Spring Break is Here!

My bags are packed and now I’m waiting for the car to come pick us up and take us to the airport. I’ve mentioned it in my past few posts because I’m so excited, but just incase you missed it, I am heading off to Lebanon with the Junior Fellow Program for our spring break! We are going to spend a few days exploring Beirut, then heading north to Byblos, possibly going further north to a seaside city Tripoli, and then going east into the Bekaa Valley to go to some small cities and wrapping it back up in Beirut for another night. 

I am so excited to get out of Jordan and see another country. I love Jordan, but I’ve done just about all that there is to do. I’ve been to the major cities, seen countless ruins, ancient cities, went to the desert, and just about all of the historic/must see sites that Jordan has to offer. I’m ready to see what else the Middle East has to offer me. I’m particularly interested in Lebanon, a mix of east meets west, different cultures combining, sometimes colliding. I’ve heard only wonderful things about Lebanon, Beirut, and the Lebanese, from the food, to the people, to the cities, the beach, and architecture, it’s supposed to be fantastic, after all it was dubbed the “Paris of the East” plus, I get to speak French, which means I will be able to get around much easier, and I love when I am able to use my French. 

Anyways, this is a very short post, but I just wanted to do a quick update. I won’t be bringing my computer with me so I won’t be able to do any posts while I am there, but I’ll obviously be doing a presumably lengthy post about my vacation in Lebanon. 

Till then!

Accreditation, the basalt ruins of Umm Qais, an Arab wedding, the ancient citadel of Philadelphia, and what may have been my last weekend in Amman.

An accreditation team from the states or Europe or something were here this week to spy on us as we worked to make sure everything was as it should be, so that the school could get accredited again, or for the first time. I didn’t really know the details, all I was told was to smile, look busy, and if they asked me anything I was to tell them that I am an intern and direct them to somebody who could answer their questions. I didn’t actually deal with them much at all. I wore a little plastic name tag around my neck that would snap in pieces on contact with any hard surface, and did my work as usual. I did run into the head of the team once when I was walking out of the library after my Arabic class, and in a funny accent (he’s Scot-Swiss) asked me where the international section of the library was. I thought I was being tested and froze, I stumbled to think of the international room, and I had no idea where it was. I smiled nervously and pointed to the librarian who helped him find the room. I snuck out of the library and briskly walked back to work. 

Black Columns at Umm Qais

I asked for a trip to be arranged for the Junior Fellows to go to Umm Qais, an old Roman in northern Jordan right on the edge of the Syrian/Israeli border, and so we went on Friday morning. It’s about a two and a half hour drive to Umm Qais. I love staring at the landscape when I go on long drives in Jordan. Driving south, vegetation slowly disappears, and massive jagged mountains and red sand appear. But drive north, and large green mountains covered in olive trees, and low valleys line with palm trees appear, as well as snow capped mountains in the distance. We got off the bus at Umm Qais, and were immediately surrounded by young kids selling random items, and welcoming us to Jordan. It was cute three and a half months ago when I first got here that random people would yell “Welcome to Jordan!” with a big smile on their face, but now it’s almost getting annoying, but with my broken Arabic I am no where near being able to respond with “Thanks, I live in Madaba, and have been for almost four months, I know Jordan very well.” So we responded to the kids with a simple “la shukran” which means “no thank you” and after we obviously showed no interest in purchasing whistles, flower necklaces, or fresh almonds, they drifted away to await the next group of tourists. The ruins of Umm Qais mainly consist of the Roman city, but also of a small Ottoman city on the outskirts that was abandoned a couple of centuries or so ago. What makes Umm Qais different from the many other Roman ruins that I have been to, is the rock that the city is carved out of. Unlike the beige stone that the ruins are usually made out of, Umm Qais was built using basalt, and there for all of the columns, buildings, and roads are black, with the exception of a few columns carved out of the typical beige stone. Not only are the ruins beautiful, but the location is stunning, especially in the spring. The mountains are covered in yellow and white flowers, olive trees dot the sides,  and the roads are lined with palm trees. From Umm Qais, looking north, you see the Sea of Galilee in Palestine on the left, the Golan Heights of Syria in front of you, and the  snowcapped mountains of Lebanon behind the sliver of Syria. After walking around the ruins for a while we went to a restaurant up a hill from Umm Qais and sat underneath the shade of some stone arches overlooking the ruins and the mountains of the neighboring countries. 

