Well hello to all of you reading this blog. It is a pleasure to have both of you as readers.
Haha, hey so my name's Logan. Long story short, I'm a senior at Brigham Young University and I am currently doing a language intensive study abroad program in Amman, Jordan studying the Arabic language. I got here about a week ago, and I'll be here until December. Pretty much, living in Jordan has been awesome so far. This experience so far has really been so incredible that it is hard to even find a place to start. I guess the most logical place to start, in my mind at least, is food. The food is fantastic. Pretty much every day since I've been here I've gone out to eat at least once. Most everything is very cheap and very awesome. Some of the things I have eaten include: falafel, hummus, kunafa (deep fried cheese rolled in sugar), kebab, shawarma, and mensaf. Mensaf is a dish that most definitely deserves a bit of explanation. Mansaf is a traditional Jordanian dish which includes rice, meat (either lamb or chicken), and a yogurt sauce that is poured on top of it. The proper way to eat it is to mix it up with your hands, then a grab a pick chunk of the gooey mixture, roll it into a ball and put it in your mouth. It is a big sticky mess AND it tastes awesome!!!
Moving on from food, one of my favorite pastimes in Amman is crossing the street. Amman is a big city with tons of traffic and very few cross-walks. This results in any time you desire to cross the street turning in to a daring game of frogger in which you try and find the best moment to dodge the cars racing down the street. Fortunately, I was always quite good at frogger as a child, and have been able to survive an entire week of this exhilarating pastime.
Beyond the fun pastimes of food eating and car-dodging I actually do have a purpose of being in Jordan. As I mentioned earlier, I am currently a senior at BYU. I am majoring in Middle Eastern Studies/ Arabic language, with a minor in Political Science. The program I am currently doing is part of my major. I pretty much spend all day in class or doing assignments for my Arabic classes. From 10 am- 1 pm I have classes on the Arabic language: the first 2 hours are in a small group with an Arab teacher and are entirely in Arabic. The third hour we spend in a large group (all 30 of the students enrolled in the program) with our American professor going over newspaper translation (this class is mostly in English). When we are not in class we have a variety of appointments throughout the day scheduled by our school including speaking appointments, writing appointments, and oral presentations. The remainder of our day we have free to go out and do our homework. Our homework involves preparation for out of class appointments along with an additional 2 hours each day of newspaper study and 2 hours a day of conversation with Arabs.
Talking about reading the newspaper for 2 hours would be incredibly boring for me and the one person (probably my mom) who has continued reading up to this point, so mom, i will spare you those boring details. A more exciting topic is the 2 hours of conversation each day. So this is pretty much awesome. Each day around 2 or 3 o'clock me and some of my fellow classmates walk up to the University of Jordan (a 40,000+ student university) and try and make friends. There are a variety of strategies on how to do this. My first attempt at this I went up to a kid and pretended to be incredibly lost looking for the library and asked him to help me find it. We ended up chatting for about 15 minutes about movies and such (since he is a film student) before I awkwardly ran out of things to talk about and hurried off to get to the "library" (a location to which I never actually went). The first conversation having gone relatively well and lasting an entire 15 minutes I gathered up a bit more courage and decided to walk up to people with out pretending to be lost. The next guy I attempted to be friend I simply walked up to him and said "hi, how are you" and we began a 45 minute conversation in the which he bought me a Pepsi and we discussed a wide variety of topics including: goals for the future, religion, gender issues, and violence in big cities. Since then I have met many people and had many other conversations. Some of them don't go as well and end awkwardly after 5 minutes. Other conversations have lasted closer to an hour, and I have received many invitations to hang out with people. I have been able to meet people from here local in Amman, the more rural parts of Jordan, as well as a couple people from the Gaza strip (Palestine). It has been way fun to just go up to random people and experience their language and culture and get some insight in to how people here view the world as a whole.
So I've been writing for a while, and I'm starting to get hungry which means it's probably time to wrap up this blog post. The point is, jordan is awesome. Tomorrow I'm off to visit the Dead Sea, but no worries! I hope to post again in the couple weeks or so so that my mom (and any one else interested) can see what else i'm up to!
