Various field trips...

As usual, I haven't written in a while, but that's because not a lot has happened. Classes are progressing, the end is nearing (1 month left), and I finally have some actual homework, although still not much. I have been on several field trips, for various classes and with CIEE, in the last couple of weeks that were somewhat interesting, although not nearly as exciting as Petra and Wadi Feid. The weekend before last, I went on the CIEE trip to the desert castles in western Jordan, but it wasn't really as exciting as it sounds. We went to 4, and all except one looked like large houses in the middle of the desert more than castles. One of them had very impressive murals, and another had a mosaic floor that was quite beautiful, but even though we had a guide, we weren't given a lot of information about the sites. Most of them were from the Ummayyad period, (roughly the 8th century) and the only one that looked like an actual castle (outer wall with rooms, large courtyard with a mosque in the middle) was originally Roman, rebuilt by a relative of Saladin. West Jordan itself is quite desolate, for the most part. Most of the population lives in east Jordan, because of the lack of water in the west, so although there were a few towns, it felt empty. Oh, and I almost forgot, on our itinerary one of the stops listed was at an "Iraqi border sign" to take pictures. I was confused when I read this, because it didn't look like we were going to be driving long enough to reach the Iraqi border, and that seemed uncharacteristically risky for CIEE, but their meaning became clear when we stopped under a highway sign saying "Iraq" with an arrow pointing west. The funniest part was that nearly everyone filed out of the bus to take pictures under this sign, despite the fact that we were probably at least 200 kilometers from the border. In terms of entertainment, that was the high point of the day.

Last Saturday was also spent on a bus, this time with my Contemporary Thought in the Islamic World class, with brief stops at various mosques, most of them connected to graves of some of the Prophet's Companions. The mosques were beautiful, but unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries, so I don't have any pictures. My favorite mosque was the first one we visited, where the prophet Joshua (according to Islam: I don't think he's considered a prophet by Christians or Jews), who took over leadership of the Israelites after Moses died in the Old Testament. There weren't very many people there, and the imam took quite a bit of time telling us Joshua's story and the history of the mosque. We were of course welcomed at every mosque we went to, which included drinks and brief descriptions of the important people buried there, but the imam at the first mosque seemed the least perturbed or... affected by the fact that we were Americans, which was nice. He addressed us as students, not necessarily foreigners. At the last three mosques we went to the same group of men gave us tours of each and one of them was constantly taking pictures. We went pretty far north but stayed in the east (the West Bank was always in sight) and I was surprised at how much agriculture there was. It was a complete contrast from the desert castle trip.

Today I went on yet another field trip, this one to the zoo with my Arabic class, of all places. I had braced myself for the zoo, but honestly it was still worse than I expected. It wasn't actually in Amman, and it was a combination amusement park and zoo. The animals were in barred, very small cages with concrete or dirt floors. That I was expecting, although it was still a bit of a shock, but the amount of trash in the cages was disturbing. They had almost all medium to large animals too, none of them were very small. They had vultures, pelicans, camels, deer, several species of monkey, what I think was a small species of wolf, or else a coyote relative, 2 black bears, and the main attraction, lions and tigers. All of the animals were either sleeping or doing some kind of pacing behavior. At one point there was a trainer in one of the cages with a baby jaguar, holding it by it's tail and using a stick to keep it from biting him. It wasn't clear if there was a purpose for this, but it was definitely disturbing to watch. It was not a fun field trip.