Explorations

Well, classes start tomorrow, so I've been taking the opportunity to experience Amman in all of its contradictory aspects. I've also been hanging out with the folks at Qasid, who are a diverse and fun crowd. Nothing particularly sticks out as the crowning highlight of the past few days, but some things worth mentioning.

• Amman food is incredible. The shawarma I'm eating in the picture in my second post was, in retrospect, crap--it was somewhat dry, and the French fries that accompanied it were cold and made from old oil. By contrast, the (pricier) shawarma I had in a cafe in the Mukhtar mall--which, besides the cafe, had only Western restaurants--was amazing. It was chicken instead of lamb, and it had a delightfully creamy sauce as well. The French fries were fresh and tasty, if oversalted. Other delights included a shish tawook in downtown Amman on Wednesday--basically a chicken kebab with great seasoning accompanied by delicious herbed bread and tomatoes and onions. There was also the lamb kebab in the little restaurant in Ajloun that we stopped at after visiting Ajloun yesterday. I'm mostly eating falafel for dinner, though--a sandwich costs about $.50, max, and though I've been assured I'll tire of it, that moment has not yet come. There's a stand just two minutes walk from my apartment, and if you come at the right time they'll just have fried up a new batch.
• Qasid organized a trip to Ajloun yesterday, as I mentioned. It's an old castle built by Saladdin's nephew to defend the Muslims from the Crusaders. Perched high on a hilltop about an hour north of Amman, it has views, to the west, of the Jordan River and the west bank and, to the north, of Syria. The defenders of the fort could send smoke signals in all four directions, to Iraq, the Hejaz, Jerusalem, and Syria. Ajloun also has the distinction of never having been captured--either by the Crusaders or by the Mongols, who attacked it later. Unfortunately, my camera batteries died halfway through the visit, but I'll be sure to steal photos from my friends and roommates. In the meantime, though, some snapshots:

From the outside, a view:














Crossing the moat:



















An arrow slit inside:



















The outer stairway (beware of boiling oil!)



















Katie and John looking pensive:

• I have roommates! Mohammed came on Wednesday evening--he's from California, son of Iraqi parents but he grew up in Kuwait and the US. He graduated from college about 4 years or so ago and has been working in various Middle East-related jobs (I think) for that time. Yersen (or so I've transliterated his name) is a 19-year old student at university in Istanbul who's looking to pick up Arabic as a second language. He's studying business administration, and at Qasid he'll be starting on the Modern Standard track, but he's just beginning to learn the language.
• The Qasid administrators are wonderful people. Granted, I haven't spent much time with the teachers, but the folks who've been running our orientation--Osama, the director of the institute, Abdullah, the outreach director, and Faysal, the academic director--are incredibly kind and welcoming. Most are Western-born or educated, so they speak English as a native language. It also helps that some of them have come to Arabic as a second language, so they have experience learning it just like we did. I'm not sure if that's true for the instructors themselves, but I'll have to see. Faysal actually lives in my building, so I got a ride with him down to Qasid yesterday morning. Otherwise my walk is about 25 minutes--fine, but happily missed in the hot weather!
• Amman has a huge diversity of nightlife. Where I live, Kharabsheh, is a pretty quiet neighborhood, but just a taxi ride away is the balad, or downtown, where there's a very lively Arab street scene. I spent Tuesday night with Qasid people in a maqwa, or coffeehouse, drinking tea, playing chess, and indulging in a bit of sheesha (what Jordanians call hookah. Very weird). Wednesday night, we went to Abdoun, the posh western area, and spent hours at a hip, upscale cafe. Thursday night--back to the balad, but this time to a bar where we watched Spain eviscerate Russia 3-0 in the UEFA semifinals. They'll play Germany in the finals on Sunday night, and since I don't have class on Monday, we'll probably go down there and see it again. Tonight, however, I'm looking forward to spending some quiet time in Kharabsheh, where there's apparently a Sufi meditational walk at 10:00 every night. Of course, when classes start there won't be an opportunity for much of this going out, so I'm seizing this opportunity while I can.

