first day

Well it is 8:25 pm Sunday night here in Amman. Itʼs about 5:00am in the morning back inaustralia. I canʼt believe Iʼm on the other side of the world!!!!! Anyways, I donʼt think Iʼll get Internet access til Wednesday, so Iʼm writing this tonight to post then. So Saturday, after bawling my eyes out at the adelaide airport, Molly and I began our 31 hour journey to Amman, Jordan. Once we got to melbourne we had to entertain ourselves for a few hours til we boarded our flight to singapore. On the flight I watched sisterhood of the travelling pants no. 2. It was crap, donʼt bother with it. Did not stay true to the books at all!!! I got about 6 hours sleep all up from melbourne to amman. We experienced pretty rough turbulence over Mumbai( ironic hey) and one kid hadnʼt been strapped in so he hit the roof!!!! Pretty scary.

Got to Dubai at 5 in the morning dubai time, which was 12pm Aussie time. That airport
was pretty cool. Itʼs MASSIVE though! And so many cool things to buy on the way home...Turns out our dollar works to our advantage for once. After dubai we boarded again for a3 hr flight to Amman.

The Queen Alia International Airport isnʼt anywhere near as glamorous as Dubai or
Singapore... Bits and pieces everywhere. The funniest thing happened to a deakin girl
called Annie...she was standing next to a mum whose toddler pulled her headscarf off, the mum, without asking, hands the baby over to annie to hold whilst she fixed her headscarf. It was pretty funny. We got greeted by a Professor from UoJ whose name I canʼt remember and we hauled all our luggage into the bus waiting for us smack bang in the middle of the pick up zone at the airport. So as were getting our luggage in we have jordanian drivers honking and driving crazily around us.

The apartment is amazing. Very clean. Although we arrived at around 130ish- 2ish, and
everyone else got into their apartments, but we were told that we had to wait half and hour becoz our apartment was being cleaned. So we waited in another apartment with some other deakin girlʼs and we waited, and we waited, and about 4 hours later our apartment was FINALLY ready. Arab time. :) but it wasnʼt too bad, I got to know a few of the Deakin girlʼs really well, and we had cold showers (the hot water hadnʼt been turned on and we didnʼt know how to turn it on until we ALL had freezing cold showers. :) So each apartment has a massive kitchen, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room and we get a balcony.

So things about Amman so far. We stick out like sore thumbs! EVERYONE knows we are
foreign. But itʼs funny coz we were walking down the street tonight and a car drove past yelling ʻWelcome to Jordanʼ. We also had local Jordanians stopping and asking us how to get directions to the Jordan University??? Go figure. They just wanted to talk to us. Once we finally got settled in our apartments, we met up at 6pm to go and find some dinner together. I was STARVING coz the last time I had eaten was breakfast on the plane. So we went to some Middle eastern fast food place and I got a chicken schawarma, pepsi and fries for $4 AUS. It was alright, not exactly nutritious but I was starving.

Crossing the road in Amman is INSANE!!!! Driving in Jordan is insane. Everyone uses
their horn!! Any person, foreigner or local, gets beeped at. Slow people get beeped at. If they are impatient, even when the light is red, they beep!!!!
Haha just remembered when we arrived at the Jordanian airport, a security guard was
bewildered at mollyʼs mouth piercing and pulls us aside and ponts at her face going
“whatʼs that???” and molly goes “ummm a piercing” and he just looked so confused.
Yeah so I have a few photos already. Iʼll upload them soon too!

Love you all
Carly