I sit now in Montage cafe, at the bottom of Rainbow St., right before the steps which lead down to Wasat al-Balad (City Centre), downtowan Amman. A thirty minute walk, this hidden cafe has played host to numerous social and academic endeavours of mine. Here I met Shadi, the soft voiced but endlessly talkative Palestinian waiter who has worked every day for the past four months, nonstop, and without a weekend. Here, at montage, I invited numerous interviewees for my ISP, getting into heated but inherently hushed discussions over the Jordanian illegal arms trade. How many salads and plates of hummus did I go through while pounding away at my first draft ISP, all 63 pages of it.<\/p>\n
But these are superficial. This little cafe was home for me. A home away from my homestay. Walking home from downtown, Montage served as my watering hole along the endless hills of Jabal Amman (Mountains of Amman). I sit here thinking of all the strange characters I befriended in downtown. The Palestinian brother and sister, both doctors, eagerly teaching me about the pulmonary system (for some inexplicable reason). The group of (proudly) shi’ite Iraqis who invited me for foul (a bean-based Arab breakfast) and ranted to me about the differences between shi’ite and sunni Islam, unafraid of the generally disdainful Jordanian perspective toward Muslims of their sect. The Jordanian shopkeepers who eagerly listened to me recount tales of the badiyya, <\/em>with glimmers of nostalgia in their eye.<\/p>\n I sit here thinking about my time in the badiyya, <\/em>how I have never come close to an environment such as this. How I was brutally wrong in my preconceptions of this tribal Jordanian culture. How it differs from my extensive studies on Saudi conservatism.<\/p>\n I sit here thinking about how difficult, yet equally important, it is for me to go home. How I am obligated to return home and spread the beauty of Arab culture and pick apart the ugliness of spreading Islamophobia. Jordan invigorated me. I am eager to share the love that has been so happily shared with me from my Jordanian brothers and sisters.<\/p>\n It was a long semester full of thousands of beautiful, strange, and crazy characters. I am sad to go home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I sit now in Montage cafe, at the bottom of Rainbow St., right before the steps which lead down to Wasat al-Balad (City Centre), downtowan Amman. A thirty minute walk, this hidden cafe has played host to numerous social and academic endeavours of mine. Here I met Shadi, the soft voiced but endlessly talkative Palestinian waiter…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":293,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/293"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19728,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3853\/revisions\/19728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}