So it's been nearly two months since I wrote a blog. I sensed that my blogs were negative in some ways, and I stand but what I wrote, but I feel like sending negativity home about the Middle East is kind of like giving bread to a baker. The fact is, Jordan is an amazing country with fantastic people and it's an honour to live here. I've had a couple of challenging months, which is part of the reason I stopped writing, because I thought, if I can't write anything nice, I shouldn't write anything at all. And my personal negativity and hangups are not really going to allow for a balanced view of anything actually.

So various stuff has been happening in the domains of love life and the universe and now I feel like I've woken up after a storm and been able to make some sense of my recent craziness. And laugh. It's so good to laugh sometimes.

It's summer here now. And when it's summer here, you know it. It's not just the day after day not a cloud in the sky hot sun and sweat. Everything changes in summer. Construction, road works, graduation parties that drive through the streets with teenagers hanging out the windows, the gulf arabs come, foreigners leave and new ones come, the days are long and the nights are busy. And the mosquitoes. Nights of scratching. I think I have the whitest softest skin within 10 kilometers. I drench myself and the room in insect repellent. The water by my bed tastes of it. The air is thick and the windows closed. But nothing helps. Cold showers in the middle of the night take away the itching maybe for long enough to fall asleep. By morning they're gone and the construction drills start. But it's beautiful. Everything about summer here is beautiful. Driving around the hectic streets, windows down, sweaty legs sticking to vinyl, flamboyant Arabic music mixing with the constant horns. Traffic jams at all hours of the day. It's all back to life. Not a drop of rain will fall for the next four months. Sandals are back, and still most of the women dressed head to toe in this heat. It's not so hot, all the Gulfies come here to escape the real heat. It's just a perfect warm summer, of long evenings on the terrace of restaurants, families picnicing on roundabouts and days and nights that never stop.

And so I contemplate my return to Australia. It must come soon. This month I think. It's been a year, and in some ways it seems like nothing, and in others, I feel I've lived a lifetime here. Everything that could change, has, many times. I studied a semester, volunteered for three different organisations, worked five different jobs, lived in two houses with 8 different housemates. I've had dozens of friends come and go and some who stick. I learnt to talk Arabic, to actually talk it. My opinion of this life and culture has changed so many times that now I don't really even have one. I now have a kind of lazy bemusement and acceptance of whatever comes. And of course at times a deep frustration, because there are so many things I just don't get, or I feel other people don't get.

I have seen and heard stuff that I never imagined. I have experienced deep kindness and horrible perverted nastiness. I have been propositioned and protected. Accused of being a prostitute in my own house, which my boss found for me when I complained of my shower in the old place. So many contradictions. And without trying to be dramatic, I feel that life here has been incredibly dramatic, and in many ways, very calm.

I hate the thought of leaving here, and at the same time, am dying to go home. And for once, I feel that all these contradictions are more logical than the simple understanding I believed I had of my life back home.

I love Jordan. It's nothing of what I expected, in any way really. There are bad things, that I wouldn't have thought of, as there are good things, amazing things I couldn't have imagined and know I couldn't find in my country. And the good things and bad things I had heard about the Middle East, well sure, I see some of them, but they're peripheral. It's all a big empty narrative, this view we get of this world. It's meaningless in so many ways. The diversity of lifestyles and opinions here is just as, if not richer than in my country, and I would be silly if I tried to define it. So I summarise it to myself as nice, confusing, sometimes frustrating, but always something, not quite sure what.