"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!
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