Greek Orthodox Christian Epiphany / Dinner @ Fouad's house

So I was mistaken in thinking that I was going to a Greek Orthodox baptism at the Dead Sea this Friday. Turns out we were actually invited to the Greek Orthodox Epiphany celebration at the Jordan River. Unfortunately because of heightened security around the West Bank border, we didn't get to see the actual river. At any rate, the service was pretty interesting albeit long. Oddly enough, because of the significant drop in elevation from Amman to the Jordan River (near where it meets the Dead Sea), the weather was much nicer there than it was in the city. I managed to get a few pictures which I'll post soon.

Later that day, we were out getting good in Jebel Webideh near my friend Cody's place, and we struck up a conversation with a police officer who was posted up at the Falafel stand where we ate.The policeman, Fou'ad, later invited Cody and I to eat dinner with his family on Saturday night. At 6pm on Saturday, Fou'ad and his brother-in-law, Ahmed, picked up Cody and I and we headed out to their father's home in Zarqa (a small city about half an hour outside Amman). There we met Fou'ad's father, Yusuf and his 13 year old brother, Mahmoud. For dinner we had a traditional Jordanian dish called Maghlooba, which is basically just chicken and yellow rice. The meal was incredible, and they kept feeding us, insisting that we continue eating (very common in Arab Muslim culture), until we proclaimed,"Hamdulillah" (literally meaning "Praise be to God", in this case meaning "Praise be to God that my belly is full", also common in the culture). Fou'ad's family was quite friendly, and they've insisted that we come back another time, insha'allah.

Classes are going well. The mid-term exam is coming up on February 5th, but since I've been doing well on the quizzes I'm not really concerned. My street level convo skills are still not where I'd like them to be, but in any case I get complimented a lot on my pronunciation and fluency.

No big plans for this week. My buddy Matthias is coming to visit in a few weeks so I'm sure we'll be trying to coordinate and work out a gameplan for when he visits in mid-February.