250 Words or Less

This is extremely strange to be trying to write these essays again. I remember last year, writing one essay over and over again, trying to put the words exactly right, getting it to come across as I had it in my head. I needed it to be heartfelt, and not too sappy, and it needed to be well thought through and intelligent, but not forced and fake. I was trying really hard, but I meant to be trying really hard. I wanted it to come out right.

And now I'm sitting here again, exactly one year later, staring at the same essay, with the same box, on the same website. "What are three reasons you want to study abroad? Explain in less than 250 words." Before, it was hard enough to keep it that short, with everything I wanted to say. But I'm not even sure it's possible to put everything I want to say in that few of words anymore, especially after this summer. How do I put my host family, our late night talks about politics and religion, our attempts at Chicago style pizza 6,000 miles away from the source, and our walks around the neighborhood, how am I supposed to put that in 250 words or less? Then there's the taxi cab drivers, their exasperation with my Arabic some days, and their delight at my effort on others; there's the cab driver who changed my life when he explained to me that you had to be thankful for life and use it, and not just sit there. There's the neighbors who played soccer in the abandoned lot next to my apartment, and there's the little boys who laughed and giggled when we played with them one day. There's the roof of our apartment, a place to go to sit and see the city, to eat and talk, to sing and get married. There's the day three door handles in our apartment came off, and it took ten minutes to explain what our problem was in Arabic. Then there's when we were leaving, getting on the bus to go to the airport, and the men from the apartment ushered us back into the lobby one last time, to get their one last picture, so proud that we had stayed with them, in their building. How I am supposed to put that into 250 words or less? Because that's the reason I want to study abroad.

Jordanian Phrasebook

I knew that I had a hard time finding Jordanian Arabic on the internet before I left, so here's some of the stuff I learned there. This is mostly ammiya phrases, which you can think of like a sort of slang, but more widespread, and accepted in any sort of conversations. It is a spoken language only though, the formal written language, called fussa, is written and used in the media, and not really spoken day to day. Keep in mind that these phrases will probably not be understood by speakers of Arabic outside Jordan and Palestine, as they would have a different dialect.

(Also, if you're in a fussa class somewhere, and you use these in class, tell me what happens. I've gotten a few laughs for saying things like "Esh?!" and "Shu yanni?" in a formal Arabic situation, just because I'm used to speaking ammiya, not fussa).

Finally, spelling doesn't matter. Ammiya is not a written language, only spoken. I'm writing these in Arabic and English just to show the pronunciation. So, save the spelling for fussa, ammiya is speaking.

JORDANIAN PHRASES AND WORDS:


إيش / شو

(Esh / Shu )

These both mean "what," and they're the words that are the most "Jordanian" compared to other dialects, especially "shu." I had a phone interview one time in Arabic and the man laughed really hard when I said "shu" on accident instead of "ma." ("Ma" means "what" in fussa, which is what the interview was in). As far as usage goes, you use them pretty much the same as you use "what" in English. You can start sentences with both of the words, and also use it as a "what?" what you don't hear something or are surprised.

يعني

(Yanni)

It literally means "I mean," but the best way to explain it is to definite it as the English "like." People say it as an equivalent of "um" or "like," or to approximate something, and in pretty much every other situation imaginable. Sometimes I swear that people just throw is into sentences,  so you'll probably hear it a lot. But beware of overusing it, just as you would not want to say "like" in every English sentence you speak. Personally, I save it for times when I'm actually not sure, like telling someone when I'll arrive, yanni, if everything works out. See?

شو يعني 

(Shu yanni?)

This combines both words so far, and is a very useful phrase for a language learner. This means  "What does it mean," but is the usual way of "What is the translation?" whether it be from Arabic to English or the other way around.

كيفك 

(Keefak (to a male) / Keefik (to a female) )

"How are you?" That's pretty much it. Not much explanation there.

كويس  

(Kwayyis (describing something male) / (kwayyisa (describing something female) )

This is a common answer to someone asking how you're doing. Some people I've talked to said it's an "old person word," but I've heard young and old people both using it. It literally translates to "OK" and can be used just the same as "OK" is in English. But a warning, it's two syllables - "kway-yis," not "koos," like the Moroccan dish. That dish doesn't exist in Jordan, so don't ask for it. It's vulgar.

