Amman, June 2001
This is a description of Amman after our first weekend there...
"The Jordanian capital of Amman is not a city built with a great deal of planning. In fact, it was basically thrown up haphazardly over the past few decades, growing from a small town of about 2000 in 1900 to a metropolis of over a million sprawling across 19 steep hills in the erstwhile Jordanian countryside. It has a few main streets, but most are nameless, narrow driveways which curve and intersect seemingly at random, often connected by staircases between the shops and hostels which cram together in the Old City downtown. The closest thing to it I can really think of is the Rhuad from Robert Jordan's A Crown of Swords.
"The best view of the city comes from the Jabal al-Qala, near where was set the story of the death of Uriah the Hittite in the days of King David when this settlement was known as Rabbah Ammon, Royal City of the Ammonites. We found it in the morning; after taking a wrong turn and stepping out onto someone's roof to take our bearings, we stopped in a shop where the woman, unable to get past our poor Arabic comprehension skills, sent her son of about seven to guide us, and with a perfectly accented English "Come on, gang!" he marched off about half a mile until we could actually see where we were going. I think the casual way in which a kid can be sent off with four foreign strangers in a huge city is perhaps the most significant understated cultural difference I've seen in Jordan.
"The citadel of Jabal al-Qala is dominated by the ruins of a Temple of Hercules, built to overlook the city when as the Roman Philadelphia it stood on the seven hills where today are found the seven bustling traffic circles which form the major landmarks to Amman's present inhabitants. Openining onto the temple courtyard is a restored palace of the Umayyad dynasty, restored because the original was demolished by the British when they were digging for Roman ruins.
"From this vantage point, one can see that the city of Amman is all white, the buildings made of the same white material by order of some past king who thought correctly it would be beautiful. The only non-white building (except at the fringes of town - ed.) is the huge light blue King Abdullah Mosque, restored just over a dozen years ago and dedicated to Jordan's founder and great-grandfather of the present monarch. In one direction - East, I think - one can just barely make out the hills toward which the city spreads in its inevitable expansion; in the others, it is urban white as far as the eye can see. Near at hand is the intact Roman ampitheater, still used for cultural performances and which can be seen after fighting off offers for special tours. Just outside are the columns and gate of the forum, where the ubiquitous children who live with a great deal of freedom in both Amman and Irbid laugh and run as they have for their playground the remains of 1900-year-old pillars and the fountains of the modern park which stands nearby. Outside this is a touristy area, filled with ATMs and drink shops and stands for the Italian-style ice cream preferred in Jordan.
"The streets of Amman are crowded, even on Friday, filled with the mixture of populations which is a hallmark of the modern city. At its best, a city is a place of meetings, and in the bustling streets of Amman jostle tourists and travellers of every description, men wearing everything from Western T-shirts and jeans to body-length garments which button at the top to white robes and red turbans, and women wearing everything from their own Western-style clothes to the more traditional hijab which comes in a rainbow of colors and fashions to the completely black robes, headscarf, and veil. Traffic is also nuts, being dominated by the cab drivers who basically do whatever they want, passing on both sides and weaving around so that every street crossing classifies as a significant adventure.
"The streets are lined with shops of every description, from small holes-in-the-wall selling soccer jerseys to the 'Big Taste of America' stores that you run into every three blocks to the local-style fast-food type joints marked by the giant wheels where stacked meat turns in a soft-edged cone before a vertical open stove while chefs with large knives chop off slices for use the shwarma, which with felafel are the cheap foods that form most of our diet. In the suq, or marketplace, you can barely move and patrons and merchants haggle over the prices of everything from clothes to gold pieces to stereos and car parts beneath unbrella tents in a large open field. Near the ampitheater is the historic King Hussein Mosque, built on the site of a mosque originally built by the rashidun caliph Umar Ibn al-Khittab, where three truly elegant Western tourists wearing flower shirts, tank tops, short skirts, etc. where tryint to talk their way in, and failing that on conditions acceptable to them, settled for having their pictures taken with their feet in the basin of ablutions. (A desire not to be associated with that made us decide to skip the Amman mosque scene.)
