“Off-book at two months?!? Who do you think we are, Bogart and Hepburn?”

We’re not in Colorado anymore, Juwad. And this week Rayjahn let us know it by mandating nightly written assignments in which we do not consult our books (the dictionary is OK, though). They have ranged from essays about our daily schedules in Colorado to instructions on preparing a meal to discussing a trip that we have taken within Jordan. For our test on Friday (I would discuss it more here, but we are both still bruised and limping) she gave us the weekend to write about any topic we like. Daph is elaborating on her experience in Guatemala, and especially the beauty of Lago Atitlan, the lake at its center. I wrote a myth about baklawa, and how it was created by a prince in his search for a princess (it sounds deeper than it is).

But things are moving along steadily. We’ve had multiple people over to our house, now, and last night we got to compare American and Turkish-style popcorn (remarkably similar, really, except for the quantity of salt). Our Arabic, too, keeps getting better. Thursday, as we were wrapping up at the language center’s computer lab, we were trying to jot down the Kiddush in Hebrew (let’s just say there’s been some jumping around on the occasional Friday night) when the security guard wandered up and peered over our shoulders, intently examining what we appeared to find so interesting. Well, we thought, we were out-ed. If he knew what it was, though, he didn’t let on, and proceeded to start a 45 minute conversation, in Arabic. Not the deepest of things, but a conversation none-the-less, and quite something given that our first week in Irbid he repeatedly tried to start conversations that typically lasted ten minutes yet successfully communicated less than a full sentence. He did express an interest in coming to America (and marrying Yael in the process), and in showing us around Jordan. He also casually asked if we knew any languages other than English and Arabic, and when we mentioned Spanish and then (Kaleel, kaleel) Chinese, he seemed very content.

The security guard also made the same assumption it seems that everyone does here. You see, Daph and I are together constantly. We go shopping together, we go to class and study together, we go out together, we travel together. On the rare occasion that people see us apart, or even work up the nerve to ask to both of us, we hear: “Sadeekan?” or “Ayna Saddeek-kee/Saddeekatka?” That is, “Are you friends?” or “Where is your friend?” They always appear to be overjoyed when we drop the “married” word. Sometimes they proceed to, more-enthusiastically, re-welcome us to the country.

That, in fact, happened today when we were buying our tickets to enter Ajloun Castle (one-eighth the cost with your student ID!). We chatted with a couple of the workers, and then one asked if we were friends, and when we answered, we finally got the hearty welcome. The baby question, of course, followed, but we still ended up with a ride up the hill to the castle (the worker, en route, was very happy to share that he was an orthodox Christian, but a little disappointed we weren’t Catholic – we’re going the Presbyterian route. . . . best ministers in America, I dare say, “semi-retired” as they are. . . .).

Ajloun Castle, our adventure this week, was beautiful. A castle originally built by Saladin’s nephew in 1184 to protect Northern Jordan from the Franks (the castle had a 16 meter wide moat) and later used by the Mongols, the Mamluks and the Ottomans, it is also known as Qal’at al Rabadh. Stunning in its power, sitting on top of a mountain with views in every direction, the castle gives a sense of power in how far you can see, and at the same time, a sense of how small you are in such a magnificent place. Everywhere the dark green of olive trees hovered over yellow wildflowers, mountains rose up with gardens and beautiful gold and brown rocks, and in the very distance, sits the water that draws the boundary between Jordan and Israel. I felt myself thinking of how many people had died for and in this place – just this single castle on a hill that was built under Saladin – and yet how incredible its existence is. In the castle’s museum, there were glass bottles from 1700 years ago. Glass. Glass that has survived millennia. It felt like a startling statement, seeing the unscathed glass in this crumbling stone war-torn building, about humanity.

Your Arabic phrases of the week:
Welcome! “Ahallan wa- Sa-hallan.” أهلا و سأهلا
The rocket scientist rode the rocket to the stars. “Ra-kabah mohundussu as-Saruchee as-Saruchah ila al-najmat.” ركب مهندس الصروخ الصروخ إلى النخمات

في عربية؟ "Miscommunication" كيف أقول

How do you say "Miscommunication" in Arabic?

