Jordan or Morocco?

Some Seriously Good News

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

My year abroad just doubled overnight. Double the countries, double the adventure, double the fun – and half the cash. I’m one happy guy. Because I’m thrilled to tell you all that I’m going back to Morocco next summer!

Seriously, this is the best news I’ve heard in a long time. Not only does this mean that I’ll be spending hundreds less on flights and accommodation, but I’ll get the chance to do a homestay, something that’s been barred to me out here on account of my sex. So even though it’s only a six-week course, I’ll bet it’ll be a lot more intense than two out here – in a good way! I’ll be heading out there on my own, too, which should do wonders for both my Arabic and my confidence, as there won’t be that English crutch I’ve had ever at the ready out here. Last but not least, it’s only a skip and a jump from Spain, so I can lay some early foundations during my assistantship. Win win. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy – there’s a whole batch of new difficulties I’m going to have to face head on by breaking the mold and striking out alone – but for the sake of a smaller city that doesn’t live on its taxi service, I’m more than willing to make that jump. Thank you to everyone who’s been on hand throughout these last few weeks; to Shahnaz and Archie for telling me to keep smiling; to Banner and Anna, for suggesting that I go for it; to my teacher Aziza for giving me the go-ahead; and lastly to Andrew, for putting up with a month and a half of comparisons…!

The best thing of all is that half of August and September are now open to me to do with as I choose. I’m still umming and ahhing between volunteering at an orphanage in Peru and roughing it on the backpacking adventure of a lifetime in Ethiopia, but I don’t want to set anything in stone quite yet, so I’ll keep you posted as and when I make a decision. Freedom feels so good, I can tell you that at least. And freedom like this, or of any kind, is always worth fighting for. I’m not half cultured enough to find a pretentious quote for you on that count, so I’ll let my own irrepressible good humor convey to you just how on top of the world I’m feeling right now. Erin Shore is playing on my iPod and I feel like I could accomplish anything, even a return to the vegetable market in downtown Amman to stock up on a week’s worth of fruit and vegetables. We’re running low and my egg-based repertoire is getting thin on the ground. I think I’ll treat myself to a meal at Al-Multaka tonight before starting to think about my TLRP: a study of angels and demons in the Crusades with a particular focus on Saladin and Reynald de Chatillon. Exciting stuff!

Enough of all this shameless self-aggrandizement. I’ll end up with a head the size of a football field. To finish, here’s an Arabic riddle that came up on a game show on TV last night. The English equivalent might run something along these lines:

A red, red city with greenest walls; its citizens black, no keys at all

The Arab viewership got it pretty quickly. It’s a shame they couldn’t keep the winning streak going, though; the following round, a game of ‘Spot the Difference’, proved too great a challenge. After forty-five minutes, nobody had noticed that the girl in the second picture was missing a finger. I guess they were all of them too hung up on that most decidedly harām shoulder on show. BB x

 

Blood, Tears and Broken Glass

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

It’s a Friday night in down-town Amman, the streets are buzzing and Andrew and Mac are exploring an abandoned hospital. Yours truly chickened out of this particular venture. I guess that means I’m on lookout? Jeez, how lame does that make me sound…

It’s kind of creepy, sitting outside this tumbledown hospital with the sounds of breaking glass and echoed footsteps breaking the half-silence. Not to mention the dim light from Andrew’s phone flickering off the walls between the windows from time to time. Am I missing out? Very possibly. Will I regret it? Almost certainly. I’m not about to abandon my post, though. Call it a brush with foreign police once too often, but I’m calling shy this time. In the countryside, maybe, but not in the middle of the city on a Friday night. And especially not after watching As Above So Below last night. Not on my life.

