Two weeks and it's hit me.

We sat there that night in that café up on the hill... Eyes glassy over the shisha smoke, throwing stories into each other’s mouths. We were filled to the brim with explosive possibilities of brilliant conversation and dreams of expatriation. Studying abroad is like that… exploring who you are as you invent yourself for a new set of friends.

I have to say, Amman has become a strange hallucination for me… I find myself retreating to expat hang outs much more than I ever did in Spain… Everything is so brilliant and new and englightening but… simultaneously not knowing the local dialect makes things impossibly frustrating and overwhelming. To top it off, I’m not in a walking city. I’m bound by psychological blocks against dirt cheap taxi cab fares and minimal distance.

The physical appearance of the city is everything I hate: post-world war two industrial mayhem in an white and dusty boxy urban sprawl of interlaced car driven suburbia. The culture is something completely comprehensible. As much as I may appear to be 100% American, my father’s side is arab and I understand a fair amount of the culture backdrop. The difference is… I empathize with arab culture rather than fall into it. Certain traits in me I see reflected in this place but others are complete opposites…

So amist this internal backdrop, I will return with my new friends over shisha or mint tea and we will contemplate the next few months. Contemplate our news lives. Discover our surroundings until our new lives become our old lives. And our surroundings disappear as we venture off to where our lifelines may take us.