and it was just us girls and the sisters and we sat on the floor and ate stuffed grape leaves (they were the most delicious thing ever) chicken and bangin pita bread (can't even compare to the crap they sell in the U.S.) and yogurt and this salad stuff and mango juice. It was amazing! So afters we all were sitting down again and it was about 100 degrees in the room (and I was in all black) and I was full and so tired from speaking arabic and so they were like "you look tired" and they brought me a blanket and pillow...which i had to drap over me...it was not the highlight of the day. The last hour was kind of painful...we had totally exhausted our arabic vocabulary and had killer headaches. Eventully we got to leave...they wanted us to spend the night, but luckily we have to have visited the family more than once before we get to spend the night. The culture here is very hospitable and they are so nice...but its different because in American culture you would not spend that much time visiting a person and so it felt very forceful, but overall it was a very good experience.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
I will not assassinate myself I will not assassinate myself I will not I will not I will not.
So last night I had a small, but intense nervous breakdown on the phone with my Mom...lucky her. Here are a few quotes that came from my mouth.
I want to DIE.
I want to kill myself.
I want to slit my wrists.
I want to hang myself from the shower curtain. oh wait. we don't have one.
Jesus hates me.
I could go on and on, but knowing that my mother will read this I don't want her to have to re-live that entire conversation. Oh and I don't want to think about it either...its like a snowball effect when I get going.
Anyways...the point is that being here is hard. And emotionally exhausting. And soul crushing. And to be perfectly honest I hate it. Well I have a love/hate relationship with it. I basically love being here whenever I don't have to speak arabic. I hate arabic. I answered my friends house phone today and the person at the other end of the line spoke to me in arabic and so i hung up on him. Okay this is not going in the direction that I wanted it to go to....so here is the point. I love the people, culture, and pretty much everything. I like it here. MOM I am not going to kill myself.
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