We’re into our sixth week in Jordan. Three school weeks remain, and after that – who knows? I took out another two hundred and fifty dinars this morning. The goal is to make that last until the end. With any luck, that should just cut it, travel funds and all, although I have been known to be a little over-optimistic about this kind of thing. Jordan’s bus service may be criminally cheap, but the Amman taxi system is draining my resources at a ridiculous speed. And there’s no avoiding them either, and believe me, we’ve tried. Google Maps gave us an estimate of two and a half hours. We scoffed at that and called it one and a half. Turns out it was a three-hour job. We won’t be walking to down-town again any time soon – not when there’s shopping to be done. And I thought that living twenty minutes’ walk from any shops in Durham was problematic! Something to think about if you plan on staying in Amman. It wouldn’t be a problem if you lived down-town, of course, but up here in Tla al-Ali, it’s a different story. Please don’t buy my fervent dislike for the place, that’s just me and my city angst, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the cost of all these taxi rides – two dinars a throw – racks up fast. I’m looking forward to living in a town where everything is within walking distance.

Now that the end is in sight, though, it’s a lot easier to stay positive. I’ve got it into my head that I’m not coming back next year and that thought alone is keeping me going, no matter how hard I’m going to have to fight to make it so. Hence a slightly less bitchy, more reserved tone this time around. It’s a lot easier with the midterm depression out of the way. Any and all lingering ill tempers were successfully vented this afternoon with The Green Mile. Tears all round, as it should be. There’s no better way to get it all out than with the greatest tearjerker of them all. Next stop, 12 Years a Slave! (There’s a bit of a theme going on here…) Films aside, I’ve plenty of books to keep me going between now and then, thanks to the wonder that is iBooks and all the free material on offer. Best of all, I even stumbled across a book of Arabic short stories penned by none other than our very own Dr. Daniel Newman, which I simply have to get my hands on the next time I swing by Books@Cafe. For the time being, I’ve at least another twenty Henry Rider Haggard books to wade through, including the full Quatermain saga. Excellent stuff. Perfect travel fuel, too.

Although I’m swung to thinking that perhaps Ethiopia might be wiser than South Africa for potential backpacking. It’s just a hunch. Further research needed. BB x

A Sex-Tape is a Step Too Far

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I think the title needs a little explanation.

In addition to the mid-term exam, our Arabic teacher set us the task of coming up with a five to seven minute presentation on a topic of our choosing. It took me until the morning to come up with something I could realistically rattle on about for that amount of time (no, seriously), but after stumbling over my words as usual, I ended up putting Andrew up to a bet whereby he had to talk about Kanye West. Naturally, Andrew tried to make his presentation somewhat relevant to what we’d studied so that he could activate the vocabulary, or whatever buzzword you want to use. The result was an exploration of the modern wedding through the Kimye phenomenon, complete with all the gory details, ego, sex tape and all. Highly entertaining, of course, but our teacher took umbrage at the subject, claiming that it was ‘hardly suitable’ for class, and debarred us from asking any questions so as to bring the topic to a decided halt. Still, the man did a good job, and he held his ground in spite of all the criticism, so I held up my end of the bargain and rustled up a pretty neat lentil and vegetable stew for him and Andreas, as promised.

To kill some time in the post-class hours, Andreas took us to an underground church in West Amman to help him to teach English to a group of Iraqi refugees. Just a couple of hours in a church not too dissimilar in style from a Worth Abbey chapel, which made me smile almost as soon as I set foot in the place. John 3:16 was up on the wall behind the lectern in golden lettering; it was pretty clear from the first four words, even in Arabic. Beautiful stuff. The Iraqis themselves, Christians from Basra, were just about the nicest bunch of people I’ve met here in Jordan yet. Andreas and his teaching partner Jason assigned Andrew and I four to teach, and we discussed hospital related vocab to get the ball rolling. Whilst we worked, the children of our students scampered about the church at full pitch. I haven’t seen such unfettered happiness in a while. One of our group was a lot quicker on the draw than the others when it came to learning all the new words and expressions, but Raja’, the oldest of the group at seventy-one years old, was an utter delight to teach, especially when she came out with a flawless sentence at the end of the session, primarily because she was so shy. It kind of reminded me of how I must have been earlier down the line. Boy, but it was good to be teaching again, though. Getting back into practice for my assistantship in two months’ time. Better still, Iraqi Arabic is the closest to fusHa out there and a joy to listen to. Basra sounds like a beautiful place, as if Iraq needs anything more to make it more appealing. Land of the Abbasids! Home of Abu Nuwas! Man, why can’t I spend my Year Abroad in Iraq?

Wait, on second thoughts, don’t answer that one.

