This Wasn't What We Were Expecting

Living in a country where very few people speak English, we learn to expect that there will be misunderstandings.  Everything won't be the same as we think.  Today was a misunderstanding, and we're not sure where the breakdown was.

We scheduled the day with Jamal to deliver food boxes, so we got up early and drove an hour and a half to Amman to his office.  We were there by 10:30 and he was expecting us, but he wasn't in a hurry to go out on the delivery.  We visited for a while and then he said he would go somewhere (we thought it was to get the food) and we should meet him in an hour.  So we went to Safeway, bought some groceries and waited for Jamal.  However, when he finally came back, there were no boxes.  We don't know what happened, but it sounded like he had never planned to go out delivering.  Or maybe the man in the warehouse slept in today, we're not sure which.

Then he asked if we would like to go to lunch, and by that time we were hungry, so we said we would, thinking that there would be a food delivery afterward.  He said we could go to a nice restaurant that served oriental food, so we said sure we like oriental, thinking that meant Chinese.  The lunch was great, but the only thing oriental was the sesame seeds on the samosa.  Everything else was Jordanian.

Jamal speaks English--but he really lost us today.  We ended up driving over 3 hours, spending 70 JD's for lunch and didn't deliver anything to anybody.  But we had fun.

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This woman was sitting outside the restaurant and I couldn't resist taking her picture.  Jamal gave her some money.