Food, Food, Food, and Food

One of my favorite sayings is "I don't eat to live, I live to eat." In Jordan, people don't live to eat as much as they live to feed. The first question I get from most people I meet here is what foods I've had since being here. As a culture that puts a premium on being welcoming and hospitable, they want to make sure that I have been welcomed in the traditional Arabic way, by forcing mountains of food on me. I have a confession to make,: I'm terrible at remembering the names of foods here. My theory is that it's because somewhere between my brain signaling the release of endorphins and it signaling I'm full, I turn it off so I can mindlessly eat more than I should humanly be able to. It's also a possibility that once they put the food in front of me, I hone in on the deliciousness that awaits me and lose focus on everything else. No matter what the reason for me forgetting the names of the foods I've eaten here, I'm going to do my best to work through some of my experiences with food and recall them, first so my Mom can stop worrying if I've eaten enough, and second because food is a central part of Jordanian culture.

We'll start it off with breakfast, my personal favorite meal of the day. Back in the states I'm used to waking up in the morning, rolling out of bed, and pouring myself a bowl of sugary pellets to start off my morning. Interestingly enough, one of Jordan's main imports is cereal, so you would think that I could stay pretty close to my typical routine while here. That's a bit far from the truth. Most mornings here, my host mother sets out a spread. After the spread is laid out, my host my turns on their gas stove, and heats up some خبز (Khabaz) which directly translated means bread, but that's slightly misleading. Bread in Arabic is something closer to a pita, and once my host mother heats it up, she puts it on a plate for me, and I rip off little pieces and use them as I dip, scoop, and devour the delicious spread that is in front of me. Starting from the right and going left, the typical spread in my house starts with oil and zatar. Olive oil is everywhere here, because we're living in the land of olives. Regretfully, olives are one of the few foods that I really don't like, but olive oil I enjoy. What you do is you get the little chunk of bread you ripped off, you dip it in the oil, then you dip it in the zatar, which is an herb that is crushed up and put on a plate for you to obtain with the help of the oil on your bread. Zatar has a little bit of a bite to it. It's a little bit crunchy and is sort of just a little seasoning for the bread, like putting salt on potatoes. After the zatar, there's usually a plate of what my host mother calls Lebanese cheese. I know that isn't what the Arabic name is, but I can't really find what it is actually called. The cheese has a creamy texture and doesn't have much punch, making it go down pretty easy. After the lLebanese cheese, there's usually some حُمُص (Hummus), which despite the fact that Americans have been pronouncing it wrong the whole time, needs no real introduction. The last consistent piece of the breakfast puzzle is جبنة (jabna), which is sort of reminds me of what cottage cheese would be like if the curds were dried and put into blocks. Overall, there are other things that are added to the breakfast feast on a daily basis (a lot of laughing cow cheese, hard boiled eggs, other Arabic foods that I don't know the name of, and more), but these are the cornerstones for how I start off my day in Jordan. Now, when my host Mother does not set out a spread like this, I do end up getting cereal. The cereal they have here reminds me of the type of cereal my Grandma would put into her dreaded morning concoction of disappointment and low-sugar health. Still, no matter what it is, I'm always starting off my morning headed in the right direction.

For lunch, I'm usually on my own. My host family is only supposed to feed me lunch on the weekends, because on the weekdays I'm at school, which means it's time for me to go explore the local restaurants. There are two typical lunches for students to get in the area. The first is to go someplace and get what is called شاورما (chawarma). Chawarma is sort of like an Arabic burrito. It's a tortilla stuffed with lamb or chicken, usually some pickles, mayonnaise, and general Arabic spices. It can be found at a lot of side restaurants that look like fast food chains, but can also be found in some more upscale restaurants (usually then it's served cut up into slices with the mayonnaise and pickled veggies on the side). When not getting the infamous chawarma, a lot of students stick to the safety of a ساندويش فلافل (sandwich falafel). Falafel sandwiches come in many different forms, from being in pita-like bread, to being in a pretezelish bun, to being in a type of bread that is more familiar to Americans. Usually these have hummus in them as well, and there can be many other things added, from zatar to Lebanese cheese to things I don't recognize. The commonality between all these forms of falafel sandwiches is that they are usually cheap. Often times I can get a falafel sandwich for close to $1 US. Usually I prefer the weekends when my host family feeds me instead of me scavenging for food on my own. Yesterday, my family had a barbeque, a typical thing to do when the weather is nice in Jordan. We went to a local park where there were hordes of other families, set up everything, then my host dad pulled out a little metal box with no top, put some wood in it, and started a fire. Once there were some good coals, my host dad started cooking كباب (Kebab) and meat patties that we would stuff into some شراك (sharak) which is like a tortilla, as opposed to the normal pita like khabaz. Everything was delicious, and between enjoying the beautiful weather, and being in the presence of friends, I ate more than I normally would have, and didn't regret any bite.

