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.