Doing cultural things in my last week here.

If there's one thing I've learned in Jordan it's that doing seemingly strange and/or sketchy activities usually turn out for the best. In America, for example, I would rarely go to a wedding with a large group in which none of us knew the bride or groom, or go with the same group to eat dinner at the groom's brother's house the following day, or let off fireworks in a construction site. And to think this all started (except the fireworks part) because we went to a dance club above a McDonalds in Aqaba (yet another seemingly sketchy but actually fun decision).

So. My friend Genevieve, along with a couple of the program people that were with her at the time, met this guy in Aqaba at the dance club I just mentioned, and it turned out that he had family living here in Irbid. I showed up to the club with a different group a little later and met this guy briefly (particularly when he dragged me and couple of the guys forcibly onto the dance floor). At some point he was telling Genevieve that his brother was getting married in Irbid and she should totally come to the wedding, yadda yadda yadda.

And then this week arrives, and it turns out that his brother is getting married on Wednesday and this guy actually wants us to come to the wedding reception. In America, this is not a usual occurence, to invite a large group of strange foreigners to a wedding party, right? This is why I love Jordan! So we had to go to a big fancy dinner party on Wednesday given by the university in our honor, but after that a group of like 16 of us ended up going to this wedding. A lot of things are pretty familiar to American wedding guests- the bride was the pretty girl in white, the reception was in a large hotel, there was dancing and such, etc.

And then there were new things: men and women guests were separated for the bulk of the reception in completely different rooms (except for the groom, who was with the bride in the women's reception area), the bride had to look all stoic for most of the time, the dancing music was much cooler than the Macarena and everyone there could actually dance without the help of alcohol, and the wedding cake was cut with a SWORD!!!! That was probably the best part. There was also a crazy old man with a cane that turned into a sword, which was both strange and awesome. He apparently pointed the cane at our guys in a threatening/joking/insane kind of way when they were in the men's reception area. Nice.

After the reception, there's always a parade of cars that drives around the city honking (I know this much from living in Irbid for so long and hearing it every night), and then at some point they go let off fireworks. Most of us chose to go back to the campus after the reception because we had our last day of class and some tests the next day, but several from our group did go on the ride-along and had some adventures getting to know the family, and they apparently had a really good time.

So this guy from Aqaba (brother of the groom) also invited us to come eat mansef with him and his family yesterday. In order to get to his brother's house, we had to take some sketchy unmarked van-bus deal, which is apparently a normal thing to do here. We all had a fun time- the Aqaba guy was really the only one who spoke much English, so we had a lot of awkward and funny experiences trying to talk to all of them. And by "all of them", I mean Aqaba guy plus 4 of his brothers and his cousin. The youngest brother was 10 years old and so adorable! The rest of the guys were very funny and incredibly nice to have invited the whole crowd of us over for dinner. All in all, I was glad that I went and finally got to experience some of the Jordanian home life.

Oh, and after we had all returned from the Jordanian home experience, the guys of our program decided it was finally time to let off the rest of their fireworks (some of which had been let off in Petra a couple weeks ago). So we trekked out to a sketchy construction site and enjoyed some much better fireworks than are legally available in America. Nobody was arrested, nobody was exploded, so all was well.

My time in Jordan is very quickly coming to an end! Oh, and my Jerusalem pictures are still not posted. If anything, I'll get everything up when I get back to the States and then post links here for you non-Facebook users. Off to Amman tomorrow for one final shopping trip, and hopefully all my gifting will be finished. Until next time...

--K