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.