2nd day in amman

Ok so day 2 in Amman. Today we were given a tour of the city and saw a few of the sights like the citadel and downtown Amman, and we even visited this huge mall. The mall wasn’t really exciting, it was just huge and western and the prices were the same as what we have back home. We had lunch at some place. I had some boiled wheat dish which was flavoured with all these spices and some spinach bread thing. I can’t remember the name of the wheat dish but it was really yummy! Manal, another SA girl helped us order, (she’s one of the fluent speakers) and managed to accidentally catch the attention of one of the servers. He came over with three pieces of baklawa for us! And then asked Manal if she would like to visit him in Egypt! Haha

Then we did some more touring on the bus and headed back to uni and had a quick meeting with Hakeem to sort accommodation out and stuff. Then myself and two of my flatmates Anisa and Pip found an internet cafe and I got to talk to James on skype which was so good, and sooooooo cheap. 500 fils!!! (1 dollar AUS) for 1/2 hr. Compared to $1 per minute that it would cost on the phone!! And I got to upload some photos. I managed to leave my USB in the computer and didn’t realise til I was half way down the street, but luckily it was still there when I raced back to get it!

On the way back to our apartment we went shopping or dome basics like rice, milk, bread, jam, water, salt, sugar, tea, oil etc. Then after we got home we all went back out with the rest of our group and looked for a place to eat. We all really wanted falafels, and you would think being in Jordan and all that you wouldn’t have to look very far to find a falafel and kebab place! Think again! We searched for ages, and found this place which looked really cool and we went in and turns out it wasn’t somewhere where you eat, but it was a shisha bar. (Shishas are a flavoured tabacco water pipe). Before we could leave the waiters started shifting tables and chairs for all of us, so we felt bad if we left, so we all sat down and smoked shishas and drank tea for an hour. But we were sooooo hungry!!! And then we finally found a falafel place!!! The waiters there were great and helped us speak arabic, and didn’t laugh at us....too much. Everyone here thinks we are hilarious! And they all want to speak English to us! And we want to speak arabic to them! But our efforts paid off because as we were eating our dinner, they kept bringing us more free falafels!

Unfortunately last night we had two not so nice incidents. The first was when a group girls from another apartment went shopping and got called whores by some local girls. And then on the way home from dinner, two girls from our group were a little bit ahead of us. They got followed by some creep who grabbed one of the girl’s behind. So that was pretty awful. Today we ALL wore headscarves and made sure we had a male with us at ALL times! All the Deakin guys have been really great and protective of us girls.