Every day, I end my food journey with food from my family. A typical Jordanian family (mine included) will cook a heap of food and use the leftovers for several days. So when I come home one day and have a meal, I usually spend the next two days coming home to the same meal. These are also the meals that I tend to forget the names of. A typical dinner that I'm fed consists of rice, or something similar to rice, and chicken. Now there are a lot of different things you can do with rice and chicken, and here they do just about all of them, but often times it's hard for me to distinguish any difference by looking at them. These meals are typically flavored with lemon, which I love, and various other herbs and spices that I can't really recognize. The food is consistently flavorful and the meat is always cooked for extended periods of time, making it tender and delicious. Throughout the night, my family typically continues to snack. Usually we have these little seeds, that are similar to sunflower seeds, that are notoriously difficult to get anything out of for exchange students. Also, my family usually enjoys having some very strong tea, or Turkish coffee, to wash down the food that was eaten throughout the day. Sometimes we get some sweets at the end of the day, such as كنافه (kanafih) which is a sweet dessert consisting of cheese covered in nuts. After eating so much food, I usually end the day in a food-induced stupor and go to bed to get ready to start it all over again the next day.

The Economy

I've never been very good at economics. When I would play Monopoly Jr. my sister would refuse to own the space dedicated to horses. In the grand scheme of the game, that really crippled her ability to establish devastating fiscal power through a conglomerate of colored spaces. When you add in governing bodies that regulate, stock markets that fluctuate, and people who speculate, I'm usually left in the dust of a philosophical pondering of how the money I'm holding is intertwined in an entire system based on gold and rules but not the golden rule. Since being in Jordan, I have realized one very important fact, the economy is important in our everyday lives. Coming from the country that dominates the global financial realm, it's been jarring to see how the economy is played out in our everyday lives.

Jordan was estimated to have a GDP of $40 billion in 2013, which ranked 105th in the world. The GDP per capita hovered around the $6,000 mark, which ranked 151st in the world. The GDP as a measurement is known to have its weakness. It doesn't measure the distribution of wealth, and it doesn’t recognize non-market activity, like those billions of horse stables that exist with the funding of monopoly money. In Jordan, like anywhere else, there is a gap between the rich and the poor. A reported 11% of the population lives below the international poverty line. The honest truth about the program I'm a part of is that I'm pretty sheltered from the "have nots" in Jordan. The West side of Amman, where I live, is known to be slightly more affluent than the East side of Amman, where I have not visited. On top of that, Princess Sumaya University of Technology (PSUT), where I have my classes, is attended by predominately well-off students whose parents can afford the price of the University. Like America, there are also public Universities where the tuition is a bit less, but they are competitive and you have to have incredibly good marks to get admitted. One day we asked our professor how much tuition was at PSUT was, she didn't have exact figures, but she placed it at around 4,000 JD per semester (at an exchange rate of 1.4, it'd put you at about $5,600).

The price tag of tuition indicates part of the reason that I call my experience with the economy here jarring. Things are generally cheaper here. At the cafeteria on campus I can buy a sandwich for sixty piaster, which is less then ninety cents in America. If you go to a nice restaurant here, you can get a hearty meal for around four Dinars, so less than six dollars. As a known tightwad with my money, it feels pretty good to save all my dough by eating cheap meals and taking cheap transportation. Cheap is all a matter of perspective though. The cost of living here is usually less than it is in America, and the reason for this circles back to the GDP per capita statistic. It's all about scale, if you keep the cost of food lower, people have to spend less on the basic necessities, and if you spend less on the basic necessities, you can pay people less. The system isn't quite that simple though. While driving through Jordan I see a lot of banks, insurances companies, and financial firms. There is also construction of skyscrapers and massive buildings downtown, and I know at least one of these impressive modern marvels is going to be a bank. All of this is a conscious effort to build the economy in Jordan. At the same time, Jordan has a high import tax to try to encourage people to buy local, especially tourist, in an attempt to ensure that the local economy doesn't collapse. This arrangement of trying to ensure the local economy stays strong, while also building international power, makes sense, but the nuts and bolts of the operation are a bit beyond my realm of knowledge.

