First day in Jordan

We had our first meeting with guys from PSUT today.
PSUT = Princess Sumaya University for Technology, one of consortium partners and our “colleague” in development of both courses (check previous post for further reference)

There were 4 main things to be done before the meeting:
> iron Gee’s shirt, because he forgot an iron:)
> have a breakfast
> get to the PSUT campus
> prepare for the meeting

1. looking for an iron
Well, finding an iron turned out to be much more difficult than we thought. Local people know English on a very good level, but some vocabulary is still too advanced… after 1 hour we managed to find a "shopping mall”, with an elderly tailor smoking his water pipe. In almost 20 minutes, he managed to iron 1 shirt and went on smoking:)

2. looking for a breakfast
Getting a European breakfast was fairly improbable, but nobody was actually looking for it. We wanted to try some local specialty. The problem was that local people have always plenty of time for everything, so preparation of one sandwich takes 10 minutes etc. Never mind, let’s try fresh mango/orange/carrot/banana juice for 0,5€. Delicious!

3. looking for a taxi
To find a taxi is not a problem here, 50% of all cars in the streets are yellow cabs. Finding a taxi driver, who would understand what “Princess Sumaya Uni… “ means was much bigger challenge, due to the Arabic language. Fifth driver seemed to be the right one.
The journey itself was very dynamic, because of distinctive (= very limited:)) traffic rules – no indication of changing direction, flexible speed limits, communicating with other drivers by hand hanging out of the window etc. I really enjoyed that and made some cool videos as well:-)
What I didn’t enjoy that much was a fact that we paid 10x more than we should have. I’ll share with you more on local taxi and money related issues later on, stay tuned!

4. looking forward to the meeting
Before the meeting, we had to prepare for it. I arrived in Rotterdam 2,5 days ago, so everything was new for me. Luckily I made some reading at home, discussed some topics with Ildi on Sunday and attended the Tempus team meeting yesterday morning so I had a basic overview of the project.
We met with Anisha in the university campus and found a nice shady place in local garden. We had several hours to divide the roles, prepare presentation, revise objectives, brainstorm possible questions…

5. looking around
After the successful meeting, which was actually just preparation for two more upcoming meetings, tomorrow and on Thursday, we returned to our hostel and went to explore the downtown of Amman.
The reception ceremony organized by local MC was great. We had typical Arabic dinner, typical Arabic cheesy sweets and typical Arabic tea with water pipe. It was cool that I managed to meet Moni again, which originally wasn’t that sure, because of national conference taking part in other part of Jordan.