View of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon from Umm Qais

The Wedding

The Roman Amphitheater in Downton Amman

When I arrived back on campus I was pressed for time as I hurried to get a haircut and get ready for the wedding. As I have probably mentioned in past blogs, my co-worker Ala’a was engaged and invited me to her wedding a while ago, and this past Friday was finally the day. We got a cab at around 8:30pm but got lost on our way so it ended up taking us about an hour to get there. I think we were the last ones to show up, but there were hundreds of people so we were able to sneak in un-noticed. Muslims usually have the religious ceremony weeks, sometimes months before the reception, so the couple is legally married, but they don’t actually get the rings or move in with each other until after the wedding reception. So unlike Christian weddings, there is no long ceremony to wait through, instead it is only a celebration. When we got there the Arabic music was blasting and many people were on the dance platform dancing surrounding the newlyweds. There were cycles of dancing, sitting and eating, and after the eating a group of twenty or so men, presumably from the husbands tribe walked to the center of the room dressed in the traditional white dresses that the men wear, with Jordanian scarves on their heads, and swords on their belts. The men formed a line through which the couple walked though, with the swords forming an overhead passageway, and once the couple reached the end, the men surrounded them in a circle, clapping, singing and dancing to the music. The bride eventually stepped into the circle as the group surrounded the groom, picking him up and throwing him into the air. After a few short hours we left the reception and headed back home. Although I would have liked to stay longer, the wedding most likely lasted until two am, at which point taxis are harder to find to take us back to school. 

Saturday was a parent visit day so I had to go into work to greet parents, and hold down the fort I guess. There wasn’t actually any real work for me to do, because all of the counselors were meeting with parents, and the head counselor was out on vacation, so I spent my time reading up on extra details for Beirut. Today I took a trip down to Al-Balad, the old center of Amman, and walked the never ending steps to the old Roman citadel of Philadelphia located on the top of a hill in the center of Amman, overlooking the whole city, and the ancient Roman amphitheater. Though beautiful, the Roman ruins weren’t particularly impressive because they weren’t in very good shape, but another part of the citadel were the Umayyad ruins, which had an amazing old mosque that was opened to tourists. I’m glad I finally got to see these sites in the city, because I think this was the last time that I would be able to make it out to Amman. I head out to Beirut next Friday for 9 days, then the weekend after I head south to the King’s beach resort in Aqaba, for a mini Junior Fellow vacation, and I leave the following Thursday. My time in the Middle East is coming to an end. 

At the Jordanian Archaeological Museum

Dome of the Mosque

The Umayyad Era Mosque

Citadel Hill

Lots and Lots of Planning

This past week wasn’t extremely exciting, work is really slow now that all of the students have gotten their acceptances or rejections from colleges, I’ve finished the major project that I was working on, and I haven’t gotten a new one yet. I think everybody is in need of a break. Luckily, spring break starts on the 21st, and I’ve been occupying my down time by looking at flights, cheap hotels, (which are not easy to find in Beirut) and worrying about all of the millions of little details that you have to take into account when traveling on your own. 

I can’t wait to get to travel to another country, especially since it’s Lebanon. I love Jordan, and Amman has a lot of things I like about it, but it’s not particularly pretty, it was most built in the 50’s with some older building in the old city, and many new constructions going up, and there isn’t that much to see in the city. So I can’t wait to go to a truly historical city, with lot’s to see and even more to do. It will be great to see another country, especially one with such an interesting history. My only concern is that I there are so many other places in the region that I want to see as well, however given the current political situations in most of the surrounding countries, I think I’ll have to make my way to Syria, or Egypt another time.

