After a 3 hour flight from Austin to Chicago, a 6 hour layover (during which I had a wonderful dinner with the Huang family), a 12 1/2 hour flight from Chicago to Amman, and the airport business of getting a visa and going through customs, I am finally here in Madaba, Jordan. People kept asking me if I was nervous, or anxious, or (fill in the blank with an emotion), so I tried to write down what I was feeling on the plane, but I was drawing a blank. For some reason I am completely nonplussed by this move.

I wrote: “This feels more like a flight to Milwaukee than to Amman, Jordan.”

And I think that’s because this just feels right. I’ve been to this school before, and with modern technology, I might as well be 8 hours away instead of 8 time zones away. More importantly, it just feels like what I should be doing. Even though I don’t have my full teaching, co-curricular, or living assignments yet, and won’t see the classroom for two weeks… my gut reaction is good (except my gut reaction to some of the airplane food… I’m glad I had an aisle seat).

Life just works itself out. This was not my first idea for a job this year. In fact, I didn’t even apply until after I had already been rejected from 3 other opportunities. And I couldn’t be happier that it worked out like that.

FUN CULTURAL TIDBITS: One of the screens that flashed when the plane was showing information like ground speed and where we were on a map was the direction to the Ka’ba in Mecca. Also, Google now automatically searched in Arabic!