There are some things that aren't beyond my realm of knowledge though. When we got here we signed a paper saying that we wouldn't attend any political protests or rallies while in Jordan. We were told that these protests could spring up anywhere in the city. It is just a part of the political culture, but it probably isn't safe for us to get into the mix of things we don't completely understand. Of course curiosity about what the protests were about lead to a string of questions, and we were told that protests could occur for many reasons, but one of the concrete reasons they gave us was inflation. The fact of the matter is the economy is linked to freedom for many people in the Middle East. In the late 19th and early 20th century, many countries in the Middle East defaulted on loans they had gotten from European and had to forfeit their economic autonomy and become ruled by foreign countries. Whether true or false, a lot of people in the Middle East link violence and intervention from foreign forces to the presence of oil and other natural resources. A tour guide we had during our city tour the first week described Jordan as "the Swiss of the Middle East". He made this comment because of Jordan's ability to avoid conflict, but he also added that it was largely in part because Jordan doesn't have any oil reserves. This is all to say that a typical Jordanian seems to understand how the economy is linked to their independence, which I only began to recognize while I started living in a country that is not the economic superpower of the world. You don't have to think about where you'll land when you roll the dice in Monopoly if you have all the houses on the board.

Dongles, Dabke, and Dubbed Days of Our Lives

Dongle is hands down my new favorite word. Phonetically it is a union of syllables stronger than the relationship of Brangelina, not to mention the fact that it sounds like a word a junior high school boy would have created. A Dongle is more than just a word carved out of the best sounds known to man,; it is also the key to me accessing internet in Jordan. A dongle is slightly bigger than your typical flash drive, and it plugs into the USB port on your computer. Once plugged in, the Dongle grants access to the 3G signal it receives and the miracle of the internet is granted to the computer.

The wonders of the internet are available to me without the Dongle. I get WiFi at the University, and of course I can go to Starbucks, which has appeared in Jordan like a plethora of dandelions sprouting out of cracked pavement. The reason I use a Dongle is because internet can be complicated when abroad. The internet has been a powerful tool in the Middle East. Many people have done research on its impact on the "Arab Spring" and many people also question its use by insurgent groups. Not only that, but internet is often a taxed commodity in the Middle East. I was talking to a Computer Science student at the University, who made it clear that the internet in Jordan is taxed. Because the internet is such a valuable commodity, it can often cost a pretty penny. More affluent people who live in Jordan have internet in their homes, but often they buy limited plans because unlimited plans can cost so much. It's because of this that the CIEE provides the students in Jordan with a Dongle upon arrival. The CIEE preloads the Dongle with five Jordanian Dinars, which is approximately seven US dollars. This gets you around three gigabytes of data, and once you use that up, it's up to you to go out to the provider and buy a scratch card which gives you a code that you enter to refill your Dongle. It's a fun system, and it's one of the many ways that you can go about getting internet access in Jordan, but it's one of the fun constant reminders that I'm in an area much different from where I grew up.

Another reminder that I'm not in America anymore is the excursion I had yesterday to the city of مادبا (Madaba). Madaba is an ancient city that's well known in Jordan for its large Christian population. It's home to a lot of famous biblical locations, such as Mt. Nebo, and we went to a church that is the alleged site of the beheading of St. John the Baptist. Other than the obvious draw of going to the site of a historical beheading, at this church they also put on a mock wedding for the CIEE students. Despite the disappointment of no accidental legalization of marriage, the mock wedding was an absolute treat. We spent a good four hours at this church, playing games, eating food, and most importantly, doing the دبكه (Dabke). The Dabke is a traditional dance in the Middle East. That sentence just about exhausts my knowledge of the Dabke, but incredibly enough, yesterday I got a chance to do it. Here's a video of what the Dabke looks like.

When we arrived at the church there was a group of people playing bagpipes and drums, and after a short trip inside the church we were herded back outside when the bagpipes started wailing and the drummers started banging. Now I want you to picture a bunch of Americans being pulled into a line by a bunch of Jordanians and trying to follow what they do, which is a form of what is happening in the video. The majority of us struggle to simply not trip over our own feet, and we oscillated between the awkward junior high dance stake out and over commitment to a dance we didn't know how to do. Hands down the best part of the entire experience was seeing the absolute joy on the face of the Jordanians. Arabs are incredibly hospitable people, and the group yesterday spent the entire night ensuring that we were engaged and welcome in this show of culture. Between the dancing, games, and mounds of food bigger than Mt. Nebo, I was exhausted, and I slept like a baby when I got home.

Other than sleeping, one of my favorite activities while at my homestayis to watch soap operas with my host family. From talking to other CIEE students, it seems like we end up watching a lot of the same programs, and one of the most infamous ones is a soap opera that is originally in Turkish but has been dubbed in Arabic. Watching it is like a blend of Godzilla in English, Godzilla in Japanese, and The Days of Our Lives. Usually, just as I hear the word for “hello” in Arabic, and convince myself that I'm capable of making sense of what's happening on the screen, somebody gets shot and my hopes of enlightenment slip away from me like a wet bar of soap. Despite my perpetual confusion, there is something utterly addicting about watching these shows. Sure, it took me a whole week to figure out the main character’s name was Omar (which is apparently also the name of the show), but I'm really invested in what happens with this guy’s life. Will he end up with Elaine, or are the doomed since his brother is a criminal who killed her parents? Who is the character who just appeared on the screen? Why is that person so angry? What type of food are they eating? Despite the fact that I don't think my parents paid for me to go abroad just so I could watch the soap operas here, there is something strangely educational from my experiences watching them. I may not always understand what is happening on the TV, or even anywhere else in Jordan, but the process of slowly recognizing more words and gradually becoming more invested in what is happening is definitely worth the cost of admission.

