Welcome! Ahlan wa sahlan!

Hello Everyone! Welcome to my blog! So, I will bring you all up to where I am today. I left Chicago airport on August 28th and had a straight flight to Amman, Jordan where I lived for 3 and a half months going to the University of Jordan. I lived with a host family with six kids and another student. They were a fairly conservative Muslim family, but also very western. My oldest host sister, Farah (16 years old) lived for a year in Kentucky and had just gotten back a couple months before we came. She had a hard time with her host family there, but came out of it speaking really good, very American, English. The next oldest was Haroun, who was 15 or 14 years old. They never really gave us a straight answer on how old exactly they were, so I sometimes think that they didn’t even know. He was kind of quiet at the beginning, but got more lively as he got used to us and as we started speaking Arabic to him. Then there was Rahaf, who was 12 and I shared a room with. She was really annoying to me at first so that I wasn’t sure if I would last the semester in the same room, but of course, after a month or so she became my favorite and we got along really well. I guess it just took a while to get on the same page as a 12 year old. Then there was Adam who was about 9 or 10. He was really cute, and very smiley and active, but would cry instantly if he lost a game or someone made fun of him. He would get really frustrated that no one understood how earth shattering and horrible is was that he didn’t win at cards. Then there was Rayan who was about 6. She was also really cute and spoke really good English for being so young, but she lost it very quickly because when I came back to visit after having been gone for a month she didn’t speak as well. It was kind of amazing to see the difference in the kids after only a month. The last was Hoor who was 3 and a terror at the beginning and just as I got really fed up with her after a couple months, she started to be really cute all the time. My host mom ran a kindergarten down the street and had also just started to get her masters at the University in library technology. My host dad wasn’t around very much because of his job in the air force, but he was very nice although he liked to talk politics and religion a lot, which could get tiring. Morgan was the other American girl I lived with and she’s really awesome. We got along really well and it was nice to have someone to talk to about living there and everything else. I took a Standard Arabic class for 3 hours every morning and then had two afternoon classes; Prospects for Democracy in the Middle East (kind of pessimistic), and Arab Women Writers (kind of depressing) but both very good classes. Winter break consisted of me traveling with Morgan to Syria and Beirut, then Mom, Jerry, Grace, Rich and Alyce all came to visit me in Jordan over Christmas. Grace stayed on and we spent New Years Eve in Amman, and then headed to Jerusalem for two days, back to Amman and then to Egypt. We had a really good time, but it went so quickly. Two days at Mt. Siani, two in Luxor, two in Cairo and days in between traveling. After she left, I spent 2 days in Alexandria before taking a very long bus/ferry trip straight back to Amman where I spent a couple days before going to Nablus. Sorry that was so short, but I had written more and it got deleted and it's never as fun to write the same thing again. Also, my first entry about Nablus got deleted, so I'm going to end here for today and I'll have more for you all later! Hope all is well where you are, sending good sweets and tea from the Middle East! Love, Lisa