When I arrived at Queen Alia Airport, I confidently handed my passport to the border patrol agent with the page open that contained my beautiful visa. This border patrol agent looked at my picture, and my nationality, quietly reached into a drawer below his desk, and swiftly stamped my passport in purple ink with a stamp that reads: "CONTACT THE NEAREST POLICE STATION WITHIN ONE MONTH". (Thank you, can I have my $40 back now please?)
Apparently, the University knows that this is often a problem, so they explained during our orientation how to renew our visa at the police station. Doing this is important so I took notes. I clearly remember the program director saying, "First you need proof of enrollment at the University. Go to the building where you payed your tuition, go to the second floor, and go to office number 3." So, with two friends, I went to said building.
The first problem that I encountered was that building floors in Jordan are labeled differently then in the United States. The ground floor is 0, the second floor 1, etc. After getting lost on the wrong floor (everything is labeled in Arabic) we were kindly directed to the correct floor where we found a nice man who was willing to help us. He invited us to sit down. This is when I found out that he was the director of the engineering program. We had been told to go to the wrong building. This kind man then advised us that we needed to visit the administration building near the main gate where human resources is located. I snapped a photo of that building:
After climbing up to the "2nd" floor, we found human resources. A woman in the hallway asked us, in Arabic, if we needed help. Quickly realizing that we couldn't easily understand her, she asked in broken English, "Where are you from? Spain? Turkey?" (I'm constantly asked if I'm Spanish or Turkish. It must be my lovely desert suntan.) I never say that I am from America, because then I'm immediately associated with President Bush, so I told her that I'm from Chicago. This softens the blow. The woman continued, "Oh, you are from America (rolling her eyes). Hamburger!" Well, I'd much rather be known as the guy from the "Hamburger" country than the guy from the 'we started the Iraq War' country so I smiled and said, "Yes." She then told us that we were in the wrong building (again) and directed us to the Deanship of Student Affairs building across campus. There I took another picture:
We climbed up to the "2nd" floor again and managed to find a kind man who spoke enough English to understand what we were looking for. He asked around his office to find out if we were in the right place. We were not. He then told us to go the the Registration Building.
Fortunately, this building was next door so we quickly made it to the next "2nd" floor. We even found office number 3. Upon entering the room, the woman who was working at the desk made eye contact with us and quickly looked back down at the stack of papers in front of her. We stepped in closer and explained that we were looking for our proof of registration. She said, "give me your I.D.'s and come back in 10 minutes. " We looked at each other and handed over our I.D.'s to the woman. Not knowing if this woman meant 10 minutes in real time or Jordanian time, we waited for 25 minutes outside and then went back. The woman handed us our I.D.'s and a piece of paper and told us to go to room 1 to get a stamp. We walked down the hall, past a gaggle of Jordanian students and into room 1. We pushed through the crowd of maybe 25 people in the small office and approached the desk to ask for our piece of paper to be stamped. The woman there said that we were in the wrong office. We needed to go down the hall and find the OTHER office number 1. I snapped a photo outside of that office, I wish I could have shown you the scene inside:
Down the hall we found the other office number 1 and asked for a stamp. Surprise! This too was the wrong office, but we were in luck, this WAS the office where we needed to get a signature on the back of our registration paper before getting THE stamp. Good thing we found our way there by accident because I didn't know a signature was required. The man laughed at us, put down his cigarette for a minute, and signed the back of our forms. Better yet, he actually pointed in the direction of the correct office where we could get our stamp. More than an hour after we started, our mission was accomplished. I can't wait to go to the police station. Something tells me I'll have something else to report about.On the way out from campus after my stamp adventure I snapped a quick picture of some students who were graduating from the university:
In order not to be rude I covertly attempted to take this interesting picture (you may need to enlarge it to see why its interesting to me as a Westerner):
Finally, to follow up on my last post, I took one more picture of 2 of the restaurants across the street from the main campus gate:
Ma'asalaama.
6 comments:
Its great knowing that the biggest thing that has come out of the United States to the middle east outside of the war is the hamburger. Priceless.
Why is the group all women? Is that a religious thing, or is it just the way the school does it?
My guess is that it is a combination of both... but I can't answer your question with certainty. If I find out I'll let you know.
I suppose it's only fair that the Jordanians know us for hamburgers, because most Americans just say "oh, falafel!" when they hear about the Middle East outside of Iraq.
Speaking of falafel, that sounds really good right now...
You are definitely getting a taste for the culture, bureaucracy and ineptitude there; sounds familiar, doesn't it? The picture of the woman totally covered in black was interesting. I wonder what he'll see in that photo...
You're certainly learning about the culture, including the bureaucracy; the picture of the woman covered head to toe in black is interesting; don't you wonder why he took that picture? My guess about the all women picture is that it was possibly an all girls' college... they may not have mixed gender classes there.
Mmmmmm, this sounds pretty familiar... I'm almost sure there are many Brazilians working for the University of Jordan :)
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