RISE Talent Contest

Saturday, November 16th

8 am. This morning, for the first time, I'm freezing while jogging. It feels a bit like summer has been washed away in one day by yesterday's long rain shower. I manage to make it back home just in time to stay dry before the rain and thunderstorm return.

While having breakfast with Lea and Rebecca, I decide to take a break from the Advanced Arabic course on Saturdays. The assignments and group projects for the mid-terms are starting to overwhelm me, and I really need my Saturdays for university stuff at the moment. So, with the unpleasant weather outside, we all cozy up in different places in our apartment, dedicating our free time to the mid-term assignments.

And time flies by – all of a sudden it's already 6 pm, and we had planned to go to a talent show. The RISE Talent Contest in Amman was launched last year with the aim of promoting and supporting young talents in Jordan and their creativity. Young people between the ages of 18 and 28 compete in four categories: music, singing, dancing, and art. The winner of each category will receive a voucher for music or art lessons worth 500 JD.

The talent show started at 4 pm, and of course, we are late. It's already half past 6 when we reach the Al Hussein Cultural Centre. It's a huge, new building complex near the Friday Markets, and the spacious lobby with high ceilings that we enter is impressive. The contest takes place in a large theater hall in the basement. Mubarak has been waiting for us there for about an hour, but he's not particularly surprised by our lateness. To Lea's delight, we arrive just in time for the dance acts. First, we see a group performing k-pop, followed by a solo dancer. He's from Syria, calls himself "Sky," and performs contemporary dance. It's beautiful and incredibly moving.

Then the show is already over – we only made it in time to see the last two acts. It's a bit disappointing, but it was already worth it just for these two performances. During the intermission, we realize that in some ways, Amman is really a small town. Mubarak, who is also involved in theater and the hip-hop and dance scene in Amman, knows almost all the dancers and musicians who have performed here today (including Sky, who was just on stage), and Lea also recognizes some faces from a hip-hop event she attended last week. And the guys are still having fun during the intermission: out of nowhere, a jam circle forms, and the dancers show off their hip-hop and breakdance moves. Everyone here just radiates a wonderful zest for life.

After the intermission, the awards ceremony. The winner in the dance category is Saleem, another friend of Mubarak's who also acts with him. Unfortunately, we missed his dance performance with a puppet, but maybe we'll have the chance to see his performance some other time soon. Now, Mubarak invites us to his home, and I spend some more time there with him, Rebecca, Lea, and Sky before heading home. I still have a few tasks to complete today.

One of them: baking a cake. Dr. Amina, our Tarabot manager, was on a business trip in Taiwan for a week and will be welcomed back at Tarabot tomorrow with a big breakfast. Like everyone else, I want to contribute something to the breakfast and bake a coconut sheet cake. An XXL sheet cake, as I already noticed at lunchtime, because our ridiculously large oven only has one tray that is one meter long. 

So, when I start preparing the dough with one kilo of flour and almost one kilo of sugar, I realize that our huge kitchen is unfortunately lacking not only baking sheets: there is no mixer or blender, not even a whisk. Rebecca and Lea have a good laugh when they join me in the kitchen later and see that I've prepared the little milk frother that we gave to Rebecca as a birthday present. A little creativity is everything.

With the milk frother, fork, spoon, and a lot of muscle power, I manage to make a quite decent dough, and after a few initial difficulties, we even manage to get the gas oven working. In the end, I am surprised that the cake almost looks as I imagined it under the given conditions. Where there's a will, there's a way.