Independence Day!

So the fourth of July dawned bright and early and was a nice lovely day. Allison joined me for church since the missionary couple there are the parents of her stake president back home in Utah. Said stake president was visiting since it's the end of his parents' mission and they wanted to see a few of the sites in the holy land together. 

It was nice having a bunch of people, and I got a nice surprise a couple of days before where I saw Matt Bird! He was here in Amman for 2 weeks to work on a film project for the arabic program at BYU. It was a rather nice surprise and it's been great to see him. 

So after church (and running some errands for our party later) we went out to eat.  

Our wonderfully patriotic decorations

We had decided to go with a group of essentially all the BYU/UoU interns and other friends met this summer to eat burgers and fries and watch the soccer match. So we went to a place called Firefly down on Rainbow street and it was AMAZING. 

It was the France vs. Germany game and it was intense! Definitely a good game and nice to watch sports and eat burgers to celebrate Independence Day. (We do what we can when abroad...)

Watching the game

I kinda went into this dinner thinking that it was going to be rather expensive for not that much food (typical of Rainbow street) and I was pleasantly surprised! This picture doesn't really do it justice, but this basket of fries was HUGE. I couldn't finish it all. 

You also can't really see the ingredients since they put them on the bottom here, but I decided to finally try a burger that had a fried egg on it. And it also had tomato, lettuce and (turkey) bacon! I love living in the Middle East. I can actually eat the bacon and pepperoni here since it's all either turkey or chicken or beef products! Yay pork allergy!

Man, you guys. Why have I waited so long to eat a burger this way? It was absolutely DELICIOUS. New favorite way to have a burger. So nommy. 

Yum. (And the whole meal only cost 4 JD. Score!)

So after the game, we left Firefly and headed back to our place for a bit of a party. We wanted to make it a very American experience so I made a cake and the chocolate chip cookies, we improvised on s'mores materials, had chips, watermelon and...jello. (She's from Utah, so that explains it). 

It was definitely an interesting experience having everyone over. The drinking age here is 18 and so quite a few people came to dinner, let alone back to our party already smashed and that was rather interesting. I definitely played babysitter more than once throughout the night. 

The party started off okay, but unfortunately friends of friends of friends kept coming throughout the night. We had only planned on like, 20 people coming total. We ended up having 50-60 people come that night. (Always a pleasant experience when my roommates had only told me the night before that we were having a party at our apartment after dinner-when I thought it was just dinner). 

Luckily there were enough of us who were sober (yay BYU friends helping me!) to keep people in line and I definitely put my foot down on smoking. (Yay another allergy). I made sure that if they were smoking, they were on the balcony. Which was great, but this is how our floor ended up after the party: 

The living room and kitchen also looked like this. 

Not exactly what I was expecting, but it was okay. My roommates agreed that a. they would never host a party at our place again this summer and b. it got way out of hand with who came and ergo they would be clearer in the future on whose responsibility was what/whom they could invite. 

I really did end up having an overall great day, and had a great conversation with Kendra and her husband Phil during the night. (They are 2 years behind me in the arabic program so we never crossed paths before). 

Traditional patriotic picture

I will say that the thing that made me the MOST sad (especially given the news this week that they're moving back to Atlanta!!!!), was that I missed out on the 4th of July fireworks and get together that Drew was able to have with Cam, Ale and Ethan. They had a great time and it made me really miss them, but at least they sent me this great picture of them all hanging out. 

*sigh* It seems that Drew and I are doomed to only have 1 of our siblings live near us at a time. Oh well, maybe they will come up to DC for the 4th in a few years since it IS an awesome show.