...and i began to pray.....

I've done a bit of traveling in the last two years, but i have never really felt the urge to travel blog at all. the pressing need to blog at all is something that (un?)fortunately comes and goes, anyway.

but after traveling mainly by myself for the last three and a half days, i feel like all these things have happened--and i haven't share them with anyone! !!!.
which brings me to the possibly pre-mature conclusion that i do not actually enjoy traveling by myself. however, there are so many people who do, and i think the general idea of traveling alone is somewhat attractive, or at least very romanticized and i like those sort of things, that i'll probably try it again in the future. maybe. maybe not.
heavens, why would i do that, though? i get along with most people, and i think that i'm a pretty fun/chill/nice person, who wouldn't want to be my travel companion? i think it would be a disservice to humanity to continue to travel alone--it would be a waste of my fabu abilities and personality. so there.

anyway, i got to san francisco three days ago and instantly mastered the public transportation system. suck on that, BART and CALTRAIN and and AirBART and MUNI buses and five million other acronyms! you can't outsmart me! i'm a map-reader! Post-Jordan instance of confusion #1: transportation here has actual schedules and leave on time and stuff. since i have consistently not been on time to things and missed the bus, i don't know if this is actually a good/more efficient way of doing things.

also, i rode the cable car. it was fun when i was like, "hey! i'm riding a cable car! @#$%!" and then it wasn't fun anymore because it cost, like, 11 dollars and also doesn't go very fast. moral of the story: cable cars belong in the category of Touristy Things Everyone Does But That Actually Suck.

anyway, i spent the rest of the afternoon stubbling around the Russian and Nob Hills neighborhoods of San Francisco, which are beautiful and hilly and have many alluring ice cream shops. i enjoyed finding grassy, woodsy spots in the middle of the city, like small parks or cool backyards, good trees. potted plants. they have an amazing little grassy spot overlooking the city a couple blocks up from the famous Lumbard street, it's beautiful and great for taking your shoes off. i haven't slept in the grass in sooo long...

I met some interesting people the first day. best of all, we spoke in english. i've just been wallowing in the delight of making conversation with people in english for the week that i've been back in the US. today, i sat in my friend's cousin's living room for twenty minutes, and they were all talking and i was just sitting there, and i understood everything that was said! without even trying! native languages are awesome! anyway, the first man i met introduced himself as Eskimo. he was a six foot black man with the largest diamond rings i have ever seen, bigger than Jordanian college girls, who sat across from me on the BART train. he complimented my outfit, which meant a lot to me because he was wearing a black velvor suitcoat and tux pants like it was normal at 2 in the afternoon, and so that was cool. he told me the first thing i should do in San Fran is go the Gucci store, and then go to the mall. then he asked for my email address. i'm still in Jordan-avoid males mode, so i didn't give it to him, then when he was getting off at the same subway stop i was, i rode to the next one and then back tracked. it was probably smart, anyway.

my first day, i also ate at the greatest seafood restuarant (oh! fresh shrimp! it has been too long!), Swan something or other on some street (just ask around or something), and that is where i met a man named Mike. he'd lived in San Francisco for 16 years and he loved everything about it. when he found out that i was here by myself and that i had spent the past four months studying in Amman, he referred to me repeatedly as "very balls-y", which i admit, i quite enjoyed, though the actual truth of that statement is in question. anyway, he was very entertaining, and i enjoyed playing the use-other-excuses-than-mormonism-for-why-i-can't-drink game with him ('under twenty-one' never works, 'alcoholism runs in my family' always does), and he and his friends shared their oysters with me. they were the kind that you just slurp right out of the shell, which was a first for me. the first one i ate was loaded with tobasco sauce, and i had to pretend that it was too hot for me, because they were all old men and i didn't want to show them up with my hot-foods toleration prowess. the second one i ate just by itself, just slurped that little thang right up, and it tasted exactly like what i image licking a seaside dock would taste like.

later that day, when i was hanging out in this cool park, i met a kid from boston who was hanging out for the summer in San Francisco with his brother and a few friends. we talked about obama and foreign relations and the middle east and books and how he is dropping out of college because he invented the facebook graffiti application and has a pretty solid thing going with that. so that's cool, i met someone who influences all of our lives in one little way :).

