Long overdue update

I have midterms this week but I promised that I would give some long overdue updates to what's going on in my life so this is my form of procrastination of choice at the moment. That and cooking (read as trying my darndest to make all the healthy ingredients I bought as unhealthy as possible). 

The truth is that a lot has happened that I wasn't entirely comfortable with writing about until we figured everything out. It's been about a month since we figured out that the apartment we were living in was a functioning brothel. We found out in stages: after a huge fight between prostitutes in the parking lot adjacent to the building that the coffee shop we lived next too attracted so many wealthy foreign (i.e. from the Gulf States) because that's where they pick up their clients. Then that the prostitutes actually live in our building and enter discreetly after curfew through a secret entrance in the back of the cafe. Then that the owner of our building knew...then that she is actually the sister-in-law of the owner of the cafe.

Once we knew all the clues were obvious and fell into place, like the red lights and moulin rogue windmill that adorns the coffee shops or the elevator buttons to secret floors. Likewise, most of the harassment happens on the corner by our building and we learned that standing there with your hair uncovered in immodest clothes by Middle Eastern standards is going to get you propositioned to. (I think Alexa holds the record, four times.) I credit my escaping propositions to my average to below-average looks and the fact that I wear men's pants most of the time. The more beautiful girls of the program have not been so lucky and two were groped.
It was very clear that we needed to move as soon as possible, but of course it wasn't that simple. There are no dorms in the university itself, but plenty of dorm buildings in the surrounding areas. Most were full since the school year has already started and all have a curfew of 10:00 or maybe even earlier. Fortunately, the owner of the boy's building sped up his construction and furnishings of a new apartment building and all of girls were able to move in there this week. The apartments are very luxurious and obviously above Middlebury's budget. The big bonus for everyone was that there is no curfew in the new apartments and men will probably be able to come and hang out in a shared apartment there, like we can in their building. 

However, I chose not to move into the new apartments with everyone else. There was an opportunity for a few of us to live in a dorm building with other Jordanian girls and possibly an Arab roommate and I felt that this way much more important to me that greater freedoms to stay out at night. I was the only girl to take up this opportunity so currently the only American living in a building full of Arab girls, which is hard but I think it is good challenge for me to meet more Arabs and speak a lot of Arabic. Though I am in an apartment by myself right now, I am very excited because my Syrian roommate is moving in on November 1. The fact that we were not roomed with Jordanians or native Arabic speakers was my biggest disappointment from this program, so I am ecstatic that the bad situation of living in a brothel turned into a wonderful opportunity to immerse myself even further in the language and the culture.