There are SO many more, but that's all I'm going to do for now. Overwhelming lists of words are never good. They scare me, and I don't want to scare anybody. So that's all for now!

Next Time?

I'm currently filling out the application for next year/summer/whatever happens. So I might keep posting on this over the school year, but probably not. I'll definitely start it up again next summer though, so I'll write again then!

This is strange to be back at square one after this summer. Filling out the same application, hoping again. Staring at the same screen of questions, wondering how to fit everything I want to say about why I'd like to go back into a few hundred words or less. I don't think I could ever fit everything into these few white boxes.  It's funny how it's even footing with everyone else applying again, not "I'm a semi-finalist," or "I'm a finalist." Just another applicant, hoping another amazing experience. Insha'allah :)

Waiting for Next Year

The website for the scholarship I got to go to Jordan last summer says that applications for this coming summer will be released late this summer. Today is the middle of September, and I'm getting antsy to start filling out the applications and hoping to go again next year! They send programs to Morocco and Jordan, as well as Egypt depending on politics, and I'd love to go again; at least having a couple applications essays would give me something to do to think about it.

I really miss the Middle East, and speaking Arabic, and so many things about it there. Insha'allah I'll be able to return before I'm done with high school.

The Police

So one day we all get on the bus for school, but we soon enough find out that we're not actually going to school that morning, but we're going to go to the police station in Sweileh until we get our visas figured out.

So here's what happens, you get a visa, and it's for a month or forty days or something like that. There's a stamp in your passport that says "see a police station immediately" or something like that. To get your visa extended, you're supposed to do a blood test, and then pay and dinar and a half for every day that you overstayed your visa without the extension. We didn't do either of those things, and we've overstayed our visas by about two weeks, and to leave the country, we need to sort this out.

So we all get off the bus at the police station. Government buildings in Amman have their own sort of charm, or not. They're usually labelled in fancy Arabic script, compared to the usual fonts on most buildings. The national seal, or symbol, or whatever it's called, emblem maybe, is below the name of the building. Outside, there are usually guards in black and grey camoflage uniforms, holding some sort of large black guns, multiple feet in length. I got used to the guns being around relatively quickly, but the harder thing to get used to was the fact that some of the soldiers holding the guns couldn't have been but a few years older than me. Which was kind of strange, but there they stood, holding their guns. Sometimes they themselves looked uncomfortable with their weapons, but usually they just stood there. Along with these soldiers, dependent on the importance of the buildings, sometimes sat tanks, with a man sitting in the top wearing his helemet with a gun at the ready, and several others standing on the ground around it, ready to go. This usually perterbed me more than the soldiers standing by the gates and around the walls.

Walking into the police station, you walk up a big whitish staircase, and go inside, where you are met by several officers wondering why in the world fifteen high schoolers from America have suddenly shown up, much less in their police station, in Sweileh, which is arguably the poorest section of Amman, according to your sources. (Not all of Sweileh is like this, though). They quickly walk us down this long white hallway into a plain white room, with two women sitting at a desk behind a sheet of glass. We all sit, fifteen of us in about ten chairs, complying with their request for us to sit, and our directors argue back and forth about the visas. Then they get us all up, and we move much further down another hallway, and we sit in another room. On the way, we passed plenty of large, fancy rooms, with leather armchairs and big screen televisions, but we settle into another plain white room with plastic chairs. They argue back and forth again, and I can pretty much only catch some numbers and days, which I guess is pretty much all they were arguing about. I never really found out exactly what they argued about, but after maybe half an hour of sitting there, they told us all to leave, and so we left.

Afterwards, I found out that they finally just gave up and agreed to get us out of their police station, as long as we paid them a small fine, something around the price of the blood test that we wouldn't take. And so we paid them for the blood test, didn't take it, but got our passports stamped that we did take it, and each got a recipt, a small scrap of official looking paperwork to present to the security officers at the airport if there were any questions about whether or not we took the blood tests. And that was that.

We went back to school, and when asked why our class was late, we simply offered that we had to go to the police. That was accepted by our teachers without further explanation, and so that was that.