This weekend my boss had the office over to her house for dinner in celebration of my co-worker who is getting married on the 15th. It’s great to feel like the people who you work with genuinely like you, even if they are older. I can’t even express how lucky I was to end up in a fun office, with people I enjoy working with, and who make 40 hours a week of office work interesting. So the dinner was great, even though I felt a bit out of place because my office is made up of all women, and the dinner was for my co-workers impending wedding, so the night consisted of a lot of “how did you meet your husband?” and various wedding, dating, marriage, and family stories, though they were all very entertaining to listen to. 

I didn’t go out much this weekend because I need to save a lot for Beirut, however on Saturday I made my way to my favorite hangout spot in Amman. I discovered it a few weeks ago, and I’ve been going every time I’m in the area. It’s a cozy, modern, artsy tea/coffee joint, in the arts district of Amman. It reminds me of a tiny Northstar, with young Jordanians, who probably write interesting blogs, a lot of expats, and a lot of European and American college students who are most likely doing a study abroad in Jordan. So I spent a few hours there relaxing on Saturday, enjoying an iced coffee with friends. 

This week, I plan to spend my time frantically looking for cheap places to stay, buying plane tickets, planning my stay there, and figuring out any last things that I need to see before I leave Jordan next month. Time is running out really quickly. When people told me that walkabout goes by quickly, they were not exaggerating. 

Floating in the Dead Sea

I can’t believe that I have just over a month left. It’s really weird to think about coming home, because when I do I will have a few weeks until graduation, and then a few short months until college. I am not dreading coming home at all even though I am loving my time here. I’m very excited to see my family and friends again, I just feel like it’s going to be a bit weird. Even though I’m working about 40 hours a week, and it gets a bit boring, and even though Amman isn’t a bustling metropolitan city, it’s s going to be odd to go back to my normal routine having come from something so different. 

I’m not really sure what to make of the political situation in Jordan right now. Al Jazeera tells me one thing about the protests, The Huffington Post says another, and The New York Times either distorts the truth, or has useless, poorly written and researched articles that feel so distant from Jordan. This is probably because I am a foreigner, but when I walk in Amman, I don’t feel any tension, or unsafe. Everyone I talk to has different opinions, but they are all in support of the King, some wanting governmental reform, and others not. What I thought was a very interesting decision of the King to do, was to ban pro-government demonstrations in the city, that way the two groups won’t clash, as seemingly happened last week. 

I’m expecting that my internship at University Counseling will start to get very slow now that all of the acceptances have come out, and I just finished my big project on the university tour that my boss is hosting this summer. But I should be able to fill any little free time during the day that I might have by getting my spring break plans in order. It’s looking like Lebanon and Turkey with the Junior Fellow program. I so excited to be able to travel around the region, outside of Jordan, and to go to large, historic cities. 

I also need to make sure to plan my remaining weekends very well because I don’t want to miss out on anything. This weekend I crossed another ‘to-do’ off my list - the Dead Sea. On Friday morning I went to a day resort on the Dead Sea with two other Junior Fellows. The Dead Sea is one of those things, at least for me, that you hear about second grade, and your whole life you have some sort of expectation of what it’s like to float in a body of water. The Dead Sea does not disappoint. The floor of the sea is made of sharp, white, crystalized, sea salt covered rocks. Floating in the sky-blue sea is an amazing experience, and the salt of the sea leaves your skin so smooth. I also covered my body in Dead Sea mud, which is this black, smooth mud known for its rich mineral content that is really good for your skin. The resort that we were at was like out of a movie, cabanas, an infinity-pool that overlooked the sea, loud music was playing, everyone there was really attractive, and the couples were kissing and holding hands, which is NEVER seen in Jordan, it was like another world, needless to say, I enjoyed the day quite a bit, the weather was warm, and the sea was relaxing, and in addition to all of that King’s Academy gets a discount or 15 JD entry fee. Day, and money well spent. 

