Journey to Jordan

Well, the Jordan study abroad has finished, I’m more or less adjusted to life in the States again, and another semester is about to start in a couple of days. I’m already starting to get caught up in a flurry of activity that probably won’t stop until December, and my adventures in Jordan are definitely over. I think it’s just about time to close the book on this chapter of my life, which means that this blog has come to an end.

I don’t know how many conclusions I can draw from the study abroad at this point. I don’t really have a context of before and after that I can put it in at this point, so it would probably be superficial for me to write an epilogue to draw all the loose ends together.

I can, however, say a couple of things.

I love the Arab culture and people much more now than I did before I left. I feel that I’ve grown and matured tremendously from the study abroad experience. I don’t know where my Arabic studies will ultimately take me, but I think I can see the next few steps a little bit clearer.

And finally, I feel that maybe, just maybe, I’m at the cusp of making the transition from a sophomore level of understanding (where you don’t know anything and you know that you don’t know anything) and a junior level of understanding (where you know something but you don’t know that you know something). It’s impossible to tell, and I still feel so ignorant of Middle East politics, history, peoples, and language, but I feel in some nebulous way that I’ve made progress.

Time will tell what all of this actually means.

Thus endeth Journey to Jordan. I do write several other blogs, though. If you want to keep reading about my thoughts and experiences, here they are:

A Thousand and One Parsecs: This is a journal of my life and experiences as an aspiring writer. Here I write about the books I’m writing, my story ideas, reviews of the books I read, and life experiences as they relate to my dreams and aspirations as a writer. And other random thoughts, ramblings, and occasional links to cooler stuff.

Onelowerlight’s Daily Photo Safari: My daily photoblog, where I post a new image every day from photos of the places I go and the things I see in everyday life. Right now, the photoblog is down, but I plan to bring it back before too long. This is my most active and longest running blog, though it’s more about the photography and less about my own personal thoughts and experiences.

عرب وغرب: أين الاختلاف؟ This is my Arabic language journal, or at least it’s supposed to be. I haven’t written in it in a while. If you go there now, you will see all the gloriously embarrassing mistakes I made when I didn’t know Arabic very well (it’s written almost entirely in Arabic). I’m going to develop it quite a bit in the next few months, though I’m not sure what I’ll do with it exactly. It will mostly be in Arabic, but I’ll probably write in English about my language learning experiences. So if you want to keep up with the Arabic side of my life, that’s probably the best place to go…after I fix it up a little bit.

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading about my thoughts and experiences in the Middle East!  I hope you enjoyed it.  If anybody found anything insightful, thought provoking, or meaningful among the many long, rambling posts that I wrote on this blog, then I’ve succeeded.

If you find something meaningful here, I hope you take the time to visit my other blogs.  I really love blogging: it is a great way to share your thoughts and experiences with other people, and to get wonderfully diverse perspectives from people across the world.  Even though this blog is finished, you can still keep up with me through these other blogs.  I hope you find something meaningful there as well.

That’s what I said when Mike Leben sat on one of the old chairs in the capitol house, broke it, and said it was time to throw it out. Man, I remember sitting in that chair on the porch of the capitol house, writing my novel on my laptop, chatting with my old friends. Of course, my comment was just a joke. But speaking of practically everything else in my life, it’s fairly true.

I’ve been back in Provo this past week, getting settled in for the start of the next semester. It’s been a trippy experience. In some ways, things are completely different. All my old friends from the capitol house (where I used to hang out all the time) are living in other places, all the people I knew from the Arabic house are gone as well.

But the strangest thing is how little everything has changed.

It’s comforting in some ways to be back in such a familiar place. After two and a half years, I feel like I know Provo really well, and BYU is practically my home in some ways. I love the mountains, the people, the college atmosphere, and the independence.

At the same time, this is my sixth semester at BYU, and I’m starting to feel the college fatigue that precedes senioritis (if it weren’t for senioritis, I doubt I’d ever graduate ). But it’s not merely a question of “what am I still doing here in college?” I’m not that anxious to get out of school–though that may change midway through this semester.  I’m not super thrilled to start classes.

It goes deeper than that, though.  I’ve changed a lot since the Jordan study abroad.  The travel experience did a lot to humble me and show me what I need to change in my personal life. I don’t want to just fall back into my same old routine, get stuck in the same comfort zone, or watch my life pass by on like scenery from a car window. I want this semester to be the start of something different.

At the same time, there is more to it.  Walking around on campus, everything felt so familiar that it was…unfamiliar.  If that makes any sense.  On the study abroad, I confronted the strange and unfamiliar on a daily basis.  It became the norm.  I fell into something of a routine, but there was always something different, confusing, and slightly unnerving where-ever I went.  I guess that after a while, I not only got used to it, I got comfortable with it as well.  At least to the point where it feels unnerving not to be in an unfamiliar place.