"In the late afternoon, we rested at our cheap hotel just down the street from a porn shop. We were staying on the roof beneath a roof of rusty poles and bamboo, which we got for about $3.75 a night, a substantial savings from the $6 or so we would have had to pay for an actual room. The sides were open, and the view of the city at night with its sparkling white lights and the green neon bars marking the minarets of the mosques was truly special to go to sleep by. That night, however, because one member of our group had a birthday and wanted his favorite food, we bounced into three taxis and sped out of the downtown past the different neighborhoods of the city, through an area of great white mansions and foreign embassies to the Abdoun, or Western quarter, where we settled in a Pizza Hut.
"The last stop of the day was the Cafe Arabesque, a true necessity in sampling the Amman nightlife, where the live singer was singing the same song the video to which is now playing in the Internet Cafe I'm at while people (who have the money) from both Amman and the rest of the world pass the evening enjoying the music, smoking shisha, dancing, and talking. The girls in our group, freed from the leering attentions of the 'Street Dogs' (see last e-mail), had 'let their hair down' a bit and through their efforts the rest of us were slowly drug from our table off to the side, to participate in the activities of the evening as people formed what seems to be the regional version of a conga (sp?) line including us crazy Americans, the red-yashmaghed and hijabed and Western-dressed Arabs, some people of African descent from somewhere in the world, all making swift, small motions to and fro to the beat of the singer's band, the feel of the traffic outside, the jostling pedestrians on the street, and the people conducting both business and pleasure well into the night across all the many hills of this tossed-up city called Amman, where people meet in the middle of the silent desert."
In light of current events, I might also mention this:
"Iraqi refugees seem to stand out in Jordan, perhaps because the Palestinians have been here for so long. In Amman, we also stumbled along a side street into an Iraqi restaurant (not the one everyone in Amman apparently knows) where our presence seemed to catch them a bit off guard, but where people started shaking our hands as we were leaving. Our waiter there worked at a hotel in Baghdad before sanctions nixed Iraqi tourism. You can still get a good meal of roast lamb and stuff for about $1.10. All kinds of people live in Amman; one person in our group has friends there whom he visits every weekend. They study with a Sufi shaykh; whenever the shaykh wants to teach them something, they go learn it, and the rest of their time they spend trying to start a publishing house and bookshop."
Still no pictures, but I'm getting tired of waiting for SIT, and am looking at other options. But I can still link to this picture of Georgia.
"The Jordanian capital of Amman is not a city built with a great deal of planning. In fact, it was basically thrown up haphazardly over the past few decades, growing from a small town of about 2000 in 1900 to a metropolis of over a million sprawling across 19 steep hills in the erstwhile Jordanian countryside. It has a few main streets, but most are nameless, narrow driveways which curve and intersect seemingly at random, often connected by staircases between the shops and hostels which cram together in the Old City downtown. The closest thing to it I can really think of is the Rhuad from Robert Jordan's A Crown of Swords.
"The best view of the city comes from the Jabal al-Qala, near where was set the story of the death of Uriah the Hittite in the days of King David when this settlement was known as Rabbah Ammon, Royal City of the Ammonites. We found it in the morning; after taking a wrong turn and stepping out onto someone's roof to take our bearings, we stopped in a shop where the woman, unable to get past our poor Arabic comprehension skills, sent her son of about seven to guide us, and with a perfectly accented English "Come on, gang!" he marched off about half a mile until we could actually see where we were going. I think the casual way in which a kid can be sent off with four foreign strangers in a huge city is perhaps the most significant understated cultural difference I've seen in Jordan.
"The citadel of Jabal al-Qala is dominated by the ruins of a Temple of Hercules, built to overlook the city when as the Roman Philadelphia it stood on the seven hills where today are found the seven bustling traffic circles which form the major landmarks to Amman's present inhabitants. Openining onto the temple courtyard is a restored palace of the Umayyad dynasty, restored because the original was demolished by the British when they were digging for Roman ruins.
"From this vantage point, one can see that the city of Amman is all white, the buildings made of the same white material by order of some past king who thought correctly it would be beautiful. The only non-white building (except at the fringes of town - ed.) is the huge light blue King Abdullah Mosque, restored just over a dozen years ago and dedicated to Jordan's founder and great-grandfather of the present monarch. In one direction - East, I think - one can just barely make out the hills toward which the city spreads in its inevitable expansion; in the others, it is urban white as far as the eye can see. Near at hand is the intact Roman ampitheater, still used for cultural performances and which can be seen after fighting off offers for special tours. Just outside are the columns and gate of the forum, where the ubiquitous children who live with a great deal of freedom in both Amman and Irbid laugh and run as they have for their playground the remains of 1900-year-old pillars and the fountains of the modern park which stands nearby. Outside this is a touristy area, filled with ATMs and drink shops and stands for the Italian-style ice cream preferred in Jordan.