From time to time, when traveling in a foreign country (and especially when writing a blog that relates to food), the time comes to eat your words.

This week, it has come for us.

So yes, there is whole wheat bread here. At nearly every bakery. It is the bread that looks like whole wheat bread. We were simply led astray by the fact that they call it “diet bread”, which gave us nightmares about aspartame-laden cancerous white fluffy dinner rolls. But no, it’s merely chubz with whole wheat and no sugar. Even when we first asked our teacher Adela about it, she looked at us a bit crooked and said, “Are you going on a diet?”

But ask for brown rice, and they really do look at you crooked. Even Safeway doesn’t carry it (and when Safeway has a mini-amusement park and no brown rice, you know that you’re in trouble). But alas, we have eaten our words (and over a kilo of whole wheat bread).

We have also eaten nearly our weight in ful. Yes, the real ful, the ful medammes that we were so sure was inferior to our precious white bean “ful”, aka white beans mashed with tahini and cumin and garlic, etc. No, my dear reader, oh no. This ful –broad beans, fava beans, whatever you want to call them, are eat-straight-from-the-can yummy. Rejahn, our “serious” teacher (see below for further explanation), came over to show us how to make the real thing. And, alas, to the detriment of our pride, it is, as she constantly kvells, “too delicious” (the way she talks about food gives you the sense that she is constantly fainting from ecstasy, only to get back up and try it again). Two strikes.

The third time we had to eat our words this week was, well, just a misfired joke. You see, writing dialogues gets fairly repetitive when the extent of your vocabulary doesn’t stretch much farther than the supermarket and two or three books. So you put in jokes. Like, for instance, Daphna goes to Dr. Ben and he writes her a prescription even though he doesn’t know what the problem is (See: DR. SPACEMAN, 30 Rock), and she, undaunted, takes the medicine. All three kinds. Now, we aren’t sure if Rejahn didn’t get our silly satire, or just thought we were clueless Americans who were unwittingly putting our lives in the hands of morons. She made us rewrite the dialogue with Daphna rejecting the medicine and reporting to her husband (aka, just Ben) how horrible the doctor was. “Crazy,” was the word she gave us. We have hence given up all attempts at humor in Arabic.

But we will end with a tale that had us eating, not words, but dinner. We invited two guys who are studying at the language center from Turkey (“Turkeys,” as one of the Italians innocently called them) to come over for dinner, and to show us how to cook the bulgur we bought. Instead, they brought their own Turkish bulgur and pasta, a hookah, and movies in Arabic (including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! It’s like my inner child’s dream come true – the TMNT come back, and I have an excuse to watch them without feeling guilty). The bulgur was awesome (I’m sure that had nothing to do with the fact that it included a quarter liter of olive oil), and it was an altogether enjoyable night. Not only are they co-students, but the three of us have formed a little basketball team, and on Wednesday we came within a point of beating three of the players on the Yarmouk U team. We’ll keep you posted. Plus, next time they come over, they’ve promised to bring the Hagia Sophia (it’s difficult to one-up yourself when you start at this high a level).

We love you all.

Your Arabic phrase of the week is: La ta-ka-luk. Don't worry.

A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Okay, it might not be fair to dub this week “the worst of times,” unless you consider being so inundated with homework that it dribbles out your ears “the worst of times.” On Tuesday we nearly gave up all bodily functions in order to finish (which we did, after working nearly straight through since 5:30p, at around 11:30p).

And it might not be quite fair to call it the best of times either (see above homework situation, combined with a lack of tofu and distance to Denver and its residents). We did, however, get to experience the “Souk” (codename for the “Shook,” or outdoor market) and downtown Irbid for the first time. As we walked amongst the plentiful veggies and fruits, awash in cries of “Farowala! Farowala! (Strawberry! Strawberry!)” and “Maoz! Maoz! (Bananas, not Communists, though they were for sale, too. Really),” we picked out enough produce to feed an army of Bens and Daphnas (onions, oranges, grapefruit, zucchini-like squash, lemon, banana, spinach, eggplant, cauliflower, dried beans. . . .). All for about $10.