That's about it for now...my next posts will be squeezed in around the time constraints of homework. The horror! The horror!

Baby steps

It's rather disorienting to be in a city the size of Amman with no concrete plan and nobody to visit. Not lonely per se, but I don't have things like homework or classmates to ground me in any concrete schedule. Even my flatmates have not yet arrived. As such, I've spent the past two days wandering about the city and seeing the sights.

"Sights," perhaps, is a bit of a stretch in Amman. To call the city historical would indeed be accurate, but it's also a completely 20th-century invention. Urban life in the Amman area dates back to the Neolithic era, around 8500. The current name, meanwhile, is derived from the ancient name of Rabbath Ammon, which appears in the Bible. Under the Greeks and later the Romans, it was called Philadelphia, and was part of the Decapolis--ten independent city-states allied with Rome. After the fall of the Islamic Ummayyad caliphate in the 8th century AD, however, when power in the Middle East shifted towards Baghdad, Amman became a backwater. It wasn't until the building of the Hejaz railway in the late 19th century that Amman, finally linked with Syria and the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, developed beyond a mere village. It was gradually settled over the next fifty years until Abdullah, the British-appointed Emir of Transjordan, chose it as the capital of his emirate.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that if you walk through the streets of Amman, you won't see anything that existed before 1900. The lone exceptions are the few Roman ruins that dot the city's downtown, and these are truly spectacular. Yesterday, I visited the Roman Theatre, a marvellous building set into the hillside of Downtown. The sight is amazing and not a bit jarring:



















Previous picture is looking from the top and center of the theatre. From the left side, looking out over East Amman:



















The stage and the remnants of the columns:














The Temple of Hercules on top of Jebel al-Qal'a, which I didn't visit but plan to:














Looking at the Theatre from Hashemi Street:














The guide at the Theatre was very insistent about giving me the full tour for a measly 5JD--something like $7, which is astronomical by Jordanian standards. Le! Le! Shukran! Shukran! Ma'a as-salaama! No, no, thank you, thank you! Go with peace! Finally he went away disappointed. I did accept a tiny cup of tea from the men outside, however, who ripped me off for a mere half-dinar. Of course, I had to drink it down in the hot sun before they'd let me into the theatre, but whatever.

Earlier in the day, I had spoken for about an hour with two policemen who accosted me on the street to chat. Murad, actually an army corporal, did most of the talking: he in accented English, me responding in halting Arabic. At the end of the conversation, he pronounced my command of Arabic "half-by-half", and suggested that I needed to "hold on to" (ie, memorize) more words. I readily agreed, and in the spirit of politeness assured him that his English was excellent.

We commisserated about the difficulty of learning each other's language. Murad, whose grammar was pretty good but who possessed a limited vocabulary, related the following difficulty he often encountered. He pointed to the space between his nose and his lips and said, "In English, what is this called?"
"Moustache," I said.
"Na'm," he said. "In Arabic, sharib." Then he mimed drinking from a cup.
"Drinking," I said.
Again, he agreed. "And in Arabic?" he asked, testing me.
"Yashrub," I translated.
"Na'm," he replied. "But in English, is it possible to 'moustache' the water?"
By this I was thoroughly confused. I hadn't known where Murad was going, but in asking whether it was possible to moustache water he seemed to prove himself either hopelessly incompetent in English, or else actually crazy.
"Like-like a milk moustache?" I asked, grasping at straws. For a man with this much of a limited grasp of my language, the thought that he might be familiar with such cultural nuances as the Hood advertising campaign was a unlikely possibility, but still worth a try.
"No, no...in Arabic, moustache and drink...they are the same..." he stammered.
Aha! "Yani...sharib mithla sharaba?" I asked. He happily confirmed my understanding.
In Arabic, a consonant-based language, both sharib--moustache--and yashrab--to drink--derive from the three-letter root sh-r-b. They are, to an Arab, essentially the same word. So Murad was understandably frustrated by the fact that in English, "moustache" and "drinking" bear no more resemblance to each other than "chicken" and, say, "parliamentary democracy."

