Meeting My Host Family

I was incredibly nervous about meeting my host family. I mean, who wouldn’t be? We were all waiting to be picked up from the hotel surmising about our families. Another student equated it to being picked up from kindergarten, except this time we didn’t know which adults were our parents. One by one we left. And finally, Zeina, our coordinator, called my name and told me my host dad was here to pick me up. First impressions: he is the cutest little old Jordanian man ever. Really friendly. He can speak English and I can tell they’ve been hosting students for a while because if I look like I don’t understand something, he’ll say it in English and then teach me how to say it in Jordanian Arabic.

My host mom seems nice. She made us spaghetti with meat in it for dinner, although I think she did that because I’m Italian. One of the first questions my host dad asked me was whether I was from America or Italy and I know they got the Italian vibe from my last name. The house is nice – they live above a falafel restaurant on the second/third floor. The uncle lives below us next to the restaurant.

I’m pretty sure we have a maid, although my info sheet about the family said they didn’t. If not, then there is a very friendly lady who does the ironing. Also, you can definitely tell they are Christian; crosses are easily found around the home as well as a statue of Mary. They already knew that I was Catholic and my host dad says he’ll show me where the Arabic Catholic Church is.

Technically I have 5 host siblings. The eldest daughter is married and doesn’t live in the house. The youngest daughter lives with the grandmother and not in the house either (I haven’t had the courage to ask why). My host brother, Rami, is really helpful. He’s shown me where I can find drinking water and the balcony that overlooks the corner of the street. My other host brother I haven’t seen yet, but I’m fairly confident he lives in the house. Finally, I share a room with the second oldest, Christine, who’s 23. She should be coming home soon so I’ll meet her then.

The houses don’t really have heating, so it’s cold. I’m currently sitting about a foot from a space heater and even then only my legs are warm. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s in the low 50s inside. It’s about 8 degrees Celsius outside, according to my host brother and my weather app says it’s 46 Fahrenheit. It’s definitely much warmer than I expected. It’s so funny because Amman is like DC in the respect that no one knows what to do when it snows. Apparently it snowed 6 inches last week and things were crazy. People ran to supermarkets to stock up on food and traffic was horrendous. I showed my host brother a picture of the snow back home and told him how warm I thought it was outside. He was surprised.

Tomorrow I get to try to take a taxi for the first time, which I’m very nervous about because taxis try to cheat you a lot here. Hopefully I’ll get to the University okay.