The infinity pool looking over the Dead Sea at sunset

Time is Flying By

My boss was gone all week at a conference in Ireland, so although it’s great to work with her in the office, it was nice to be able focus on my project for the college tour this summer without having to worry about the other odd jobs that she gives me when she is here. This project is the project that keeps on giving. Every time I think that I am finally finished with it, something didn’t save, or I didn’t include something, or some information was incorrect. This project took forever, and although I have finally finished creating the profiles for each college, I still have to create the rest of the booklet, which shouldn’t take too long because it’s just the cover, index, layout, and map of the tour. Also, for my new co-curricular this term I am helping out with the photography club, which has been great to far to help with something that I really love. 

My weekend was pretty quite, and on Saturday I took a shuttle to Amman to a coffee shop that I love going to for some real coffee. They only have Nescafe on the campus, and I’ve found that I’m getting weirdly addicted to instant coffee. So I had some real coffee on Saturday morning, and instead of taking that shuttle back to the school, I stuck around Amman to wait for another shuttle that was taking students to the downtown. I was really proud of myself because I was able to find my way from the coffee shop to the downtown to get picked up. It’s not very far, but I was really happy because Amman is not the easiest city to navigate, it does not run on a grid like most American cities, instead it is a maze of windy streets that go up and down hills and valleys with a ridiculous amount of traffic circles. So I found my way to the old downtown, bought a few trinkets and movies, and made my way back to campus that afternoon. 

On Sunday, my moms good friend who set me up with the Junior Fellow program stopped at King’s for the bi-annual university fair that the company organizes at schools around the Middle East. It was really strange because before I left, she told me that she was going to go to Jordan at the end of March, and before I left in early January, that seemed like forever. I cannot believe how quickly my time has gone by here, I have six weekends left, so I really have to plan each one thoroughly so that I don’t miss out on any little thing. 

My office let me take the day off, and I went around with my moms friend to two other high schools in Amman where she was having a fair, and later a hotel downtown for a larger fair open to high school students of Amman interested in attending American universities. The fair finished at around nine pm, and before ten her aunt and cousin who live in Amman came to pick us up and we went out to dinner at restaurant in an old large house downtown, with the dinning hall on the top floor with glass walls overlooking a sparkling hillside of downtown Amman. At around 11:30 we finished dinner and said good bye, because she was leaving in the morning for Kuwait for the next fair. It was absolutely wonderful to see a family friend from home, and to spend time with a family in general, because you really don’t have that at a boarding school.  

Wadi Rum

We had a shortened work week last week because it was the end of the semester, and students were taking exams. I’ve been working on this project for over two weeks now, and I am getting really frustrated with it because it’s taking so much longer than I thought it would. Basically, my boss is running a college tour over the summer for college counselors from international schools all over the world, and I am putting together the booklet that goes with the tour. This booklet includes an in depth profile of every university the tour will be visiting, as well as a schedule, map, and trying to find a charter bus to take the group around. The more I work on this the project the more bored I get, and so it’s taking me a lot of time to finish it. 

Finally the week ended on Wednesday, and I headed back to my room to pack for the long weekend. I had a good night of sleep and Thursday morning I boarded the bus and set off for Wadi Rum - a mountainous desert of Southern Jordan inhabited by Bedouins. Along with a small group, we were off to spend the weekend there in a Bedouin camp. It was almost a 4 hour drive south down a single highway. It’s very interesting to watch as the landscape drastically changes the further south you go. From Madaba it’s pretty green, with dark red soil, olive trees, and farm land, you drive a little south towards Mt. Nebo, and the rocky mountains came into view, the land at this point is very rocky, with large bouldery mountains. Further south again the boulders become less frequent, and sand drifts over the mountains. Later on the sand changes to a terra cotta color, and massive jagged mountains spring up in the distance. We finally arrived at Wadi Rum in the afternoon. We passed a small village, and turned left onto a path leading into the desert towards the mountains. 

