18th
Day 31-Oh bureaucracy how I feared I would miss you!
So today on our way to school we made a few unexpected turns. Now this wasn’t too too surprising knowing our bus drivers penchant for picking up one or two extra people on our way out to Zarqa. As it turned out it wasn’t a pick up…. It was a drop off.
All nine of us aided by our bus driver went into the municipal police station this morning around eight am in order to renew our visas that were only good for one month. Now Jordan is taking up two entire pages of my passport.
It was a lovely 1 hour 45 minute stop, filled mostly with sitting. (the thing is i’m used to sitting/waiting in governmental procedures ut there was no line… legitimately no one there to dirtract the enritre station to helping us) There were however various exciting moments of fingerprinting and bathroom flooding to keep the boredom away. It took one very tall police man and three desk clerks to finger print us and whuile they watched we flooded a bathroom or two trying to wash the ink off our hands. One of them suggested to steven that he should wipe hjis hands on my pant because they were black…. HARAM police dude…haram. (it was actually funny and not creepy) Apparently if you’re going to be in the country for more than one month they must have your fingerprints (and handprints?) on file for…uh…when you go on a crazy crime spree? Or maybe for when we sneak a poor Jordanian girl into our room and are held hostage by the hotel? …or something like that…
The new visas are a big stamp with hand written notes around three of the sides, they’re really neat looking and we should/might translate them at some point. Especially because they might say something like “these people are really crazy don’t let them out of the country without putting them in jail for awhile” or something equally awesome! Really it just says the dates the visa is extended to and maybe some other stuff like that.
This little adventure made us a total of two hours late to school- otherwise known as all of the time allotted for our test. As it turned out the time had been reallocated to grammer today so we managed to skip grammar completely today!!! Which, as mentioned before, is the ultimate goal of our lives.
Our vocabulary teacher who was giving us this week’s test brought us Oreo’s and is now my favorite person in Jordan. She is SO nice!! Even though we had a test we got to chat afterwards about all the differences we’ve found so far in the country, and also talk about her experiences in the U.S. (she’s the one who lived in Norman) vs. Jordan. It was really eye opening!
We also, as indicated by our pictures, got to spend some time in the gym!! Misheala and I decided to play ping pong—no one else wanted to at first, but we started a trend and soon everyone was having a great time playing some ping pong! It was way fun, but it would have been way more awesome if there had been air conditioning!!
We had a VERY long drive home, but we decided to take it really easy tonight and order in some Tche Tche (yum!!) so we’ll be all rested for the Dead Sea tomorrow!!
