So, here's the scoop now. I'm sitting in al-Husn on Friday afternoon in the Dew's apartment, while Nancy sleeps and the Dews are out visiting members with the Bradfords from Amman. Sounds like we're at home, right?
Nope!
As of our lasts posts, we were still all set to live up here in al-Husn. Our original plan was to live with a member family up here in their large house, but to accomodate the most amount of students, we gave up our spot there to 5 girls, who are having a blast. We were planning on staying with the Dews, the branch president couple up here. But, a small twist was added to our situation - we couldn't live with the Dews, since it's against mission rules. We then had to find some other place up here. The apartment above the Dews was available - really big, nice, clean, and cheap - but only until June 1st. We spent this whole last week pretty much homeless; we stayed at the Dews while they went down south to Petra, but we had to leave by the time they got back.
So, after much deliberation, we decided to go back down south to Amman. We will both miss al-Husn a lot - it's beautiful up here, life is calm, the members are great, everything is amazing. The only problem is the 4-5 hour daily commute - 2 hours each way, sometimes more when busses break down. The actual ride from Irbid to Amman is only 1 hour, sometimes less, but taking taxis to the stations, waiting for the busses to come, and having busses constantly overheat was too much. All the other single students are staying up here - bus time for them is hangout time since they have nothing else to do. Nancy was just spending way too much time alone and stranded up there.
We're in al-Husn today because we came up with the Bradfords (the missionary couple in Amman - he's district president and was my old Arabic 102 teacher in 2003), since they made a branch visit. We're going back down with them to our apartment later this afternoon.
We finally have an apartment in Amman. It was difficult to find and get since I was spending all my time commuting instead of finding apartments (even though Kirk wanted us to come out here in the first place...we haven't had any help from him finding apartments...grr...). Unfortunately it's a little expensive, but we have two empty beds in our place since it's so big, so hopefully we can get some apartment-mates!
It's a 30 minute walk or an 8 minute bus ride to the UJ (that's a lot better than 5 hours...) in a really quiet neighborhood near other students as well. It's a big place, fully furnished, but kind of a dump. They just repainted it like last week and never ventilated it, so the whole house reeks of fresh paint and cigarette smoke (if anyone has suggestions on how to get those smells out of our apartment, let us know!), and they never cleaned up, so there is dust and dirt and paint everywhere. Tomorrow is clean up day! We also have to find sheets and pillows, since the ones already there are pretty disgusting. We don't feel at home at all yet - we're actually pretty disgusted - but as soon as we get it cleaned up, we'll be able to finally be settled in, after more than 2 weeks of gypsy-like homelessness in 3 continents!
We'll also get internet set up soon. We're calling the company on Sunday and they shoul have it installed by Monday, so if you don't see any posts for a while, that's why. We'll be temporarily offline. We'll also get some pictures of our new place uploaded - hopefully before and after shots so you can see what we have to clean up.
Life has been extremely stressful these past couple weeks - probably the hardest weeks of our lives - but those weeks are over now. We finally have a place to live. We are finally settled down (or will be after tomorrow). What stress... If we ever live out here later in life, I'll be working with the government, who will actually organize everything for us and have a nice apartment and everything lined up already...that would've been nice here, but alas! It was definitely not the case!
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