This might be a record...11 days since my last post? And it will be another while before I post again: leaving tomorrow morning for our Eid Al-Adha break until November 20th, and I'm sure the long lists of what we end up doing in Turkey and Cyprus will daunt me to the point of putting off that post for at least another week or so!! Don't worry, I'm planning on taking notes every day of what we do (let alone how much i spend...), so I'll be sure to remember what happened when I finally get around to writing about it to you!
Nothing of extreme interest happened in the last 11 days, besides midterms last week (By the way, A on Fusha, A on Amiyya, and A- on Alternative Perspectives - don't you just hate it when all the teacher notes is some check marks on ever paragraph but points magically go missing for no apparent reason?). There were also elections this past week for the parliament; apparently there's just one seat for a Christian representative, and grandpa Alber's second cousin was running. He didn't win, but Rita and Eddie were pleased about the guy who did. It was very exciting...we had no school on Tuesday, as it was declared a national holiday to encourage voter turn-out, and we all received emails from both CIEE and the Embassy about potential demonstrations and protests, and were discouraged from going out. Apparently someone died down in Aqaba due to some tribal tensions once the results were announced! Much more exciting atmosphere here than in the States, it seems!! I went out that night, with my blondish hair covered in a scarf out of paranoia, and went to Alyssa's apartment where we made a rather delicious Mexican meal with fried bananas and ice cream for dessert.
The Saturday before all this was our CIEE day trip to Ajlun. It was...nice. We went first to the Ajlun Nature reserve, which actually was a surprising amount of green. We had breakfast at the visitor center and then took an hour long hike around the hill; had some good views, and made me sort of nostalgic for South Africa: walking in single file through trees, having the species pointed out to us, looking off the hill at the amazing views, and having our leader shout at us to walk more quietly so as not to scare away the wildlife (aka birds and some lizards...).
After this lovely jaunt through the greenery, we headed off to Ajlun Castle; once again, you could probably get more information by looking it up on Wikipedia.
(insert adorable picture here as soon as this Internet allows me to...)
After explore the castle for an excessive amount of time, we went to another reserve where "the King's private herd of deer" was protected...? This was a legitimate large enclosure for deer (unsure of the real name) that are becoming rare in the area. They like the jabal-tops because of the cooler atmosphere. So we went there, with the exclusive access from our Challenger Team chaperones--it's not open to the public--and got to feel the little guys some rather wobbly cucumbers. Good times were had by all. After this we headed to the same restaurant in Gerash that we ate at for that trip a few weekends ago, and then headed home.
So that is pretty much all of note that happened this week. It occurred to me that I haven't really been talking about cultural things as much as I should; all the funny little instances that happen to me at odd times (such as the little old taxi driver the other night who was trying to speak to me in very broken English and Arabic, then noticed a car ahead of him that was driving rather crazily and gestured toward it with a rather well-pronounced "F***!"; or like the bus that passed me as I was waiting for a taxi, where all the men were hanging out the window and shouted a chorus of heavily accented "Hello"s and "I love you"s at me). It is my goal in the final weeks that I'm here, after my return from Eid break, to keep my little notebook on me at all times and mark down such awesome occurrences that I would rather remember years from now when I read this again. At the end of my blogs I'll be sure to share them with you :)
Anyway, at this point, I'm to finish packing at head to Alyssa's where I'm staying the night before she, Chris, and I head off to the airport in the morn'. Our plan is 3 days in Istanbul, 3 days traveling through the country on our way to the southern coast, hitting up Troy and Cappadocia on the way, and then ferrying over to Cyprus for 2 nights. Yes, it sounds rushed, and it will be a whirlwind of sightseeing and blurry views from bus windows, but, just like when I travel anywhere else, I much prefer the ability to just be in a new country and breath in the atmosphere, and just be there. It wasn't our intention from the get-go to spend the full week in Istanbul and see everything there is to see there...we just want to get the general taste of Turkey (hehe, right before Thanksgiving, eh??). Other folks are spending Eid in Egypt, Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, Dubai...But we figured that, hey, we're studying Arabic, we WILL get back to this region and see those places at some point. We banked more on going somewhere a little out of the way that's a little more unlikely to see us again (though insha'allah it will!!).
I hope y'all have a great week and I'll get back to you in a few days!
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