We also made our way to Jerash, a town known for its incredible, primarily Roman, ruins. Nestled among green hills and sprouting yellow and purple and white wildflowers, old rocks and columns and theaters sticking up out of the ground. . . it was enough to make you think, “Hey, those Romans really did have something going for ‘em.” It was beautiful. It was also the most touristy place that we’ve been to, complete with a souvenir bazaar. We ran into a man selling souvenirs inside the grounds who was so excited to hear that we also attend Yarmouk University that he took us on a small guided tour and showed us how the columns rock (ever so gently) in the wind. You could feel the movement on your fingers.

Jordan continues to confound as well as amaze. Most people here are incredibly polite and, at times, shockingly honest. When we bought the dried beans, Daph and I misinterpreted the Amia (the Jordanian dialect of Arabic, considerably different from Foos-ha, or “Modern Standard Arabic”, which is what we are learning but is actually spoken. . . nowhere. . . except on television), and gave the storekeeper exact change plus a bit more. He shook his head, “tut-tutted” in an Arabic fashion, and put the extra money back in my hand. Now, of course, there are less pleasant encounters, and for us, here, they have been restrained primarily to transportation (taxis love their foreigner tax everywhere, it appears). Today, leaving Jerash, multiple men tried to convince us that all public transport back to Irbid had stopped and that their private car was the only route back, for a mere 10x bus fare. We caught a mini-bus on the road for the same price as the one that brought us. . . .

And, there are always the surprises. Trying to find the souk, we asked a policeman for directions. He seemed to be at a total loss, but a student came over who spoke good English and gave us directions. Before he would let us walk, though, he said, “But tell me, what do you think of Islam? I know that over in America, it’s like everyone in Islam has big beards and is a terrorist. But it’s not like that. What do you think?” I thought that, if we thought that, we probably wouldn’t be in Jordan, but. . . . we chatted for a bit (I wasn’t that snarky), and we found out that he was a Hebrew language major. “Why?” Daph asked. “Because,” he said, “they’re our neighbors, and it felt like my destiny.” Daph coaxed a “Ma Shlomcha?” out of him, and when she responded in turn, he said, “Wow, you’re good,” and then seemed to fade back into how important it was that we feel welcome in Jordan. He sent us off after taking a picture with each of us on his cell phone.

Your Arabic phrase of the day: Lam a’akul al-shokoladah al-letti kanat fee beytna, liannahu akula jami-oo alshokolada awalan. I didn’t eat the chocolate which was in our house, because he ate all the chocolate first.*

Or, Sah-phara Ben wah Daphna ila Jerash alyom. Ben and Daphna traveled to Jerash today.

*That’s right, folks. . . necessity is the mother of invention, and we are making our own vegan chocolate candy and halva from scratch. . . . We’ll keep you posted. We love you! See the posts below that have had pictures added!!!!!

The Adventurous Illiterates

Last night we went to the Italian girls’ home for dinner. There are six of them studying at the Language Center, and they invited us over for a meal. They brought out heaping bowls of penne in a homemade sauce, and as I wiped my bowl clean, my stomach burgeoning, I thought of my dad, and was about to ask, “So, do spaghetti starters really exist in Italy?”
And that was when they brought out the second course.

It has been quite a week. Classes continue to be grueling, and we even began learning about clauses. We have learned the “continuing past” (as in “he didn’t arrive”), how to pluralize (though there are enough exceptions to the rule that having a rule seems silly), how to use “but,” and five different ways of negating something (each has its own use, either with nouns or in different tenses). Meanwhile, we are still stuttering about, trying to read without vowels, and still trying to perfect the throaty ayin and the rolled rah.

