I didn’t read about the Ajloun Castle before going because I don’t have internet to search it, but now that I do, I did a little bit of research. This is a fortress castle built around AD 1184-1185 to control and protect the passages and routes between south Jordan and Syria.
Instead of writing a long blog, here is an image of what my day looked like. It was a good first trip outside Amman because I got to see the rest of the city by bus and also see what’s outside of Amman.
7:30 AM Meet at Qasid Institute to go to Ajloun Castle for the fieldtrip with the class.
8:15 AM Depart from Qasid Institute. Katie (my roommate and best buddy here) and I sat in Bus #3 and I decided to not sit with Katie so that we are forced to talk to other people. In fact we did meet new people, we met a guy named Thomas (Kenyan guy), Arie (a guy who studies Islamic studies), Dan (a guy who is really nice and all I can remember of him was that he got food coma during lunch and had a hard time breathing and moving), and Harry (a physicist).
During the 15 mintues, Katie and I managed to snap a pretty good picture of our big heads!
uses we took to drive up to the city of Ajlun ripped a tire. The tire just
exploded. It only took 15 minutes to fix the problem. Why such a short amount of time? One thing that really amazed me was how helpful all the bus drivers were. My bus driver was driving behind this bus and right when he saw the tire had exploded; he calmly stopped immediately and jumped out of the bus to give a helping hand. Then you see
all the other buses start to stop as well and did the same and collaborated as a team to help. It was a nice 15 minute stop because all the students got to go outside of their buses and took pictures of the amazing view we so happened to stop at. It was really hot, but not humid. The landscape was incredible; the north of Jordan is closer to what used to be the major Fertile Crescent, so the land is lusher, more diverse with trees and greens. I saw my first olive tree for the first time as I was looking out the window. We were so close to the Syrian Border.
12:00 PM Leave the castle site and head to a restaurant for lunch with 200 other students. It was a full on Arab meal with pita bread, a variety of dips like hummus, babaganoosh, and maybe 6 more different dips as apetizers. Then the real stuff came when the meat was set in front of us. It was grilled chicken, lamb and some other kind of meet they always eat.As we walked through the castle following the tour guide, he pointed out that the castle is situated about 1000 feet above sea level and from the top of the castle, you can see the Lebanon mountain peaks covered in snow, West Bank, Syria, and Egypt. Our tour guide also explained to us that he had ancestors who used to live in the castle and as we were standing in the middle of the living room of the castle, you look up and you see the ashes of the fires on the bricks from cooking inside.
3:00PM Took a nap on the bus because of a food coma.
5:00PM Arrived at Qasid and went to check out apartments with Thomas a little South of Amman. An apartment as big as mine is about 900 JD. A square room with a bed, bathroom, kitchen and living room costs about 350 JD.
6:30 PM Katie went out while I took a nap.
It was a really nice day today. I wasn’t too impressed by the castle because I didn’t read anything before I went, but it was nice to spend some time with our fellow classmates and meet incredibly smart people. Some of the students go to the top universities in the world. I feel really luck to be able to study Arabic with such a rich group of people. People from Princeton, Yale, Oxford, University of Edinburgh, and many more are here to either pursue a masters or PhD degree or because they are interested in the language. It’s amazing to see how rare this program really is. I’m so happy to be here now, compared to my last post.
Sorry if this was hard to read,
Dandelion Traveler
dandeliontraveler 