Mansef

Yesterday our professor, Dr. Saad Abu Diyeh, took us to a party in a village near Ajloun (the Crusader castle from previous post). We arrived by bus around 5:30pm and were ushered into a building where the women were separated from the men and brought to sit down in a parlor. There we were offered coffee (from shared cups) and the music began! There was lots of dancing and the women taught us the Jordanian dabke. Dabke is a traditional dance done throughout the Arab world, but the steps are different from country to country. They took it easy on us, giving us the basic version, but a few times the women got so into the music they did it full out. It was something else. Will have to find someone here in Amman to teach it to me. Afterwards they brought out big dishes of rice and lamb meat with flat bread and a yogurt sauce. They were kind enough to bring us plates but they only seem to use them for the rice. Most of our hostesses reached right over the plates and picked off bits of the meat with their hands, often plopping chunks down onto our plates, encouraging us to eat more. By the way, it was delicious. Really good. Amazing. I only stopped eating because I literally had no room left. How they got the meat to fall right off the bone like that I don't know but YUM. Then it was time to go! How quickly it all went by. On the bus ride back, we stopped at the home of a friend of Dr. Saad's. He invited us onto his patio for cinnamon tea that tasted like rice pudding. Here is a picture of the whole group standing at the top of a dam outside of Amman, taking in the evening scenery: