First day of school, at least for all the local students of UJ. My hope was to come home from Lebanon and see that all the female students would tear off their headscarf in a grand riot of “enough is enough” and wear miniskirts, be loud and boisterous and receive no unwanted attention from males because the stigma of Ramadan wore off.
Wrong.
Instead of seeing the occasional student on campus, potentially with a headscarf or veil, long skirts and shirts, there are 30,000 such beings around me. There are benefits of course. It is much easier to just be one of the crowd, small with no one caring about you. On the other hand, there are detriments. You are one of the crowd, small with no one caring about you.
It is an interesting change of events, (albeit it has been but one day) whereas my threat emotionally was once men glaring and smirking on campus, it is now women whispering, pointing and giggling. I keep thinking there is something on my face and then I remember, oh yeah, I’m white.
I wore a skirt today, it comes below my knees by maybe an inch or two and is high waisted. I always think I look professional in this skirt. It is black, elegant, pencil-shaped. I wore it with a nice white shirt tucked in and a shawl over top. The cab drivers seemed to get a big kick out of my New York look today. “Amrikia, eh, de New York?” “La, (no), 3la toul! (drive on)!”
I hate it when I speak “Arabic” ( I use the term loosely because I realize how I must sound) and people respond to me in English. I’m making an effort here people, come now. Luckily, I’ve come across more and more people who “No speak englisi” so that makes life easier for me when I’m in a butchering mood.
Classes are different now after Ramadan (mainly longer). My 5-time weekly Arabic class that was once an hour or so is now three. Three hours of anything is a long time...especially a language. Rote memorization is annoying as all hell, but unfortunately it’s something I am good at. I feel myself picking a lot of colloquialisms and standard phrases up, and quickly. I secretly hope to be able to continue Arabic in South Africa next spring (did I tell you that was my next stop after this semester in Jordan?) If I had to memorize facts this way for the rest of my academic career, I would become a nanny. Yesterday.
I stopped to get a bowl of hummus (judge me) and a fattouch (salad of sorts) for lunch on my way to the gym. Can we talk a little bit about how excited I get when I have “real” food to eat? It’s like I just made my first potholder in day camp. Mom, look what I did! But stuffing hummus and fattouch in a gym locker for an hour, waiting 20 minutes in the midday sun for a cab, taking the cab and coming home to eat said feast was a letdown. I have hummusy radishes in front of me as I write this blog to you and a killer headache from trying to tame cab drivers and running my brains out on the treadmill.
At first I thought I was cool with my little gym routine. I’m so grown up going to the gym, bringing my clothes and soap to school (never forgetting underwear) to go workout and shower at my little gym.
Wrong again.
Hassle is an understatement. Most everything that is easy in the U.S. is such a production here. Showering is annoying because if you forget your waterproof flipflips you will most certainly get gangrene and die. If you don’t bring a hairbrush you will walk out of the gym with a rat’s nest on your head, if you don’t properly close the shampoo it spills on your homework, you must walk a substantial distance from the gate of the gym to the gym proper (a workout on its own!) and to get home you can’t just hop a subway or your vehicle, no. You must wait, sopping wet hair and wet fattouch and all to wait again on a highway street corner for a cab that is
1) That IS
2) That is free
3) That is not skeevy.
Bonne chance. You must also pay cab driver and pray he doesn’t choose some route you don’t know because he is probably ripping you off. Waiting is a learned skill, I have discovered. Not my forte yet.
I just put a load of wash in and I did it now because by dinner time in six hours it should be ready to hang outside to dry.
My roommate just went to Carrefour to follow my lead from yesterday for her groceries which was an event consuming the better part of three hours from cab rides to maneuvering the mall to haggling for spices to checking out with a dysfunctional credit card to catch a cab that is going to rip you off to take you down a back road you don’t know to make five trips up three flights of stairs with 70 bags of groceries that you will have to do all over again in a week.
Ah romance!
I sense a trend on day 28…that is of being wrong. I’m a stubborn person by nature (genetic trait) but it has been surprisingly easy for me to laugh at myself for thinking life without someone watching over me would be easy. I suppose I never really thought “easy”, but when you are thinking about “what ifs” in life the last thing you think about is how radishes will leak onto your newly printed homework , or the potential of a washing machine so outdated that it leaks onto and rusts the floor of your oven. You certainly never think of gangrene feet. At least I never did.
What I enjoy most about the mess that is my current reality is that with my Excedrin bottles on hand and friends who don’t take themselves seriously I am learning my different thresholds for nuisances and my potential for independence. In the words of the great Jay-Z, I am able to go and brush my shoulders off. I can laugh at myself a little for thinking how worldly and wonderful I thought I was. I like to see how far I can push myself before I have to pack it up and head home, I’m always up for a little challenge, even if that involves pushing down the hygiene standards to utterly unacceptable levels. I am here!