The landscape of Wadi Rum is breathtaking, it’s unlike any other mountainous area that I have ever seen. It is not a mountain range, that is to say, the mountains are not connected by high ground to one another, instead, the desert is all at ground level, with slow sloping dunes of red sand, and then massive jagged mountains rise at extraordinary heights in random spots in the desert. 

We got off the bus at the camp that sits right underneath a mountain and went straight to an open air tent. The tents in the camp are all made of black wool with one large, and two thin horizontal stripes of white. The open air tent had many layers of thick, colorful rugs and many stiff patterned red pillows of woven red wool centered around a metal fire pit. We sat there and met an American woman who helps oversee tourists at the camp, and she used to work at King’s as well. We were served typical, delicious Arabic sweet tea with a hint of cinnamon for the winter. We quickly picked our tents for the weekends, and went off to walk around the desert to find a spot to watch the sunset. I walked barefoot through the sand, it was like walking through silk. A few of us climbed up to a ledge on the side of a smaller mountain and sat there, waiting for the sun to set behind the mountains. Shadows began to creep onto the mountainsides, and twilight dyed the mountains red. Before it got to dark we headed back for the camp to eat dinner. It was absolutely freezing when we went to bed at night. The desert is so cold when there is no sun! We only had one blanket each because we didn’t think to grab more before we went to bed. I slept horribly that night. The next morning we got up and had breakfast, and shortly after along with a teacher who was on the trip as well, I got on a camel for a two hour ride through the desert led by an old Bedouin. After an hour we stopped the camels, and the sat in the middle of the desert, at which point the Bedouin began to dig a shallow hole into the sand and place sticks which he had collected on the way. He made a small fire in the sand, put water in an old metal teakettle and made us tea, right there in the middle of the desert, it was wonderful. When he poured the tea, and the ashes were still hot, he placed to pieces of pita and warmed them up for us as well. He spoke only a few words of English, and often said “Bedouin!” and smiled. However, with his few words of English, and my broken Arabic,  we all managed to have a conversation. Surprisingly, he knew all of the U.S. presidents in order since Eisenhower, and after he said each name we would all do a thumbs up if we liked the president or didn’t. “Kennedy!” we all put our thumbs up, “Nixon!” we all said “Noooo!”. It was unreal, there I was in the middle of the Jordanian desert, talking U.S. presidents with a Bedouin. We saddled up once again and rode back to the camp. 

For lunch we met with some young boys from the village to discuss some potential community service projects between King’s Academy and their school (the purpose of this trip was actually for students to form a link with the school in the village and start some community service projects, but I was just there to enjoy Wadi Rum and “supervise” a bit since I am technically a faculty member). In the afternoon we drove to Aqaba to spend some time at the beach, which was filthy. The first time I went to the beach we I was at a resort, so it was beautiful, but this was a public beach, and it was just gross, and a fight broke out at one point as well. 

We were off in the car once again back to the camp for the night, this time we grabbed plenty of blankets so that we would not freeze again. We played games under the moonlight, and relaxed in the cool, grey sand. We woke up early the next morning, and boarded the bus for King’s once again. 

Dead2Red

The impending Dead2Red race was on my mind this whole week. Since I found out only a week in advance, I had very little time to train for it, but after work every day I went for a run so that I could prepare a little bit, but in reality nothing but months and months of running could have actually prepared me for the race. Thursday finally arrived, and I left work early to rush back to my room and finish packing, to then run to the dinning hall to quickly eat, and then rush over to the parking lot to pack up the cars. The drive to the Dead Sea was much longer than I anticipated. It took about 50 minutes, because Madaba is up in the mountains, and the Dead Sea in 1,300 feet below sea level, so the whole drive consisted of slowly driving down dangerously curved roads, carved into the side of the mountains. Even after we arrived at the Dead Sea, we had to continue driving until we reached the other side. The Dead Sea is the color of the sky on a clear, cloudless day, bright blue, with light dancing on the water as the sun is mirrored in all directions layering areas of dark, rich blues, and light turquoises, leaving a ribbon of white along rocky shore from the salt. 

