Arabi

Despite receiving no prior training in Arabic, I was possessed with the idea of staying in the middle east.  Part of the notion was of me romanticizing the idea of the middle east as an exotic region with cultural facets radically different from Western ideals.  Part of it was my very legitimate desire to come to an area that is struck by political turmoil and experience the culture. Perhaps I was motivated by a sense of adventure.

That's certainly what I'm getting here. The city of Amman is not inviolably vast, but it is large enough that I puzzle over how to get from place to place.  There is also a struggle in that I am unable to wander the streets by myself, as a single American girl, without facing some sort of danger. "They're dogs." My host mother described men this way as we were walking back from her mother's house.  "They stare at you and hang their mouths open."

So far I have been getting along with the limited Arabic that I know. It's rather pathetic sometimes how little I can navigate the city without the help of written instructions and how little I know how to direct my taxi drivers. For the first time, I know how it feels to be so completely foreign.

 But I'm learning, and I'm studying, and I'm figuring it out.