First Week in Jordan
Well, we've finished up our first week in Jordan, and I can't believe how much we've managed to do already! Here are just a few of the highlights ...
Amman and Jordan Facts
Jordanian dinars (1 JD is worth about $1.40)
The picture above, on every page, is a panorama of downtown Amman, the capital of Jordan. You can see that it is a big, crowded city, and that many people live in these apartment-style buildings. We are living in a hotel. Amman is a city of about 2 million people. (There are only 6.2 million people in all of Jordan. For comparison, Wisconsin has about 5.6 million people). Jordan is a small country, just under 90,000 sq km (about the size of the state of Indiana). It contains the lowest point in the world - the Dead Sea, which is located 408 m below sea level! As the capital, Amman is home to the King and his family, as well as the National Assembly. Jordan is a constitutional monarchy, which means that the King shares power with the National Assembly (like our Congress). The current King, King Abdullah II, has reigned since his father died in 1999. His wife, Queen Rania al Abdullah, has recently written a picture book for children that is available in both Arabic and English editions! You can see pictures of the King and the royal family all over in Jordan.
Arabic Class
Every other day we have Arabic classes at the University of Jordan (which is the oldest and most prestigious college in Jordan). Arabic is the official language of Jordan, but now all students learn English too. We are still working on the alphabet, which is very tricky! The Arabic alphabet is written right-to-left and contains 28 letters. It is written in script (like cursive), so all the letters connect to each other. Here is my first name in Arabic : كاتي pronounced Keh-tee. It has four letters : a K, a long a / eh sound, a t, and a long ee.
Food
Hummus and baba ganoush with bread. See the lemon mint?
There are a lot of different restaurants and fast food places near our hotel, ranging from traditional places serving shwarma to a McDonald's and a Burger King! Shwarma is meat (lamb or chicken) pressed into a big cone. When you order, they shave off pieces and put it in a pita with yogurt sauce (like a gyro). Very tasty. There is also falafal - deep fried balls of chickpeas, and lots of side dishes like hummus (chickpeas), tabbouleh (a minty salad), and baba ganoush (eggplant). My new favorite drink is called lemon-mint (sounds like limon-nehrnehr in Arabic) ... lemonade with chopped up mint leaves in it, which turns it an electric green color. Very refreshing on a hot day. Speaking of which, it is pretty hot here - in the upper 90s to 100 F, and we haven't seen a single cloud yet. We all drank lots of the water we brought when we were sight-seeing this past weekend.