Hundreds of runners were warming up as tried to find parking along the crowed Dead Sea Highway. I anxiously began stretching, and after a half hour, our first runner went to the starting line, and the rest of us hopped back into the cars to get dropped off along the road at increments of 500m to await our turn to grab the baton and start running. 

Beginning of the race, with the Dead Sea on the right

This is how the Dead2Red works: the distance from each sea is 242 km, that is split up into 24 km for each runner. It is a relay race, each team has ten members, and there is no set distance that each runner must run before passing the baton, though most do around 500m. Oh, and you have 24 hours to complete the race. You don’t get to rest at 12 am for the night, you just keep running, and running, and running. 

While I was waiting I saw the a runner from the team that ended up winning. He was sprinting down the mountain. That was the first and last time I saw that team the whole race. My turn finally arrived, and I sped down the mountain. I finished in a couple of minutes, and thought, “Oh that’s not to bad”. 1 down, 48 more times to go. The race was like a giant game of leap frog. I ran, and my car sped ahead of me to drop off the next runner, they got out, I passed them the baton, got back into the car, and we sped off ahead to drop off the next runner, and pick up the current one, the last runner got out, and passed it to the first runner of the next car. We went ahead 3.5 km, as the car did their rotation, and passed it to one last car before the baton made its way back to us again. And so the cycle was, all 49 times. I had a love hate relationship with the race. At around 8 pm, I was loving it, we were blasting music in the car, I having a ball. 12 am rolls around, the initial excitement is long gone, but I’m still going strong. 3 am, I dread every time that I have to get out of the warm car and run in the cold, pitch black desert, but at least I was comforted by the sounds of large howling, feral, most likely rabies infested dogs in the distance. 6 am rolls around, and the sun pears over the jagged mountains revealing the vast desert to my right. At this point I’m slightly comforted by the fact that it is finally day time, but then I quickly realize that I still have over 6 hours more to run, and I haven’t had any sleep, I am hating that I signed up for the race. Also, within about an hour my ankles gave in because since I didn’t think I would be doing extensive running in Jordan, I didn’t think to bring my good  track shoes, instead I wore a pair of tennis shoes, which was an awful mistake. After quite a few excruciatingly painful, and slow runs, my team members just looked at me, told me to get in the car and take a break. I originally put up a bit of a fight because I really did want to finish the whole race on my own, but after not even being able to walk without a lot of pain, I decided it was for the best. I ended up only stoping 25k or so short of the finish line, so I did run the majority of the race anyways. 

View from my room

Our team got lost in Aqaba trying to find out what street to run down next, but finally we found our way, and then all got out of the car together and crossed the finish line together in 20 hours and 26 minutes. This was great, because first of all, there were two staff teams this year, the good one, with people who are avid runners, and then our team, the disappointments as well called ourselves, who were in it just for fun, and to say we did it. So it was quite an accomplishment to finish four hours before the deadline. 

We all limped into the hotel which was a lovely 5 star resort on the Red Sea. Let me tell you, relaxing on the beach is the best way to end a 20 hour race. The Red Sea is gorgeous, and from Aqaba, you can see Israel to the right, with Egypt further down the coast, and Saudi on the far left behind some mountains. The Sea is lined with a thin beach, and red jagged mountains. The sand is dark, and from a distance the water is a very dark, royal blue. But when you swim in it, it becomes a deep turquoise. We stayed the night there, and went to a dinner at the Mövenpick in Aqaba for the runners. I spent the next day relaxing at the beach, and walking around Aqaba. All in all, I am very glad that I ran the race. Though I hated it at times, it was a great experience, and I really pushed myself physically, it was definitely worth it, though if I ever decide to do it again, I’ll be sure to spend months prior to it training.