Circles, Cigarettes, and Coffee

It's time to talk about everybody's favorite geometric shape. The planar figure that packs a punch, the genius behind the wheel, the locus of points equidistant from the center; that's right ladies and gents, we're talking about circles. Circles are pretty incredible, despite the fact that they take the apple out of pi. This shape wasn't only used by Europeans to create wonderful things like Stonehenge, (fun fact: the stones at Stonehenge weigh around four tons, the ones at the Great Pyramids of Giza weigh between 25-80 tons) they were also used to create roundabouts in Amman. On my way out of the airport my first day here, one of the CIEE staff members explained that there are eight roundabouts that run through Amman. These circles are important landmarks used to describe where you are in the city. He also said these circles had a lot of traffic, and that we were closing in on our first experience with traffic in Amman. This didn't seem like an intimidating statement, but he said it with a gleam in his eyes that indicated he spends too many hours a day receiving requests, both reasonable and absurd, from American students.

There is a loose understanding of traffic laws in Amman. You can find Jordanians making their own lanes, jay walking, going the wrong way on one way streets, and you can almost always hear honking. The best way I can describe driving is through the use of the word inshallah. In an approximate English understanding of the word, inshallah means “if God wills it”. Most of the time traffic seems to follow this simple rule: let's see if we can do this crazy thing and make it out alive, inshallah. During orientation we were told our biggest threat in Jordan is a Jordanian behind the wheel, and so far nothing has indicated that this statement is a lie. Even though this system is foreign to my notion of traffic, there's a special kind of beauty to it. I've been in multiple taxis where you'll spend one second cutting people off and weaving through traffic like a native New Yorker through a group of tourists, and the next second the driver will politely stop to allow another car to pull in front of them. Even though there seems to be more fluidity in the understanding of what a lane is and what's appropriate to do while driving, there is some sort of understanding between Jordanians that allow them to pull out inches away from each other into traffic without ever batting an eye. This is a constant reminders that I'm just settling into a new culture that I can't completely understand yet, but it's exciting to think that I may be able to learn a piece of it, even though that piece will most definitely not be about driving.

The driving habits here are a constant reminder to me that I don't want to meet the same fate as James Dean, but the other reminder of this iconic actor is the cigarette. I've yet to see somebody pull off smoking in the same smooth manner of James Dean, but there are plenty of cigarettes going around here. During orientation we were told that the official numbers are that around 60% of Jordanians smoke, but our presenter told us he believes it's closer to 90%. The other day I was in a taxi that had the universal no smoking sign posted on the windshield; halfway through the ride the cab driver offered me a cigarette. There really isn't a concept of a non-smoking area from what I can tell. You can smoke inside, outside, upside-down, rightside-up, and you can light up a Camel if you're a 10 year old riding a camel. I personally don't smoke, but I also don't really mind when other people smoke. It's sort of fun to see man-made smoke clouds when you walk into a room. Despite the fun side of it, part of me does miss the fresh air of Western PA. The other day I was talking to a Jordanian who had spent two months in America, specifically in San Francisco. He said he'd like to go back because he enjoyed the fresh air. I thought I was more likely to meet the king of Jordan than hear somebody call the air in San Francisco fresh. For a while I thought this person was crazy, but as my time here goes on, I'm slowly starting to see where this person was coming from.



One of the places where you can walk into a cloud of smoke is a Cafe. While I am not addicted to cigarettes, I do seem to have developed a slight addiction to coffee since being here. Cafes are really nice here, which makes sense because coffee houses originated in the Ottoman Empire. One thing that has changed since the time of the Ottoman empire is now coffee houses are one of the best spots to get WiFi. The sixth cafe in the world that offered WiFi is actually located in Amman, which, I'm not going to lie, is a huge draw for a millennial college student who constantly feels the urge to stay connected with family and friends back home. The Cafe isn't the only place where I'm offered the elixir of life. When I'm at home I often get Turkish coffee, which is wonderful coffee that comes in a tiny cup with a huge impact. This deceptive cup of coffee is enough to make my heart flutter like a hummingbird, and because the Turks know what they're doing with coffee, it tastes delicious. There is a lot that can be talked about with coffee, as one of my classes back at SU spent a couple months on just that topic alone, but for now I'm going to leave you with the tantalizing thought of the juice that gives us a jolt, and how great it is that I'm halfway around the world experiencing a cup that is better than any I had while I was back in the states.