My last few posts have been all about the really intense research period. I've spent at least 7 hours in the same cafe working for the last three days straight, and I have three days left to finish a 50 page paper. I'm a little bit stressed. Having said that, Jordan is nothing if not a setting for ridiculous stories to emerge. I have to share one with you.
Today, it rained. Unlike the horrible downpour in Los Angeles, this rain actually happened. As in rain fell hard. Rain fell loudly. Rain fell in significant volume (by middle eastern standards). Having said that, unlike American cities that have decent drainage, Amman has virtually none. Today, Amman's streets are a puddle. This caused problems for taxis.
My friend and I left the SIT building while the rain was falling down quite hard. It's 50 degrees (cold by my California standards), wet, windy, and fairly miserable. After walking in the rain for about five minutes, we managed to get a cab. As we drove through the terrible traffic, the car was bombarded by splashes from other driving cars. It was quite funny. After about 20 minutes in the cab, the driver pulled off the main road and told us that the cab was dead. Instead of letting us out of the cab, he made us pay him for the journey we had taken thus far.
However, he dropped us in the middle of fucking no where, where there were no cabs, traffic was ridiculous, and it was still fucking cold.
We walked for a half hour, literally jumping from sidewalk to sidewalk as to avoid stepping in 4 inch high puddles (and got rounds of applause from laughing passerbyers), before we finally saw an empty cab. We looked at him with pathetic, cold, American eyes, and of course, the asshole didn't let us in.
Dejected, we kept on walking. About five minutes later, we saw a woman get out of a cab right in front of us. Allah Hu Akbar! We got one. Oh wait--there was another person in it, and we couldn't get it. Two more frozen minutes later, we saw another woman get out of a cab about 20 yards in front of us. We waved at it, and sure enough, it picked up someone else. Realizing that we were at least an hour walking from home, frozen solid, and still wet, cold, grumpy, and needing to do work, we had no choice but to keep on walking.
A cab finally stopped for us, but as soon as we told him where we were going, he said no becasue of the traffic. We pleaded with him, and he gave us an insanely high price (as we looked like lost american tourists), saying it would take at least an hour because of the traffic. With no other option and wanting the pseudo warmth of a cab, we agreed.
Sure enough, 15 minutes later, we were at our destination. The asshole took every side street and shortcut he knew, and took enough money to pay for the hot chocolate that I so desperately wanted.
Now I'm at my normal cafe doing work before going to dinner with SIT and all of our host families. It's going to be crazy, and of course, all I want to do is sit down and work. I'm still wet, still cold, still cranky, but I guess I'm realizing that it's the first time in a long time I've worked this hard on anything. Aside from my frozen fingers and wet legs, it's kind of nice.
That's all, and Inshallah, I'll be done with this paper soon!
Becca
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