Project GO Jordan 2017

1) Ramadan hours for restaurants get strange. Our local Avocado, which sells burgers and various kinds of juices and shakes, is open at first from 3PM-8PM. Iftar is usually around 7:45PM, so Avocado closes shortly after Iftar. It then closes for three hours, until it opens again from 11PM to 2AM, presumably after the employees eat Iftar and pray Taraweeh. Fortunately, most businesses on their storefronts have signs that explain their Ramadan hours. 2) We have a cafe right across the street called Al Shareef Cafe. Every other night, after around 10 or 11PM, we can hear occasional cheers from the men in the cafe from a soccer game. Even across our apartment, we can hear the cheers as if we were in the cafe. 3) There have been lots of fireworks set off since Ramadan started not too far from our apartments. Almost every night we hear fireworks going off. The fireworks are the small kind meant for private use on the streets, the kind that they sell in the United States coming up to J

I've never been to a Jordanian church before. So today I visited a Catholic church in Amman for Mass with other members of the Project GO program. The church we visited was كنيسة الفرير (Church of the Brother/frère? Something like that), a Catholic Church in the middle of Amman. This church was a short walk from Firas Circle (دوار فيراس) which seems to be a commercial area with plenty of shops, both cheap and bougie. Mass was actually quite similar to those that I've attended in America. Since all Catholic churches abide by the regulations and traditions of the Catholic Church, it's not entirely surprising. The priest gave the service in English and spoke with an American accent. The attendees largely looked of foreign origin, either American/British/Western European or Southeast Asian. The church items were in Arabic, including the depiction of the Passion. In a sense it felt like a bubble of English in the Arabic-speaking country outside. The sculpture and artwork visua

Today was our excursion to see the ruins of Jerash and Ajloun. We first arrived at Jerash, an ancient city built by the Greeks and later rebuilt by the Romans. It remains one of the better preserved Roman cities, especially in the region. As a result, the ruins of Jerash are pretty extensive and feature many of the key features of ancient Roman cities, such as the Amphitheater, Nymphonium, baths, hippodrome, etc. As a result, our tour around Jerash was quite a hike. Throughout the Roman city, we could still see remains of the Greek presence before the Romans. For example, certain columns in the city center were built in a Greek style. Lunch was at the Green Valley (الوادي الأخضر) a restaurant in the nearby area in the modern town of Jerash. Jerash the ruins was a large city, part of the Roman Decapolis, with about 25,000 residents. However, from any point in the ruins we could see the expanse of the modern town of Jerash, that stretched on far greater than the ruins. We then ar

We tried Vimto for the first time today. If you haven't spent Ramadan in an Arab country, Vimto is a British soft drink that became popular in Ramadan as a drink to enjoy at Iftar (breaking of the fast after sunset). I've been informed that Vimto somehow became synonymous with Ramadan, and is as far as I can tell, only available during Ramadan. It's a dark reddish/pinkish drink that's supposed to taste like a cocktail of berries with some spices. Why Vimto became synonymous with Ramadan is beyond me, so I did some reading. Apparently, the British gave a Saudi company the rights to produce and distribute Vimto. Because it was a very sugary beverage, it became popular during Ramadan to restore some energy after the fast. In fact, the Saudi Vimto apparently has more sugar than the British version. With the magic of modern marketing, Vimto spread from Saudi Arabia to throughout the Arab World as a Ramadan drink. When it's all said and done, it seems odd that a British

Today was our excursion to see some of the sights of Northern Jordan. 1) On the way to Irbid, our first site was the Yabbok River/Zarqa River (نهر الزرقاء/nahr az-Zarqaa'). At this site, the Hebrew Patriarch Jacob is said to have wrestled with an angel sent by God in the night until the morning. God then renamed Jacob Isra'el which means "the one who fights with (isra) God ('el)". A boy at the site offered horse rides to some of us. Overall a pretty lowkey sight. 2) Our second "site" was driving through the city of Irbid, which is the second largest city in Jordan after Amman. As we drove in, we passed by the town called Al Husn (الحصن) which rapidly expanded from Palestinian refugees. The city of Irbid, much like Amman, is spread out and sprawls across a huge area which short and squat buildings. Irbid seemed to have a bit more color to it though. It featured less Western-style buildings and commercial centers and more of the type of roadside sh

May 25 is Jordan's Independence Day/yawm al-istiqlal (يوم الاستقلال) so we had the day off. This day is a national holiday for schools/offices/government, but many restaurants and businesses were still open. After a lecture by Dr. Sullivan and Charles on the Syrian Refugee Crisis, we went to the King Hussein Park (حدائق الحسين) to see some Independence Day celebration. As a group, we took the bus to get to King Hussein Park in West Amman. The bus lines run on roughly straight lines on the main arteries of the city. At 35 girsh/ride, they're much cheaper than taxis, but if you don't know the streets of Amman well you could easily get lost. West Amman is definitely the newer and more opulent part of the city, with King Hussein Park almost at the edge of the city. From a distance, the greenery of the park stands out from the endless beige of the rest of Amman. New development like the King Hussein Medical Center are also located in this part of town. The Park itself is