Despite all the familiarity, I can tell that I’m not just going to slip back into who I was before the study abroad experience.  I might fall back into some old habits if I don’t watch out, but my priorities and outlook on life have changed significantly.  I feel like I’m more aware of things, including myself and how I come across to others.  I’m a lot more laid back and take things at a slower pace.  I enjoy being with people and listening to them more than I used to.  I get more rejuvenation from spiritual activities such as prayer and scripture study.

Outwardly, too, things have changed.  As I was unpacking this week, meeting my roommates, and setting things up the way I like it, I saw just how much of an influence the study abroad has had on me.  I’ve been putting up posters of Bedouins, the Aish Bedunha boycott stuff, Jerusalem, and other pictures.  I’ve been talking with everyone in Arabic, and just talking with them I can tell that I’ve changed a lot.  The RF this year (Basseem) is a friend of mine, and we get along just swimmingly talking all about Jordan, Palestine, the Arab world, Arab culture, etc.  I’m definitely going to be bringing a small piece of Jordan with me to the Arabic house this year, and that’s going to be fun.

As the days go by, I can feel things stabilizing.  I hope I’m not falling back into old habits that I don’t want.  This weekend, I’m going to sit down and figure out who I want to be and what I want to be doing with myself this semester.

But honestly, I’m not too worried.  I’m actually quite excited.  If this is the end of one thing, it’s the start of something else.  As I was talking with Dave Kerman the other day, he remarked “this is going to be a really good year–I can tell.” And guess what?  So can I.  This is going to be a really good year. I can tell.

Well, I made it!  We left Saturday morning (my brother in law and I) and arrived early early Tuesday morning.  It was a long, long drive, but it was also really exciting and fun.  After living in the Middle East for four months, it was a wonderful experience to return to this beautiful country and see it up close by driving almost all the way across it.

I love roadtrips.  I think that’s something that makes me really American.  Out here in the USA, we’re always on the move.  We have friends and family from all over the country, and many of us move from one state to another several times in our lives.  Roads, highways, and travel are a part of our national mythology, from the pioneer trails to route 66.  I’m no exception to any of this–I totally love it.  Whenever I get the urge to just hop in a car and go somewhere, I feel in some small way like it’s my American heritage calling to me.

We started Saturday by loading up Danny’s truck, hooking up the Uhaul trailer, loading it up with all the furniture, luggage, boxes, and miscellaneous junk that we were taking out to Utah, and headed out!

My father was REALLY generous.  A lot more than he needed to be.  He paid for the trailer, gave us nearly $500 for gas, and bought enough food to nearly last us the entire way.  That was pretty awesome.

That first day, we drove through Western Massachusetts, New York, the tip of Pennsylvania up near lake Eerie, and halfway through Ohio.  It was a BEAUTIFUL drive.  Holy cow, I didn’t realize that American farms could be so beautiful.  There were so many in New York and Pennsylvania, big red barns and gray metal silos next to huge fields of corn, with green rolling hills and forests in the background.  It was really pretty.

Cincinnati was really confusing, but fortunately Danny had a GPS device (a Magellen–we called her “maggie”) that helped us navigate through the spaghetti bowl of highways out there.  In fact, Maggie was really useful the whole trip–she led us to campsites and gas stations, and at the very end led us through Heber and Provo Canyon and helped us shave off quite a bit of time.

We camped out at a random campground out in Ohio, then went to church at the local ward there.  It was really interesting to go to church in an actual chapel with pews.  The ceiling was so high, and the room was so big!  Definitely not what I’m used to, after four months of the Amman branch and three years of student wards.

The dynamic in the church was really interesting, too.  It felt more rural–the people were a lot different than the people in the Amman branch, where nearly all the Americans are world travelers and government workers.  Still, it was the same church, the same gospel, the same organization and everything else.  It really opened my eyes to the fact that even in different, far away places, among people that I hardly know, it’s still the same church.  Kind of interesting.

We drove through Toledo, Indiana, passed just south of Chicago, and made it midway through Iowa before the end of the night.  Flat country, LOTS of farms.  It was still really green, but there weren’t as many forests.  Mostly just farms.  Indiana was kind of more of the same, but it got really flat in Illinois and we started seeing cornfields that stretched all the way to the horizon.  Crazy.

Let me just say something here about tolls.  They suck.  When we passed from New York to Pennsylvania, we had to pay a hefty $35.  $35!!!  It would have been a lot cheaper, but we were pulling a trailer.  Things didn’t get much better until Illinois.  $2 in Pennsylvania, about $10 in Ohio, and $16 in Indiana.  By that time, we asked the lady at the toll booth in Indiana if things were much worse in Illinois, and she said “oh yeah, Illinois tolls are REALLY high.” We passed the border dreading what we would find, but after paying $1.70 to get on the road, we were able to pass through the state without paying anything else.  And after we crossed the Mississippi into the Western US, there were no more tolls at all.  There also weren’t any giant, luxurious rest stops with massive convenience stores, arcades, and fast food restaurants, but I was ok with that.

