How did I accumulate this much crap in three months?

Apologizes for being off the air for a while. We still don’t have Internet in our new apartment, so these backlogged blogs were uploaded via conveniently located Internet café. We hope to supply our new place with much-needed Internet access sometime after Eid because Jordan apparently comes to a standstill during holidays.

Moving on.

We are finally holed up nicely in our new apartment. Last Monday, November 16th, we marched (or taxied because I was carrying a ton of grading) down to the rental office and signed our contract. Right now it is unfortunately a month-to-month contract, but we are hoping to have a chat with the owner when she is back in the country so we can aim for an eight-month contract. That should get me right to the middle of July, perfect timing to escape back to the U.S.

After spending a bit of time at the apartment checking things out and cleaning, we grabbed a taxi and said, for one of the last times, Daheit al Rasheed. Once back at that place we called home, we began packing. We wanted to bring over a few bags that first day and practice sleeping and getting up later.

Three and a half months ago, I came to Jordan with two huge duffel bags full of stuff, one carry-on-sized suitcase and a bulging backpack. By the time I finished packing, every bag I brought with me was stuffed to the gills, all of my clothes were still on the hangers, ready to be transferred to my new wardrobe, and I had about twenty little plastic bags fully of stuff as well. Where did all this stuff come from? And how in the WORLD am I going to get it back home to America next summer?

I ran down to our old familiar stores to buy toilet paper and tissues. We didn’t know where to get such items in our new location yet. And that purchase just couldn’t wait any longer.

Our friend came to the apartment and we packed up a good half of our stuff that night. We lasted for two days on that, then on Wednesday we decided to go back for the rest of it. We still had a significant amount of junk to haul over. And our friend with his oh-so-convenient car was not there to help us. What to do?

We went out to the main road near our old apartment. We pulled over two taxi drivers, one of whom spoke English, and told them we would give them extra money if they helped us move our stuff. They cheerfully (or in the case of the one non-English speaking driver, confusedly) agreed. They dragged our considerable amount of stuff down and threw it in the taxis. They drove us to first circle and threw the stuff in our new apartment.

Two hours later, I was officially and completely moved in.

Get ready, Jabal Amman, because here we come!

For the last three months, Heather and I have been happily entrenched in our spacious apartment in Daheit al Rasheed, which is in the far north of the city.

The rent is cheap, the stores near our house are cheap, and the company is good. However, the beds are uncomfortable (two twins pushed together anyone?), the taxi rides to and from school are ridiculous, and the neighborhood is a bit more conservative than we'd like.

About two weeks ago, our roommate Nadia told us that she was moving out at the beginning of December. We thought about it for a bit and decided that we should also try to move down to the middle of the city where our school is and where it is so much closer to everything else we usually go to.

The very next day, a rainstorm hit the city. We stood in the rain for 20 minutes waiting for a taxi, then spent 45 minutes in the taxi on our way to school. 5alas. That was it. It was time to move.

A few days ago, Heather and I checked out an apartment that is about a five-minute walk to our school. It is right in Jabal Amman, the place to be in Amman. AND, the selling point for me at least, it comes furnished with AMERICAN-style double beds! A mattress! AND boxsprings! Ah. Luxury.

The problem was the asking price. Too much. Way too much. We counteroffered and waited two days to see if it was accepted. Yesterday, we heard the answer. YES!

We move later this week. Jabal Amman, here we come! And more importantly, comfortable beds, here we come!

Ana mabsoota lamma ana be7ki arabi... sort of...

The moment you've all been waiting for is here. No, not the season finale of Mad Men. I'm finally going to devote the time to writing a post that has been in the works since my second week here: the joys of learning Arabic.

My continuing observation is that Arabic is a doozy of a language to learn. It's not just the backwards curlicue letters I had to memorize, though I'm not going to lie, those took a while. Because 1) you have to completely flip your brain around to start on the right side, which is a bit like an American trying to drive on the left side of the road, 2) all those silly little squiggles look alike and 3) those quirky worms change COMPLETELY depending on where they are in the word. All the fancy calligraphies they use here do not help in distinguishing that circle/line/wiggle with this circle/line/squiggle.

What makes reading Arabic even harder is that they LEAVE ALL THE FREAKING VOWELS OUT OF WORDS! Instead of true vowels, in Arabic they have "voices," called harakots. These voices tell you whether you should use an "a" sound, an "oo" sound or an "e" sound in between the consonants. And no one ever bothers to actually put them in words because they already know how the word is pronounced. I do not. It would be a bit like trying to pronounce English properly f w snck ll th vwls t f th lngge drng th nght (if we snuck all the vowels out of the language during the night).

Plus, if you want to type Arabic easily on cell phones or Facebook messages, you have to transliterate it into Latin letters. So it's basically like learning two different languages: one in a readable alphabet and one made of curled up bits of ribbon.