We did make it to Amman this weekend, though. We spent a lot of time walking in, well, the wrong direction. And Jordanians give directions a lot like their neighbors to the west.
“Yes, yes, just go straight.”
Everyone spoke English, making it very hard to practice, but we got to try Jordanian and Egyptian fu’uls (apparently we’ve been using the wrong bean. Oops). We saw, from a distance, the Roman Theater at the center of town. We walked through the wealthier part of the city and saw all the wealthier expats eating American food on a balcony overlooking the city. Unlike in downtown, the streets there were clean and sparse, whereas in downtown the streets had heavy traffic (when we tried to get a bus, multiple passed too full to take on even half of the waiting passengers) and it was easy to walk into people if you weren't paying attention. The city, too, seemed to be laid out in sections -- DVD stores were here, gold stores here, dress shops there.
In the end, we decided we are very happy that we chose Irbid over Amman. We came home exhausted and cuddled in front of a movie to unwind.

Thursday was quite an adventure, as well. We decided to go for a walk, but as we made our way through campus, we heard distinct groups shouting and cheering. At first we suspected that something was wrong. Approaching one of the groups, though, we saw a horde of men carrying a guy in a suit and singing. We asked some spectators what was happening, and, in Arabeezi (Spanglish, here), they informed us that the student government had just been elected, and the person hoisted in the air was the new President of his “Faculty.” The whole school had erupted in celebration, and the boys we had asked lead us around to view many of the different schools celebrating (we noted that all of the Presidents were male). Needless to say, our walk never made it to downtown.
We did spend over an hour chatting with the boys, though. And as two of them grilled me on why I let Daphna go around with her head uncovered (he was the first to pin me into "admitting" that I was Christian -- it didn't feel like a comfortable time to go the whole way), Daph and I marveled at how seriously student government is taken here. I don't remember who a single student government officer was during my many years in college, and I barely remember voting, let alone anything approaching these campus-wide celebrations.

Well, unfortunately, we had best away. Homework and chores are calling. At least, though, we get spaghetti again tonight.
Some things never change.

Arabic phrase of the day:
Nahnu la nooridu anna nephalu wajibna. We don't want to do our homework.

Monsoon Season in the Desert

As our first month away from Denver wraps to a close, the rains have hit. We had a sunny week, and then it rained basically all weekend. All weekend. It was like God cursed the school children. And it was a cold rain -- last night, when we got home from meeting a friend for coffee, Daph and I both sat with our hands and feet on the heater. One of my toes appeared to have lost all circulation and was a rather putrid shade of green. Daph says it was just white, but I say it was green. And festering.

Things here, though, are going well (even my toe regained its natural color). Classes are intense, but exciting -- we're learning a lot of new material and getting to the point where we can begin to ask questions in class in Arabic, and have basic semi-conversations. We even wrote a short children's story about a monkey and his dog that you can see in the pictures. I'll have you note, our teacher asked who was the "Picasso." Of course, she thought that the images were all cubist renderings of variously posed dead fish. . . .
You win some, you lose some. . . .

We went out last night with our friend, Fallata, a Nigerian at school at Yarmouk, but who normally lives in Saudi Arabia. He brought a friend, Mohammed, who wants to work on his English (and help us with our Arabic). Fellata entertained us with tales of his failed matchmaking attempts and discussions of religion and renewable energy in the Middle East. He also told us where to get the best smoothies and introduced us to the best felafel place in town.

Fallata's father, by the way, had four wives and 23 children. Fallata can also distinguish between which individual tribe Nigerians are from by their facial features, and can do the same for regions in the Middle East. At the felafel place he had a friendly argument with the Egyptian felafel-makers about what country had the best soccer team in Africa. It was left unresolved.

At home we are settling in, and after a disaster-laden first attempt to make fu'ul (the local breakfast of choice, basically a dip made of fava beans), we asked one of our teachers, Adella, how to make it. Apparently, you see, we only needed about a quarter of the garlic, but to mash it better (in boiling water), with tahini and cumin. Now we wipe the bowl clean with chubs and then lick it to get the last bits of aroma. Yummy. Pictures are coming, let us know if you want the basic recipe.

Anyway, the phrase of the day: Jo bared. Cold weather!

Much love!