There’s a lot to be said for this religion malarkey. With any luck, one day the moment will come and I will believe. Warm fuzzy aside, I’ve got to say that those two hours were a godsend, no pun intended. All of my frustration and anger from the past week simply disappeared. I have Faras and his friends to thank for that, for being so friendly and eager to learn; and of course Andreas, for giving me the chance to get in on the project. All is well with my heart once again. I’m still going to fight for the chance to go back to Morocco next year, but I know now that I can and will survive another month out here. I can do this.

Hold the phone, according the beeb there’s a storm coming. Rain. You have no idea how happy this makes me. That it’s going to be 41 degrees at the peak of the storm is beside the point. Bring on the rain, I say. Bring it. BB x

  

Clear the Runway

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

That’s it! No more exams this year! And none for another two years, come to think of it. How’s that for a load off the mind? I guess only time will tell how they went – three weeks’ time, to be precise, by which time I’ll be home. Blimey, but this year has drawn to a close quickly… I’m really not expecting an awesome turnover as far as the language exams are concerned. These last few weeks more than ever I’ve heard people liken language to Maths – the beauty, apparently, being that there’s a logic, and there’s a right and a wrong. Great news if you’ve got the kind of brain that can crunch logic like a harvester, but devastating if your mathematical competence is on par with a freshly-picked beetroot. The highest I ever achieved in a regular Maths paper at school was a paltry 28%. How I got this far – to Durham, of all places – with such a pitiful weakness for numbers is nothing short of a miracle. For me, there’s nothing better than a good, old-fashioned essay, so this last week has been an absolute breeze in comparison with the previous three weeks of grammar-busting. There’s no denying the importance of grammar – it’s the bedrock of any and every language – but it doesn’t exactly make for entertaining reading. Especially when you have to tread the line between what is right and what is wrong. Thank goodness for Arts, where it becomes one big grey area. A difficult place to excel, but a far better environment for the mathematically inept, like me.

Away with the musing. The Morocco/Jordan debate came to a sudden and decisive end yesterday with the booking of return flights from Amman at the end of June. Done! Expensive, but that’s the price you have to pay for visiting wealthy countries. It’s not as though I had much of a choice with my department either, the way things have gone of late. We’re banding together as a year to prevent the following years being plagued by the same problems we faced. Hopefully they don’t have to go through with all that chaos. But that’s that! So I’m going to Jordan. I’ll be there for just over two months before zipping back for a short stop at home before jetting straight back out to Spain, by which point I’ll have much more of an idea as to where it is they’re sending me. Exciting stuff. Now all I’ve left to do is to wait a couple of days for my monstrous portrait to arrive and I can get straight back to work on that, and let’s not forget all the gigs and rehearsals set to swamp me over the coming weeks. And paperwork. Christ, the paperwork. Will it never end?

If you’re after an alternative point of view over the next two months in Jordan, give my friends over at Langlesby travels a browse (https://langlesbytravels.wordpress.com/). It’s highly entertaining reading and a great deal less greenie-pontificating than me! I’m working on that… BB x

Summer's here and the lane is as dark as night again

Freedom!

The Great Admin Flood

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

We’re getting to that transitional stage of the Master Plan when it suddenly all gets real. Not the British Council side, of course – details, as usual, are and continue to be pending, but it’s the Arabic side that’s beginning to take off, so to speak. By the end of May, I’m supposed to have completely the necessary admin for and secured:

  • Student Finance for 2015/16
  • Erasmus
  • Form No.6 for the MLAC Department
  • A study placement at an Arabic language institute in Amman, Jordan
  • Flights for said study placement
  • Insurance for said study placement (HAH)
  • Rail ticket home to catch flight to said study placement

