Cultural insight

After our arrival from Dead sea, we were invited for a dinner at Anisha's uncle's house. It was a great opportunity to get to know the pace of life of local people. Me and Gee have been playing with children, Anisha was helping with preparation of the dinner. We were talking about local habits, Jordan and neighbouring countries, education, economical situation, cuisine...

I was impressed by 11-year old son, Abhishek, who is attending local English school. Our conversation was on much higher level than I'd have expected in such age. Moreover, he was the only one from the whole family to speak Arabic and his English was on very good communication level as well. Smart guy!

My "key learning points"
> prices are VERY flexible here (read below)
> most of meals is eaten by hands (and so was our dinner as well)
> knowledge of English among local people is generally on a good level
> security is the priority (read bellow), due to insecure neighbouring countries
> traffic security is an exception:) Crossing a street requires dose of courage:)
> despite the incredibly cheep petrol (and therefore taxi too), Jordan has almost no natural resources of petrol, everything is imported
> taxi is a chapter on its own, you can find many specifics! Read one of my previous post for those basic ones.
> you can often encounter ineffectivity, when 3 people are doing the work of one
> it snows here too:), I've seen photos of Petra covered in snow... beautiful!

Just you and me and my guard!
The Jordanian government is paying a thorough attention on national security. From time to time you can meet soldiers in the street, every single police station is crowded with redundant policemen, at the airport during the luggage check, I must have opened my backpack and turned on my laptop (maybe they wanted to run an antivirus check), when driving on a highway, you're passing through check-points every hour...

Price? Double, triple… as you wish
If you're a foreigner, you'll pay more. Take this for granted and your stay here will be much more easier:)
At the beginning I didn't want to accept that. Just imagine: on Tuesday you are paying 4JD for 6 meals and on Wednesday you are paying 5JD for 2 meals (the only difference is that on Tuesday it is Oksana, living here for 1 year and speaking Arabic, who is ordering and paying; whereas on Wednesday it's me and Gee.
How we managed to pay 10x more has already been described before ;)

Food
Once mentioning the meals... I guess it would take some time to get used to local cuisine. I was trying to identify the main difference, but I didn't manage - it's kind of overall: I cannot say they don't have ordinary "restaurants", but the food is usually poor in meat and is spicy... I cannot say they don't have "fastfoods"/sandwiches, but it's preparation is not fast at all:)... I cannot say they don't have good pastry for the breakfast, but the choice is fairly limited... and many other "small" differences like eating with your hands from one common dish etc. :)
To sum up, I was completely OK with one week; one year would be more challenging:)

Well, I have no clue what is my expression supposed to mean:)
If I should guess, it was something between excitement and scare from missing the cutlery...