"The streets of Amman are crowded, even on Friday, filled with the mixture of populations which is a hallmark of the modern city. At its best, a city is a place of meetings, and in the bustling streets of Amman jostle tourists and travellers of every description, men wearing everything from Western T-shirts and jeans to body-length garments which button at the top to white robes and red turbans, and women wearing everything from their own Western-style clothes to the more traditional hijab which comes in a rainbow of colors and fashions to the completely black robes, headscarf, and veil. Traffic is also nuts, being dominated by the cab drivers who basically do whatever they want, passing on both sides and weaving around so that every street crossing classifies as a significant adventure.
"The streets are lined with shops of every description, from small holes-in-the-wall selling soccer jerseys to the 'Big Taste of America' stores that you run into every three blocks to the local-style fast-food type joints marked by the giant wheels where stacked meat turns in a soft-edged cone before a vertical open stove while chefs with large knives chop off slices for use the shwarma, which with felafel are the cheap foods that form most of our diet. In the suq, or marketplace, you can barely move and patrons and merchants haggle over the prices of everything from clothes to gold pieces to stereos and car parts beneath unbrella tents in a large open field. Near the ampitheater is the historic King Hussein Mosque, built on the site of a mosque originally built by the rashidun caliph Umar Ibn al-Khittab, where three truly elegant Western tourists wearing flower shirts, tank tops, short skirts, etc. where tryint to talk their way in, and failing that on conditions acceptable to them, settled for having their pictures taken with their feet in the basin of ablutions. (A desire not to be associated with that made us decide to skip the Amman mosque scene.)
"In the late afternoon, we rested at our cheap hotel just down the street from a porn shop. We were staying on the roof beneath a roof of rusty poles and bamboo, which we got for about $3.75 a night, a substantial savings from the $6 or so we would have had to pay for an actual room. The sides were open, and the view of the city at night with its sparkling white lights and the green neon bars marking the minarets of the mosques was truly special to go to sleep by. That night, however, because one member of our group had a birthday and wanted his favorite food, we bounced into three taxis and sped out of the downtown past the different neighborhoods of the city, through an area of great white mansions and foreign embassies to the Abdoun, or Western quarter, where we settled in a Pizza Hut.
"The last stop of the day was the Cafe Arabesque, a true necessity in sampling the Amman nightlife, where the live singer was singing the same song the video to which is now playing in the Internet Cafe I'm at while people (who have the money) from both Amman and the rest of the world pass the evening enjoying the music, smoking shisha, dancing, and talking. The girls in our group, freed from the leering attentions of the 'Street Dogs' (see last e-mail), had 'let their hair down' a bit and through their efforts the rest of us were slowly drug from our table off to the side, to participate in the activities of the evening as people formed what seems to be the regional version of a conga (sp?) line including us crazy Americans, the red-yashmaghed and hijabed and Western-dressed Arabs, some people of African descent from somewhere in the world, all making swift, small motions to and fro to the beat of the singer's band, the feel of the traffic outside, the jostling pedestrians on the street, and the people conducting both business and pleasure well into the night across all the many hills of this tossed-up city called Amman, where people meet in the middle of the silent desert."
In light of current events, I might also mention this:
"Iraqi refugees seem to stand out in Jordan, perhaps because the Palestinians have been here for so long. In Amman, we also stumbled along a side street into an Iraqi restaurant (not the one everyone in Amman apparently knows) where our presence seemed to catch them a bit off guard, but where people started shaking our hands as we were leaving. Our waiter there worked at a hotel in Baghdad before sanctions nixed Iraqi tourism. You can still get a good meal of roast lamb and stuff for about $1.10. All kinds of people live in Amman; one person in our group has friends there whom he visits every weekend. They study with a Sufi shaykh; whenever the shaykh wants to teach them something, they go learn it, and the rest of their time they spend trying to start a publishing house and bookshop."
Still no pictures, but I'm getting tired of waiting for SIT, and am looking at other options. But I can still link to this picture of Georgia.
posted by Brian Ulrich at
5:28 PM
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