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Coffee Poisoning

by - 6:18 AM

I feel that the best way to procrastinate doing my shit ton of Arabic homework would be to tell you about my could've-been-potentially-life-threating-but-is-now-a-funny-story experience. Upon having a some-what rough day, I met a friend that night at Jebel Webbdeh (a nice neighborhood with amazing views of Amman), to sit and gossip about my "I love you but I want to kill you right now" moment with my host mom...[nothing major, just an extreme lack of independence as i'm used to in the US]. So Samantha and I are sitting on what we think is a public wall, overlooking the city, when a nice looking family with 4 kids comes out of the car and the following occurs: They start speaking to us in Arabic, we stare blankly back at them, they start speaking to us in English, they invite us in for coffee [totally normal and non-creepy to do here], we politely refuse, they invite us in for coffee again, we politely refuse again, they invite us in for coffee a third time, where at this point, my instincts were to get up and walk away, when Samantha replies with a peppy, "sure!". We proceeded down the stairs with this random family [for some reason the fact that they had children was reassuring that we weren't walking to our death bed], when we walk into their house, or lack there of. Like I said in a previous post, cleanliness is a huge deal here because guests come over unexpectedly, all day long. The fact that they didn't have a clean house and there was massive amounts of crap piled on their couches, probably should've been red flag #1. We sat down when the dad told one of his sons, in Arabic, to go get us coffee, while the mom [the only one who spoke good English], started off by telling us that her and her husband our divorced, one of her sons mom is from Venezuela, and than asking me whether Venezuela is in America. We then got the FAQ's like, "what religion are you" [answer: always Christian], "what does your dad do for work", "everyone in California is rich, right?". At this point, 10 more guys came into the room all introducing themselves, while we received multiple marriage proposals [rather tempting, but just had to refuse]. This is sounding a lot less creepy and a lot more inviting than it really was. The son came back into the room with 2 cups of coffee, one for me and one for Samantha, while him and the dad exchanged some sort of look and whispered something in Arabic [like we could've understood it if they yelled it]. Apparently Samantha was oblivious to this odd encounter between father and son, and proceeded to drink the coffee, while I tried to figure out how to discreetly make the coffee disappear from my cup. They began to ask us strange questions while the boys were trying to look us up on Facebook. Samantha and I non-verbally agreed, "this is creepy as shit, this coffee is most likely poisoned, and we should probably run out of the house now". When the mom started explaining that when they saw us, they had just gotten back from the police station because they were arrested for getting in a fight with their neighbors, we took it upon ourselves to abruptly and awkwardly leave, and speed-walked out of their house waiting for a Dexter-like scenario to happen. We're now basically running up their stairs outside of the house, and the whole family comes outside looking up at us confused, while the sons are yelling "goooood biiiyyee preeeety laydieees". We walked down the empty non-lit street, and I found out that Samantha was oblivious to the fact that there was something weird going on with the coffee situation. The walk back to the main circle was spent trying to convince Samantha that she won't abruptly die, and that they weren't extremely creepy-letspoison2americangirls-type of people. Good news: Samantha is alive.

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  1. Hahaha When I went to tunisia people would always offer to marry me.. Funny at first but it got annoying with time.. !