Actually, it's even more like learning two different languages because of all the different Arabics out there. There's fus-ha, which is the classical Arabic taught in schools and nearly completely useless if you want to be understood in the taxi. It's a bit like if someone jumped off the plane in rural West Texas and said, "Charming morning, good sir. Wouldst thou assist me in obtaining my belongings?" What I'm learning is amia, the spoken Arabic language of Jordan, which will be useless in any other Arabic-speaking country.

And don't get me started on the wacky conjugations this language employs. First of all, the infinitive is in the past tense. PAST TENSE! So no cheating like my mom did in France by using all infinitives. "I to have to go to eat now." And though I am getting better at figuring them out, to me the conjugations only bear the slightest resemblance to the original word. For example, long before we started conjugating verbs, our teacher taught us the word "btodros" means "you (masculine) study. While looking at another sentence, we came across the word "darast" and didn't know what it meant. "Well what word does it look like?" she asked. Apparently the answer was "btodros," though I'm definitely not seeing it. But yes indeedy, "darast" does in fact mean "you (masculine) studied." Weird.

Another fun fact about Arabic is that they don't just stick a fun "s" on the end of a word to make it plural. No, no, that would be much too simple. They actually have TWO different plurals for every noun. One plural means two of something, which you make by adding "een" or "teen" to the end of the word, and one plural that means three or more, which is usually a different word entirely. For example, "osboa3" is week, "osboa3een" is two weeks and "asabee3" is three or more weeks.

In the end, though, it will all be worth it. When Arabs speak Arabic, it is a beautiful language. All the sounds are subtle and flow gently like water over a stream. For some reason, when they speak, all the harsh sounds are swept into the other sounds so that it is still soft and musical.

When I speak, it sounds like I am coughing up a hairball. They have one "H" sound, similar to the French "R," that literally sounds like you are gagging. When Heather and I have to spell words, we call that sound "phlegm." As in spelling Ahmad: A... phlegm...

Ahmad the Dead Terrorist aside, we also have to pronounce a "Qa" sound from the back of the throat, possibly from somewhere near the rib cage. To do this, unhinge your jaw and drop it somewhere around your belly button while jutting out your chin, bugging your eyes out and doing a credible impression of saying "aaah" at the dentist's, only with a "Q." There's a breathless "H" sound that is more like a wheeze from an emphysema patient or perhaps Darth Vadar, and of course the guttural stop that sounds like someone just clapped a sweaty palm over your mouth mid-word with an audible pop.

But my two favorites are an "R" sound that sounds like the "GRA" sound a baby makes when it has just dumped dinner down its shirt and an "A" sound that is basically a nasalized, controlled yell. This war cry is tragically in what seems like half the words in the Arabic language.

So while Arabs get to sound smooth and cultured, we foreigners get to sound like we are slowly going criminally insane. EstAna DaEEaA. Ya tEEk AAAl AAAfia! I say hysterically to the taxi driver, imagining the men in white coats sneaking up behind me with a restraining jacket. "Quick grab her now! While she's in mid-wail!"

Should have stuck with being fluent in Texan.

Peculiar Prefixes

I was grading some prefix/suffix homework today in which the girls had to find ten words with a prefix or suffix in their books and then write the root word of the original word. In the course of grading, I had two answers that totally made my day.

First of all, one girl found the word "button." The root word? "Butt."

But my favorite was the word "discuss." The root word, according to my other student, is "cuss." I laughed really hard on that one.

In a way, it makes sense I guess. "Dis" means to remove or separate, so if you removed the "cussing" from a conversation, maybe you could have a pretty decent discussion...

Winter Wonderland?

Well, for all of you who have been sending me nasty emails about the hot weather in Jordan, feel free to snicker behind your hands and/or guffaw openly. Our crazy summer, which stretched to the end of October, is finally over. And now we can enjoy fall.

Or not. On Halloween day, it abruptly skipped fall and dove right into winter. Unfortunately most of my cold weather gear is waiting for me to pick in up in Texas, so it might be a chilly month and a half for me. But I did buy some comfy new pajama pants I will be wearing about 16 hours a day, so I'm prepared.

The worst part is not the cold. Cold I can handle. The rain, however, is getting old. Now normally I love rain. But not in this country. Do you know what happens when you mix rain with a city built on dirt? My shoes ankle-deep in mud. That's what happens.

THREE Month Anniversary

Today is the three month anniversary of my arrival in Jordan.

It occurs to me that I should probably start picking a longer length of time to get excited about at this point. I'll hold out on the next announcement until I hit the big six.

Time's fun when you're having flies.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for...

The best line I've heard in my English class in a while came when I was teaching the girls how to write a paragraph. We were researching pumpkins (it WAS Halloween), but the example was about ice cream. The clincher, or conclusion, of the sample paragraph was, after talking about how good ice cream is, "No wonder we say, "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream."

One of the brightest girls in my class had figured out that we were going to use the same format to write about pumpkins. She raised her hand.

"So we are going to write a clincher for the pumpkin paragraph as well, right?" she asked.

"Yes, of course."

"And could we say, "I scream, you scream, we all scream for pumpkins?"

It took me a while to get the class to settle down after the general hilarity of seeing their teacher crack up for a whole minute.