All before the month is out. And somewhere in there I’ve still got four exams to go, all revision-heavy and – guess what? – all right down to the wire. The afternoon of the 29th, to be precise. The second the British Council gives me my province, I’ll tackle the lot in one afternoon flat, I reckon. After some kind of tribal rain dance in celebration, welcoming that information like rain at the end of this great drought of ignorance. Too metaphorical? Of course it is. But a great deal less over-the-top than my comparison of the Berlin Wall to a Great-Crested Grebe’s nest in yesterday’s Spanish exam. Yes. Don’t even ask. I simply couldn’t resist using that wonderful word somormujo in an exam. I’ve been waiting for the chance and I took it. I just hope the examiner on the other hand is lenient enough to let it slide. Or has a sense of humour. That’d be preferable. Anonymous codes aside, by the time anybody reaches the letter ‘Y’, they must be getting pretty tired of reading essays, by my (wistful/skewed) logic. Fingers crossed! It’s one thing having a sackful of random, wacky vocab to pull out at the opportune moment, but it’s quite another to find somewhere wholly relevant. But I’m sure you don’t need telling that. That’s more of a strike across the hand for me. Maybe I’ll look back on this in a couple of years and laugh. Or, more likely still, in a couple of weeks, with grades in hand, and berate my foolishness. EIther or.

Major digression. What I was actually intending to write about was my predictions for Jordan. So I was revising Arabic grammar this afternoon at the Student Union building which lapsed into a Jordan planning sesh after a couple of hours of the jussive and the imperative. A couple of hours too many. Two things I found: that an ISIC card should (theoretically) get you a student discount of around 45-60% off flights to Jordan (which, when you consider the £200 average price, is a major deal-breaker), and that the Jerash Music Festival will be taking place during our stay. I’m normally unlucky with that kind of thing, missing out on the big religious festivals or musical events by a couple of weeks when I’m on my travels, but this time I’ve struck it lucky. So although it’ll be way too hot to do some of the things I’d planned on doing – like desert treks, for example – where there’s a will, there’s a way. Jordan is going to be expensive, which is a major downer, especially when you compare it to Morocco, which is where I’d planned on going. Not only did Fes grow on me when I stayed there over the Easter, but when you compare the flight rates to those of Amman – £20 to £240 – you almost want to tear up the carpet in frustration. I did, anyway. Almost.

Check on me later when I’m in a more stable state of mind. This evening had me finally get around to fixing the wobbly wheely chair with super glue, which naturally had a little get onto my hands which then required a mad dash to the kitchen and boiling water. Not a stable state of mind. I’ll let you know when the BC gives me a province, okay? Hasta pronto x

Looking Ahead

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Blimey, these Arabic listening past papers are a mixed bag and a half. Learning the vocab in advance isn’t the problem, it’s the random new words they throw in for good measure. The case marking doesn’t help either, but at least we don’t have to do that ourselves. MSA is supposed to be clear and easy to understand, but sometimes I swear it was easier to get by in Morocco. None of this case-marking chaos in the real world. Yes, I am writing this post in the last five minutes of an Arabic lab session. It kind of petered out towards the end. Everybody seems to be in the same boat as far as total disorganisation is concerned. Us British Council hopefuls aren’t the only ones in the dark. The entire Arabic portion of the year abroad is still very much up in the air. Will it be Jordan? Will it be Lebanon? Or will it be Morocco? Cause it sure as hell won’t be anywhere else, since those are our only options. Oh, to have been born a few years earlier and then to have had the chance to go to Syria or Egypt…! Puts everything in perspective, that. I mean, Syria…! As a viable year abroad option! Nobody would even dream of it nowadays. And to think it was at the top of my list when I first applied to study Arabic three years ago. So much for that. Thanks Assad. Thanks IS. Thanks to everyone else on the CIA hit list.

The bigger picture, kid, think of the bigger picture. I suppose Jordan won’t be so bad. It’s just the price hike that bothers me and that’s just me being petty, right? Were I going to the American Language Institute in Fes (ALIF) and not Qasid, hopping back and forth between Spain and Morocco would be easy as anything – not to mention adventurous, since it would entail docking at either Tangier or the Spanish enclaves and then traversing the Rif to get to Fes. How’s that for commuting? As it stands, it looks like Amman is the only viable option, and it’s not so easy to get to and from Spain – let alone the UK – from Jordan at the snap of a wrist. Well, I’ll be playing it by ear for a little longer, I think. These first few posts have quite a sarky, waspish tone to them that I don’t like. That’s probably lingering BC stress and pre-exam tension setting in. The sun, however, is shining brighter than ever. The long British heatwave known as ‘summer’ is upon us. Things can only go up from here, right?