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.