To get you up to date....

So yeah, after being out of Australia for a good 14 months (I was sitting on the runway of the Bangkok airport when K Rudd's election was announced) I have come to the conclusion that I have difficulty keeping in touch with people, and that a lot of people really don't get what the attraction of Jordan is for me, and why on earth I don't just come home (especially in light of my bank balance which is now negative $2000...). So, this is my attempt to rectify this silence and keeps some kind of contact with you, my loved ones...

So to summarise:

Novemer 2007: Travelled to Dubai for four days where I visited the Bahraini family for whom I was once a nanny to their 3 kids. I hung out with the kids, ran on the beach (which is very nice despite the Emiratis' best attempts to fill all surrounding marine areas with dirt shaped as gimmiky island stuff for rich people) and noticed that Dubai is still growing, ridiculously green (despite being one of the dryest areas on the planet) and cracking under its traffic problems. Nothing much had changed really.

So I headed across to Jordan, where I met up with 10 of the students from my Arabic class in Australia, and my teacher who is Jordo-alian, and lived with them in to neighbouring appartment buildings in Jubeihah, a suburb next to the University of Jordan and home to a large population of Saudis. We studied for a couple of months, at one point I took a bus south with Ben and we jumped on a ferry across to Egypt, sat on the beach for a few days, and then with a rush of nostalgia fled back to Amman to celebrate a good Aussie christmas with the rest of the crew. At this point the weather in my stomach kind of exploded, meaning hard core stomach bug killer pills, a dry christmas and thankfully lots of turkey.

Amman was nice, and time was mainly passed smoking argileh (water pipe) in the local Saudi hangout, Midwakh, studying, and attemping to communicate in broken Arabic with the natives. After 2 months, the Arabic was finally picking up, so Phoebe and I decided to stick on for another month and try and 'consolidate', in search of a change of scene and cheaper argileh, we lugged our bags up to Syria, found room with couches! in a house with a fountain in the living room, in the middle of the old city, which is the longest continually inhabited city in the world. Eager to settle in to our new home and meet some locals, we (logically) headed off to Lebanon in the middle of a blizzard in a taxi without snow chains. Going at about 2 ks an hour because of the poor vision (we could basically see snow) and the bad roads (they were frozen and we were ilequipped) we arrived late to Beirut and checked into our hotel, which was one of three identically named hotels in the same building, and appeared to double as a brothel cum cockroach mueseum. Never mind! We quickly enough found out where the real hookers hang out (in the clubs around our hotel) and went into the central resto-bar area where we found Gus. Beirut is cool, and we also went skiing in some mountains nearby.

Back to Jordan, and reluctantly on to France. For a moment it seemed that this part of the plan, which I had grown less keen on was going to be sabotaged, as snow started to fall once more, and our planes threatened to be grounded, and the hire car people refused to leave the warmth of their office to come and get the car and give us back our oh so useful passports. A brief encouter between our car and that belonging to a 'pilot for British Airways' threatened to further complicate the situation, but alhumdulilah, finally we boarded our flights, but alas, I had lost the beautiful posters I had carefully selected of President Assad of Syria.

I arrived in France in the middle of February and found it to be cold, grey and unfriendly. I had no where to live and not much clue any more of why I was to study in France for a year instead of my beloved Middle East. But, in a very quick time, I found a very nice share house in the company of a Serb guy and and Italian guy and girl. We even had a view of La Tour Eifel from our bedroom window....oh Paris! so got used to that, went to my uni where I was to study some fairly random courses for the next year, mainly focused on improving my French. Found the courses fairly unstimulated and some of the students very aggravating which was more irritating in the cases where they we wearing cuff links or stilletos (depending on their sex). But had a couple of classes that didn't leave me feeling suicidal and one very nice teacher who taught me how to pass off as a man in even the poshest parts of the city. At some point I decied I needed to make some cash, so I took to working in an Irish pub at La Bastille, which was quite dull really, but I learnt how to make good Mohitos, so I have no real complaints. Oh and I got to eat the cheeseburgers that they sold for $25 free of charge!!!! France was fun, lots of nice exchange students from around Europe, and when the sun came out, lots of drinking cheap and good wine and cheese along the river Seine, or in the forest/park thingys they have. Met lots of great people (who I don't keep as close in contact as I should) and was pretty happy when I made the decision to stop paying 400 euro ($800) a month to share a bedroom in a boring part of Paris and move to Jordan.

So now we're down to the real stuff. To cut to the chase, I quickly remembered why I had fallen in love with the Middle East the first time (I had forgotten that intensity along with my Arabic) and decided that I had no wish to return to Paris to complete my second semester. So began the 2 month process of asking my uni in Australia to credit me for a semester there instead of in France. Also good was that Rian, who had moved into the house I was living in the same week as me, and was equally bessotted with Jordan, decided to extend her stay. So we both threw off our intended courses of study and enrolled in the highly renowned and internationally prestigious University of Jordan. Actually it's a beautiful campus of almost 40,000 students and it's quite a good place to study I reckon. My Arabic teachers were a little eratic and sometimes spontaneously didn't come to class, but I learnt lots, and at the same time improved my spoken Arabic (which is entirely different to the Arabic you get at school, on the news and in books). So that was a good semester. Had a bit of a falling in love episode, that was nice for a time, went back to Australia for christmas, came back, took exams, got stressed, realised that I needed to show my uni in Australia all the work I had done in Jordan in order to get credit for it and that it didn't look so impressive, so focused on that, and then decided to break up with boyfriend, got emotional and stressed about the uncertainty of my future (yeah my life is so tragically hard I know...) and ran off to Europe with Rian for 3 weeks where I increased my debts and also noticed that the debt collectors were after me. Went to Holland, a very nice country, Belgium and Israel (to very unfortunate bi-products of my travels) and France where I saw some good old friends, had a terrorist scare on the metro, drank wine and saw my brother who lives in Polland.

Have just come back to Jordan, and am relieved to find the sun is mainly present and it's not too cold at all for survival (Europe I think is an evolutionary challenge). I am passing my time with trying to live up to the Obamalutions, which are 86 resolutions for change that we do believe in, conceived on Obama Day of course. I also look at photos of my new baby sister Madeline, am starting at uni, and nervously waiting for an email from ANU telling me what my destiny is for this semester. It's an edgy time really.

I hope to stay in Jordan, it's a nice country with good people, and now that I have the structure of the Obamalutions, which make demands of me such as:
Must always have toilet paper in the house
Clean teeth daily
Yoga once a week
If we ever end up in prison, make the most of it
Approach a hero and assign a mentor.

So, I think life's looking up really. Mainly thanks to Obama.