The Amman Party Circuit

It's been a rash of parties around here.

From Sam and Ester's Wedding

Thursday night, a couple friends of mine got married in a fascinatingly multi-cultural wedding. Ester is Czechoslovakian (literally ... one parent Czech, the other Slovak!), currently lives in Switzerland with her mother and her mother's partner and his son, and has also lived in Germany. Her friends and family came from all those countries. Sameh is Palestinian-Jordanian, but he and his brother lived in Canada for years, so his brother and a bunch of their friends came from Canada. And I've known them both for almost a year, and know a lot of his cousins and aunts and uncles, so it was a fun gathering. I also met Ester's mother and her partner at Sam and Ester's engagement party, and it was great to see them again ... and to practice my German! As I told Koni, aside from a little bit in Hungary, I think the last time I really spoke German was at that engagement party. Now I not only had Koni, his sons, the girlfriend of one of them, and Ester's mom to speak High German to, but also some other Swiss women who got a real kick out of my Baernduutsch and spoke Swiss German with me. That was a rare treat, indeed!

Friday night I had a very nice birthday party at my place - equally multicultural, with Heba bringing along her UN friends, my roommate Keri from last summer who had a great time practicing her Azeri with Darius from the UN, the French girl who's subletting from us this summer, some Jordanian friends, some American friends, my Scottish co-worker and her Jordanian boyfriend.... And a number of those people also went to dinner with me last night for a nice, juicy, fat USDA steak.... Yum! If only there'd been pie....

Then there was a party on Saturday night at Sameh's cousin's new husband's house that I wasn't going to go to, until I found out that one of my Peace Corps friends was going to be there. (He's also basically my cousin, since he lived with and was adopted by the same Bani Hassan tribe that I did.) Andy's teaching Arab kids in Nazareth in Israel, and I've been trying to catch him in Amman every time he's been here recently, with no luck until this past evening. But at this point, he'll be in Jordan pretty much until his school year starts in Israel, so I should be seeing a lot more of him. In fact, he converted to Islam and got married this week to a Jordanian girl he started dating in Peace Corps. Anyway, it was great fun to catch up with him, and watch him quizzing all his Peace Corps Language and Culture Facilitators (or LCFs for short) on just what he was supposed to do the next day to get married.... I'm looking forward to meeting his beautiful wife this weekend! Andy is an amazing photographer, and his pictures of Noureen are just incredible!

I don't know how I ended up, for once in my life, in the in-crowd, but it's quite fun!