Of course, my new "dear friend" Murad and I have exchanged numbers, and he earnestly promised that the next holiday he had he would invite me over for dinner. It was, all in all, a fascinating exchange.

Today I wandered around Sports City and Shmeisani, battling unfriendly ATMS, life-threatening taxis and and obnoxiously consistent 85 degrees of heat. Bought a fan for my AC-less apartment, bought an adapter for the laptop, as mine cracked on the second day of use as I tried to extricate it from the wall socket. Outside of downtown, Amman really is a very Western-seeming city, albeit with different architecture and a lot of funny-looking squiggles on the street signs. Tomorrow I take my placement test for Qasid; Tuesday we begin orientation, and classes start later in the week.

Until later...enjoy your summers!

On the ground!

I'm on the ground in Amman! Right now it's about 10PM Amman time, which for all those on eastern time must be about 3 in the afternoon. I had an overnight, 10-hour flight to Istanbul last night, and since we jumped ahead 7 hours we landed at 10:20 despite taking off around 5:30. Spent the day inside Ataturk Airport wishing I were outside Ataturk Airport, because of course I wanted to see all the famous mosques I've been studying about in Islamic Architecture. I arrived in Amman at 4:40, exactly on time and was pleased to find Bilal, the Qasid driver who took me on a pleasant half-hour drive north to Amman proper.

I write this now from the table in the front room of my second-floor Kharebsheh apartment, the only place currently where we have a DSL line in. (The second-floor is actually the third floor, since in the Middle East the ground floor is labelled zero). In any case, the apartment is quite lovely, with a nice sitting room:















and a decent kitchen:














and a comfortable bedroom:














and shawarma!














OK, the shawarma didn't exactly come with the place, but the doorman (or doorman's father, I couldn't quite figure it out) showed me where to buy it and helped me through my fumbling understanding of the Jordanian currency system. (There are $1.40 US to a Jordanian dinar (JD), but everyone just calls them "jaydee." What's tricky is that they're either broken into 100 fils or 1000 piastres, but nobody actually says the units, so you have to work it out for yourself). Luckily Abu Hussein--that's the doorman, or his father--directed me. He was quite surprised that I only wanted one shawarma, and I was equally surprised when, back at the apartment, I had actually gotten two. I also have half a dozen apples, some peaches, some pineapple juice, some inscrutable but delicious-looking baked goods and several gallons of water.

The call to prayer sounded just half an hour ago, which is incidentally close to the time that the call to bed sounded for me (Time changes! Airport sleeping! Not fun! I have nothing scheduled until Monday afternoon, so I look forward to several days of Amman sightseeing. Whatever that amounts to. Until then, may peace be with you all!

PS: It was 33 degrees Celsius in Amman at 4:30 today. My internal Celsius-to-Fahrenheit converter tells me that if you multiply by nine, divide by five, add thirty-two, multiply by your weight in kilograms, subtract the number of letters in your last name, switch the digits around and carry the two, that's...hot.

Gearing up

Hi all!
This is my first post on this new blog, and ideally I'll be updating throughout the summer. It's Sunday, so my departure date is just four days away. I can't exactly say I'm ready...I just got back from hiking for two weeks on the Long Trail in Vermont on Thursday, and I've been decompressing from that for the last few days. At the same time, I've got clothes and suitcases to buy, housing to finalize, roommates to contact, driving plans to JFK to finalize, guidebooks to purchase, etc. For sure, I'll be taking my camera and a big memory card, so look forward to pictures that, while perhaps not worthy of being immortalized in the arches of Adams House, should give you a sense of what I'm doing. I'd love to hear comments and feedback from any of you, which you can do using Blogspot's commenting feature.

That's about it for this posting, but look here next week for posts when I've gotten myself settled in Amman. I have ADSL at my Amman apartment and WIFI at Qasid, so I'll be fully wired. Until then...ma'a as-salaama!