3 nights in Amman

Well I made it to Jordan, and after a couple days my bags decided to join me. I stayed with Tarek, a guy I met on couchsurfing, for the first three nights and yesterday I moved into a nice little apartment closer to my language school with Ryan, another American. I've got a little time before I head off to class for the next 4 hours and I figured I would put up a quick update on here.

Amman has been great so far. My Arabic is enough to get around with limited English (sometimes), and I have made a couple friends in the city through couchsurfing. I'm taking Arabic classes 4 hours a day, and then should be doing homework, but usually end up going out afterward. I'm still figuring out the general schedule here. Back home I'm used to having dinner around 6 and then starting up again around 8 for the evening. Here, it seems that a lot of people go out around 6 and then get dinner when they get back.

So far I have mostly been in the western part of Amman, near the university. This is the rich part of the city: the houses are pretty nice, the streets are decently clean, there are western sytle fast food places everywhere, and a lot of people are pretty well educated. However, in east Amman the conditions are a bit worse, that's where the refugee camps are and other lower class neighborhoods. I'm going on Sunday to talk to an organization called Ruwwad that I might be working with for the rest of the summer, volunteering with them in the camps. Still a lot of details to work out, but hopefully that will work out. I also might work some with my friend Haya who has a program teaching English in a refugee camp, and is currently in the 30 finalists for a contest sponsored by the Queen for social ventures in Jordan.

That's it for now. I'll try to get some pictures up now that I have my camera. I have internet access in my apartment, but it's really slow, so uploading pictures may take forever. I hope everyone is doing well wherever they are this summer. Keep me updated, I'm on facebook daily. I'll try to get some more meaty posts up once I have some things to think about (wait until the speech tomorrow maybe).

سلام (Peace),
ذانيل (Daniel)