Like a typical American, I arrived in Jordan well ahead of
the semester because I wanted to be prepared. I wanted to get used to the time
difference, learn my way around, get my classes scheduled, buy my textbooks,
and get every other detail out of the way so that I was entirely organized for my
first day of school. Unfortunately, my detail-oriented, anal-retentive,
always-on-time attitude was the complete antithesis of the Jordanian
mindset. In Jordan, people are confident that things will work themselves out. Absolutely
everything is “no problem, don’t worry about it.” Time is relative here, and if
something like a bus route or a class actually happens to have a schedule the
only thing you can be sure of is that it will not actually operate according to
that schedule.
A few days after my arrival in Jordan, I got a phone call
telling me that the start day of my semester had been postponed by weeks. This,
combined with my early arrival, lead me to the Month of Nothing- where I was
alone in a city without classes, friends, or an inkling of the local language. As
the clichéd overachieving student, this was probably the first time I could
remember where I wasn’t running between sports and extracurriculars and work
and friends and so on. I had been prepared to work hard learning Arabic,
studying for my engineering classes, staying late on campus for clubs and
sports- but had unintentionally given myself the most complete vacation I could
have imagined.
So, I studied Arabic anyway. I made flash cards and sat on
the patio of my host family’s house memorizing words that all sounded exactly
the same to me.
What I learned: Arabic is hard.
Trying to teach yourself Arabic is stupid.
However, I did learn things out of necessity faster than I
would have in school. In my earlier days of French class I remember learning
things like how to say colors and the months of the year and the names of the rivers
in France, and none of those things actually helped me when I visited Paris in
high school. Once in Jordan, I had to learn things like ‘right,’ ‘left’
and ‘straight’ or I would never have been able to direct a taxi driver. I had
to learn ‘please,’ ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ very fast or risk coming across as a
total jerk. And I wouldn’t have gotten very far if I couldn’t read Arabic
numbers, which are different than ours.
Another thing I did was join a gym. As a workout junkie, I
was pretty concerned that I wouldn’t be able to exercise in Jordan since I didn’t
think a blonde girl running around the block every day in spandex would be
appreciated. The gym I joined was called Fitness1 and it was massive, even
bigger than the YMCA back home, however it was segregated into a male half and
a female half. When I started I was quite affronted- I had to check-in at the ‘female’
desk and head towards the ‘female’ half- it was my first experience with true
segregation after all, and I was not going to pretend to me happy about it.
However, when I got into my half of the gym I immediately liked
it. The first floor was an enormous pool, sauna, hot tub, rock wall and locker
room. The second floor was tons of cardio machines and three rooms of different
fitness classes, and the third floor had weight machines and dozens of female
fitness instructors walking around helping people. The idea of being separated
from the men still seems crude to me (and probably always will), but I actually
felt more comfortable. The attitude once inside the female gym was much more
relaxed than any gym I had ever been in before. Additionally, it was
interesting to see all the conservative women walking around in swimsuits and
spandex.
What I learned: Working out is universally awesome, even in a society that is completely different.
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