Oh My Gosh!!!!! I just got my acceptance email from NSLI-Y!!!!!!!! I can not believe this! I am going to be spending 6 weeks living in Amman, Jordan and learning how to speak Arabic. On March 16, I was sitting in math class and I got an email from nsliy. It didn't have any content, which was a bit worrying at first but I opened the attachment and read 'We are pleased to inform you that...' and all I wanted to do was stand up and starting jumping up and down and screaming. After class, I ran out and read the acceptance letter, acceptance contract and brief program details and I just kept rereading them over and over again. I looked up all the details of the place where we would be studying, more information about Amman etc. Here is a quick map for reference- I just couldn't stop gushing about Jordan to anyone that would listen. The food, the weather, the location, the culture, the people, the language...everything!
Soon after I got my first packet that let me know that I will be going through the American Councils and that Pre-Departure Orientation in Washington D.C. will be from June 13th-June 15th (only 5 days after school gets out) and we will head to Jordan as a group from there. We will be in Jordan from June 15-July 29th and will be taking classes at the Qasid Institute 5 days a week for 4 hours. Reading more about it made me realize that this is actually happening. For such a long time, I had been reading people's blogs about their experiences and hoping so badly that I would get a chance at this amazing opportunity as well and I can't believe that that is a reality now!!!!!! Also important to note- a lot of people have been asking me whether it is safe to travel to Jordan given the current situation in the Middle East and I'd like to address that by saying 1) It often seems that people forget that these are places where people go about their daily lives safely everyday and Jordan is a very friendly place to both tourists and foreigners 2) NSLIY is implemented by the State Department, which is who people turn to to find out whether a country is safe to travel to. They are perhaps the most well-informed of the relative safety of travel to different parts of the world and they would never send high school students to a country where they felt that their safety was at risk. Bye! Sophia
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We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us. !أهلا و ساهلاHi! I'm Sophia, a high schooler from the San Francisco Bay Area. I received a scholarship through the State Dept. to study Arabic in Jordan in the summer of 2016. Categories
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