After crossing the Mississippi–the quintessential north-south line that cuts America in half, culturally and historically as well as geographically–we passed through Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming, three states that I’ve never really seen.  They were strikingly different from the other states we passed through in the East.  Trees gave way to plains, cornfields gave way to cattle, cities and towns gave way to open stretches of highway populated only with farmers and truckers, and accents became thicker and much more rural.  It was really interesting.  America is such a fascinating place.

We camped in Iowa at a campground on the side of the highway (literally), then took off early in the morning.  By this time, we were both really excited just to get to our final destination, so we decided that if we weren’t too tired by the end of the day, we’d just push on for Utah without stopping until we got there.  I was ok with that.  Most of the sites I wanted to see were pretty far off of the highway (Nauvoo, for example is several hours south of I-80–it would have taken a whole day just to go there), and I really did want to get to Utah at this point.  And really, I found the drive itself interesting enough that I didn’t really feel compelled to stop at the major historical sites.  They would be cool to visit, but maybe some other time.  After all, whenever you go to a really cool place, it’s always a good idea to leave at least a couple of things undone so you have an excuse to come back.

Nebraska is HUGE.  It took FOREVER to get through that state!  But Wyoming was really beautiful, especially in the light of the setting sun.  We passed just south of an enormous thunderstorm, and that was incredibly beautiful.  I love storms, especially the huge ones that tower over the plains with their black, moody, ominous clouds that are so brilliantly white at their peaks.  The flat plains and endless cornfields gradually gave way to rolling cattle lands, and I started to feel like we had truly entered an empty place.  The cloudless blue skies gave way to marvelous and beautiful skyscapes, as wonderful as any of the scenery that we had passed through earlier.  As we crossed into Wyoming, we started to see mountains on the horizon, and hills right in front of us, and I started to feel like we’d truly passed into the West.

Highway exits and gas stations started to become scarce.  We gassed up at this old station deep in Wyoming that looked like it had been built in 40s and hadn’t been renovated since.  It was right next to some amazingly beautiful mountains overlooking the endless emptiness of the rolling cattle lands out there.  Awesome.

We passed through the rest of Wyoming in the night–lots of confusing and unnerving road construction, with twists and turns as we made our way through the few mountains that lie on I-80 between Wyoming and Utah.  For the most part, I-80 is flat, even out into the rockies, which is one of the reasons why we chose it.  Fewer treacherous mountain cliffs and passes, but more truckers.  You trade the one for the other, but it was better for us since we had a trailer ourselves, and didn’t want to climb (or descend) any steep slopes.  When you’re going down a hill, hit 75 mph, and the trailer on your back starts to wobble, it can be kind of scary.  Braking only makes the wobbling worse, so all you can really do is downshift or ride the hill out.  Despite the difficulties, we pressed on.

By the time we got to Utah, I was a zombie.  I drove until I was too exhausted to be able to drive safely, and Danny stayed awake by singing along to Les Miserables and listening to the second half of Harry Potter 5 on CD.  Neither one of these were conducive to sleeping, so instead I zombified.  When we pulled into Provo and drove down University Avenue towards Springville (where we spent the night at Danny’s grandparents’ house), I was happy to finally be in Provo but so tired that the news had little effect.  We pulled up to the McQueens’ beautiful house, I grabbed my clothes, took a room in the basement, and passed out.

So that was our roadtrip.  These last couple of days, I’ve mostly been figuring things out–housing, classes, car, clothes, stuff in storage, etc.  My mother and sisters are all out here, and it’s been really cool to see them!  I gave them all the gifts that I brought for them from the Middle East, and they really enjoyed them.  That was really great.

I love America.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best country in the world, and I really truly believe that.  It’s my country.  I love learning about its history, its culture, and after spending the last four months abroad, I’m more enthusiastic than ever to be back and see it again.  There is such a HUGE difference between East and West, between New England and the Midwest, and the Midwest and the Rockies.  I could just feel it in a hundred different subtle ways as we passed through.  Iowa and Nebraska aren’t just nowhere states–they have their own distinct feel to them, things that set them apart from the other places.  The people, too, are so different.

Seeing all these differences in America made me wonder if Jordan is much the same way.  To my eyes, as a foreigner, most of the places seemed very similar.  Amman was definitely its own place, and the landscape in Irbid was a lot different from the landscape in Kerak and Mafraq, but other than the city-village-Bedouin divisions that were fairly obvious, I didn’t really pick up on many other differences in the people.  A corner store in Amman is prettymuch the same as a corner store anywhere else in the country, and the houses and villages everywhere look prettymuch the same.  At least, to my eyes they did.  I’m sure there are differences, but they were so subtle, and my eyes and ears were so untrained, that I didn’t pick up on them.  Yet, in my own country, I can pick up on all the subtle differences between regions.  What if I knew Jordan well enough that I could do the same there?  I have to come back someday.

As far as culture shock goes, it was more exhilarating than exhausting or unnerving.  The only two things that I still find truly shocking are the taboos against disposing of toilet paper in waste baskets and how incredibly TINY American coinage is.  When I got back to BYU, though, I did get another shock that was kind of funny.  At the University of Jordan, there are a lot of beautiful girls, but they almost all wear the hijab.  At BYU, there are even more beautiful girls–really, some of the most amazingly drop dead gorgeous girls you will ever see in your life–and NONE of them wear the hijab.  All that beauty, totally uncovered…it was something of a shock to me.  For the first five minutes at least.  And then I started to get used to it (and realized that I still don’t like typical Utah hairstyles–in fact I like them less now).

I’m just going to write this really quick before I head out.  My brother in law is outside, fixing his headlight, and once that’s done we’re going to pack up and HEAD OUT!  I am excited!

The plan is to drive from here (Massachusetts) to Provo, Utah, arriving sometime Tuesday or Wednesday.  We don’t have a really set itinerary.  We may stop places along the way, we might not.

I’m looking forward to it.  I LOVE road trips.  I used to drive across the country all the time growing up, going to visit family in far away places like Texas and Utah.  I’ve wanted to go on a long drive for some time.

I know that the Jordan study abroad is technically over, but I thought I’d keep up this blog just to record some of my thoughts as I adjust back to life in the states.  I still think of Jordan a lot.  Just now I realized that if I make the “be quiet” sign while driving, people will think I’m flipping them off. Last night, while walking around at the Big Y supermarket, I realized that the grocery store was maybe three times bigger than the Safeway in Shmeysane (I can never transliterate that word).  Last night, as I cooked up some beans for a burrito, I realized that Jordanians would probably use a spoon instead of a fork.  Little stuff like that.

I do feel like I’m on the ground running again, though.  I’m not apathetic or disoriented anymore.  Life is great and I’m excited to be home, to be driving across this awesome country that is the United States, and to be back in Utah.

I won’t be blogging on the trip (since I won’t have an internet connection, probably), but I may or may not write a few posts longhand and put them up later.  I don’t know, but we’ll see.

Gotta go.  See y’all around!

I really love blogging, and my longest running blog has been my photoblog, Onelowerlight’s Daily Photo Safari.  I started it nearly a year and a half ago, on January 12th 2007 (that was back when I was still using Blogger), and since then I’ve been updating it daily with new photos.  I think that in all of that time, I’ve only missed three days.  While I didn’t always have the internet access in the Middle East to update it daily, I did faithfully add at least one new photo for each day of the study abroad trip.

However, I’ve been having some serious computer issues recently, and as a result I’ve been forced to temporarily suspend my photoblog.  My Dell laptop, which has faithfully served me for nearly three years, is getting old.  While I was studying abroad, the power contacts in the back started to wear down.  As a result, whenever I plugged it into a power outlet, it would get real finnicky and sometimes wouldn’t connect.

Things got really bad once I got home, to the point where I can’t hardly charge the batteries.  As a result, I’ve been forced to use other computers.  Trouble is, all my photo editing software and archives are on my laptop.  So…while I can write for this blog (and my writing blog) on public computers, I can’t update my photoblog.

Honestly, this is not a small blow to me.  One of the reasons I started my photoblog was to prove to myself that I could start a project and be consistent with it.  I was really proud of the fact that I’d been updating it daily for so long.  And, after all this time, it’s really grown on me.  Updating the photoblog is something that I do almost automatically.  To not have it anymore is…a little unsettling.

However, I AM really happy that I was able to keep it updated consistently throughout the study abroad trip.  I have a photo up there for literally every day we were in the Middle East (sometimes four or five per day).  If it had to go down at any point, now would be the perfect time.

So…yeah, everything is up in the air.  I want to resume the photoblog once I get settled out in Utah, but I won’t know what I’m doing until the computer situation is resolved.  In the meantime, I’ll have to use public computers and flash drives (and I think my second flash drive is on the verge of crashing…scary).  In a lot of ways, I feel like I did in the Ambassador hotel back in May–no routine, everything up in the air, not sure where I’m going or what I’m doing.  Things don’t really begin until I’m back out in Utah.

So, if you’re wondering why the Daily Photo Safari is down, that’s why.