Water Tanks

This is what the roof of our apartment building looked like, just concrete and all, and then a bit higher up there were the tanks. This is where all your water comes from in the apartments. If the tank goes dry, just wait until the next time the water truck comes around. Sometimes there's an extra tank that youc an get switched to, but honestly, just try not to use up all the water in the first place. You share water tanks with other apartments, so it might not be your fault if you run out. But you also don't want to be the ones causing some other family's faucets to run dry because you took too long of a shower. I kind of like having to think about the water tanks, I think it's a good thing to be a little more aware of how much water you use. Especially when our toilet broke and you had to flush it manually with the showerhead, it was interesting to see exactly how much water you use every time you flush the toilet.

All McDonalds aren't the same.

Could you find this in the states? I think not. Yeah, that's pretty much all I wanted to say on this topic. I only went to McDonald's once, and didn't even order anything. Just wanted to see what they had, remembering that they offered mango and green apple sundaes in China compared to the states' chocolate and strawberry. In Jordan, we found this.

Laundry Duty

Laundry isn't hard. I know that. But when you walk up the machine and see this, there's the moment of, "I wish that laundry didn't have to be an experiment." Turns out that turned to the left, the machine spins, and to the right it drains. The middle is supposed to be off, but our machine was broken, so that it ended up being somewhere between off and drain, meaning that it would leak all over the floor if the hose wasn't elevated above the bottom of the tank. Kind of a challenge when the hose is meant to just lie on the floor when not in use.

I've already described laundry on here, and while it was dreaded there, I now miss it. It's too easy here - I don't need to manually fill it up, and it washes and rinses automatically, and there's not a massive risk of soap stains. AS well, if I leave the laundry in the washing machine here for a couple hours after it ends, it doesn't reek of fish.

Too easy.

Trash Days

This is a picture looking down from the roof of our building onto a lovely game of Trash. Trash was kept on the ledge of the window of Ten Ghirsh, and when it became too much, they'd play a sort of game of basketball and try to throw it down into the can. Sometimes it became quite a spectacle, and the challenge was keeping the little kids that ran around downstairs out of the way of the falling bags and bottles.

Al-Matbakh - The Kitchen

So this is what the stoves and ovens look like in Jordan, both in my apartment and my host family house. First, there's the gas tank, which is on the right here. It just hooks up to the stove with a tube, almost like you're camping, and that's where the gas comes from. If you run out, there's a truck that comes around and you buy another tank. To us, the truck is referred to as the "dead clown music" truck because of the music that is plays to let you know when it's coming. It's pretty much on off-key ice cream truck on steroids. It's the kind of thing you despise as it drives past your window at four in the morning, but now that I'm home I miss it sorely.

So then there's the stove, which has wheels and can be moved around, compared to stoves in America which are usually built into a counter or whatever. The stove is lit with a match or a lighter after turning on the gas. It took  a couple tries to figure out how much the gas needed to be turned on so that the stove didn't essentially explode when you lit it. I burned my hands a few times in the beginning. In the picture, the stove is open, and then there's the glass cover pulled up so you can use it. I guess maybe you could put that down when you're not using it, and use the top as extra counter space, as the counters are tiny, but we usually just left it open, in both the apartments and my host family. The table was a good enough counter.

As far as the oven goes, I only used that once, in my host families. We were making Chicago style deep dish pizzas from scratch, which is an adventure quite difficult but really fun if you're up for the challenge. especially because I'd bet that your host family, same as mine, will have no idea why your pizza is so thick, and why the sauce is on top. They asked if I was making a cake, but in the end they enjoyed eating the pizza. Anyways, to use the ove, you put whatever you're cooking on the lower rack, turn on the gas, light a roll of newspaper, and stick that into this hole in the bottom of the oven to light the bottom of the oven. The nespaper is necessary because you have to stick it pretty far in there, and a match wouldn't work. Once the bottom of whatever you're cooking is done, you move it to the top rack, put out the bottom flame, and light the top, and then literally cook the top. It's a strange system, and you wouldn't think it works but it does.

And then there's the two pots. That's just the innovation you create when your apartments were stocked with no lids but two pots, and you're making pasta. By the way, we were short on utensils, so I ate that pasta with a wrench. And plates? Yeah right, we were usually short and just ate all out of the pot. Good times.