Sweet and sour chicken

I'm sitting at home, watching Ghost Whisperer, full from a meal of mall food-court Chinese food.

"But Sarah," you say, "you can't possibly be back in America already!"

Well, I'm not. Life in Jordan, in some ways, isn't so different as you might think. And life in my Jordanian house is different still. The television (they have about a thousand channels) is almost always on - this is fairly typical for an Arab family. My family has internet access (hence the home update), which is definitely atypical. And I went with my host sister today to City Mall - a four-story brobdingnagian of a shopping center. Fun fact, the Sbarro there serves real Italian food - pasta, bread - instead of greasy pizza. What a shame.

I could go on and on about the differences and similarities between Jordan and the US. Make a giant Venn diagram that would take all day to read. But I got ahead of myself. I really wanted to start out writing about my host family.

My host mom is Italian, and my host dad is Palestinian - this family is atypical even from the first sentence. I have two host sisters - one is a student at UJ, and the other works in acupuncture. Rasha, my student sister, is also an intern with CIEE. At our Wednesday dinner, the night before we found out about our host families and met them for the first time, she asked how I felt about meeting mine. I told her that I was excited, but nervous - very nervous, almost scared - and she reassured me that I would be fine. Tricky, tricky. She knew then. She had known from the start that I was going to be her host sister, but I was completely surprised when our housing director told me about it. You know, in the good way.

My fears were completely unfounded. Rasha is fluent in English, and each other family member has a varying amount of English proficiency. Between all of them, I'm conversing comfortably, learning a little bit of Arabic, and also learning a little bit of Italian. This family speaks its own language. All of them have been so very welcoming to me, and their house is wonderfully comfortable.

After spending a lazy weekend at the house, waking up late - which is still five in the morning at home - I'm starting classes tomorrow. Yes, I typed that correctly. Sunday. The work week/school week here is Sunday through Thursday, because Friday is the holy day in Islam. Arabic class will begin tomorrow, running S/T/R, with a listening section on W and a colloquial dialect class M/W. Yeah, that's a lot of Arabic. Tomorrow we register for our area studies (= elective) classes - which I'm still deciding on. Check Fb for the poll.

I wish that I could be witty and stylistic tonight, but I just can't seem to pull it off. Do I have first-day-of-school butterflies? Well, it seems that I do. No matter - I'll just wear my glasses tomorrow. Professors think you're smarter when you wear glasses.

... Or something like that.