The next day, i explored this marsh land around Palo Alto. PA is where mallory has been living, its the town near Stanford. It's cute in general here. cute houses, cute downtown area, cute people. cute! but the marshlands were pretty great. marshy-ness and the smells it generates reminds me of my childhood. unfortunately, i was not exactly prepared for this type of adventure, and got some kind of nice clothes really extremely dirty, especially when i was scaling the balcony of an abandoned ranger station (which, by the way, trespassing is way scarier in the US than in Jordan, because you can't pull that whole 'i don't speak the language here' thing to avoid being arrested) and trekking thru mud that mysteriously swallowed my shoes (i got them back). anyway, after that i went to the cute parts of town, but i still smelled like marsh so it was even cooler. later met up with Mal and we ate Thai food, which i'm always told is awesome, and it's not bad, but i like indian better.

So yesterday, i performed another wonderous feat of public transportation and went to Santa Cruz, the Nor Cal surfing capital. Oh
my
GOODNESS GRACIOUS the water is freezing cold there.
i think the first day, i swam for maybe a total of an hour. it didn't help that with wind chill, the air temp was only about 65. it was sunny outside, but it was all a facade, that sun. you couldn't feel a single ray. The second day, in despair and desparate for some ocean time, a rented a wetsuit. this allowed me to swim for an hour and a half. blah. i could go to the beach in january in florida and the water would have been warmer.
i also ate the most delicious blueberry pancakes of my life in this city. i walked up to some man, asked him if he knew the area, and then asked him where in the heck i could get some pancakes. Linda's Seabreeze Cafe. Homey and bizzare, excellent pancakes.
i didn't meet very many people in Santa Cruz. it was because a) i was too busy trying to figure out how to swim without dying b) i was eating pancakes or corn on the cob, both of which were kinda overly sensual experiences and people could just tell i need some time to be alone and eat c) a lot of people were on drugs or had that shabab leer going on, so i didn't want to talk to them d) my roommates at the hostel were old ladies who went to bed at 9 and a surly french girl who never made eye contact with me e) when you did talk to people, hey used the phrase "right on" a lot, and i don't know how to respond to/handle that.

anyway, i have another week to knock out San Francisco and the surrounding territories, and also add to the list of things i've learned during my first independent traveling experience. seriously, this is the story of learning experiences. awesome! not.

it came from beneath

so....i sucked at that whole update your blog and tell people about your life half way across the world thing.
but i have about twelve more hours in jordan and i'm totally the deathbed repentance type, so i'll go for it one last time.

things i will miss about jordan:
-pita bread
-30 qersh (about fifty cent) falafel
-being able to get on the roof of any building, anywhere
-the foreigner treatment (the good kind where you get things for free and stuff)
-two hour church block
-microbuses can take you anywhere in the country
-fireworks all over the city every night
-adventures with comrade Nikki and other assorted peoples
-the complete removal from my 'real' (aka stateside) life and the amazing perspective this allows

i'd write a rebuttal "things i wont miss" list, but i don't want to get all angsty again, not when i'm so close to getting out. one of my biggest accomplishments this summer is that as bitter as i may have been at times, i'm not leaving bitter. i don't hate Amman. i don't hate arabic, or arabs, or my teachers here. i don't even really hate my host family (though i am never ever never doing a homestay again). i probably will record some of my bitterness so that i can have something to bring me back to earth when i'm feeling all nostalgic and romantic and orientalist about my time here, but not in this public forum.
but hey, i still have twelve more hours. and a day in egypt. and a return to the middle east in a very short time. this isn't a send off. this isn't an end. i can't even attempt to draw some overarching conclusions until the 12 hour plane ride. but these sort of things, study abroads and surrealism and such, they don't really have appropriate endings anyway. they just sort of taper off or explode violently or get drowned in this weird sleety white-wash of everything that has happened in the past period replaying itsself in your mind. how very very strange it all is, all these people i've met and things i've done and thoughts i've had.
fare thee.