Good bye
Haha, hey so my name's Logan. Long story short, I'm a senior at Brigham Young University and I am currently doing a language intensive study abroad program in Amman, Jordan studying the Arabic language. I got here about a week ago, and I'll be here until December. Pretty much, living in Jordan has been awesome so far. This experience so far has really been so incredible that it is hard to even find a place to start. I guess the most logical place to start, in my mind at least, is food. The food is fantastic. Pretty much every day since I've been here I've gone out to eat at least once. Most everything is very cheap and very awesome. Some of the things I have eaten include: falafel, hummus, kunafa (deep fried cheese rolled in sugar), kebab, shawarma, and mensaf. Mensaf is a dish that most definitely deserves a bit of explanation. Mansaf is a traditional Jordanian dish which includes rice, meat (either lamb or chicken), and a yogurt sauce that is poured on top of it. The proper way to eat it is to mix it up with your hands, then a grab a pick chunk of the gooey mixture, roll it into a ball and put it in your mouth. It is a big sticky mess AND it tastes awesome!!!
Moving on from food, one of my favorite pastimes in Amman is crossing the street. Amman is a big city with tons of traffic and very few cross-walks. This results in any time you desire to cross the street turning in to a daring game of frogger in which you try and find the best moment to dodge the cars racing down the street. Fortunately, I was always quite good at frogger as a child, and have been able to survive an entire week of this exhilarating pastime.
Beyond the fun pastimes of food eating and car-dodging I actually do have a purpose of being in Jordan. As I mentioned earlier, I am currently a senior at BYU. I am majoring in Middle Eastern Studies/ Arabic language, with a minor in Political Science. The program I am currently doing is part of my major. I pretty much spend all day in class or doing assignments for my Arabic classes. From 10 am- 1 pm I have classes on the Arabic language: the first 2 hours are in a small group with an Arab teacher and are entirely in Arabic. The third hour we spend in a large group (all 30 of the students enrolled in the program) with our American professor going over newspaper translation (this class is mostly in English). When we are not in class we have a variety of appointments throughout the day scheduled by our school including speaking appointments, writing appointments, and oral presentations. The remainder of our day we have free to go out and do our homework. Our homework involves preparation for out of class appointments along with an additional 2 hours each day of newspaper study and 2 hours a day of conversation with Arabs.
Talking about reading the newspaper for 2 hours would be incredibly boring for me and the one person (probably my mom) who has continued reading up to this point, so mom, i will spare you those boring details. A more exciting topic is the 2 hours of conversation each day. So this is pretty much awesome. Each day around 2 or 3 o'clock me and some of my fellow classmates walk up to the University of Jordan (a 40,000+ student university) and try and make friends. There are a variety of strategies on how to do this. My first attempt at this I went up to a kid and pretended to be incredibly lost looking for the library and asked him to help me find it. We ended up chatting for about 15 minutes about movies and such (since he is a film student) before I awkwardly ran out of things to talk about and hurried off to get to the "library" (a location to which I never actually went). The first conversation having gone relatively well and lasting an entire 15 minutes I gathered up a bit more courage and decided to walk up to people with out pretending to be lost. The next guy I attempted to be friend I simply walked up to him and said "hi, how are you" and we began a 45 minute conversation in the which he bought me a Pepsi and we discussed a wide variety of topics including: goals for the future, religion, gender issues, and violence in big cities. Since then I have met many people and had many other conversations. Some of them don't go as well and end awkwardly after 5 minutes. Other conversations have lasted closer to an hour, and I have received many invitations to hang out with people. I have been able to meet people from here local in Amman, the more rural parts of Jordan, as well as a couple people from the Gaza strip (Palestine). It has been way fun to just go up to random people and experience their language and culture and get some insight in to how people here view the world as a whole.
So I've been writing for a while, and I'm starting to get hungry which means it's probably time to wrap up this blog post. The point is, jordan is awesome. Tomorrow I'm off to visit the Dead Sea, but no worries! I hope to post again in the couple weeks or so so that my mom (and any one else interested) can see what else i'm up to!
Good bye
