Graduation

Today, Carly and I visited the UN school where she volunteers. They were having a end of year/volunteers/teacher thank you celebration. The school – for Palestinian refugees – is not nearly as well funded and equipped as our schools, but they sure do have energy and passion. A group of Japanese volunteers has been providing physical education for the students (not just sports, but aerobics etc.), and those who took part looked more appreciative and enthusiastic than I’ve seen in students before.

Also, the little 5 year old boys were wearing 5 piece suits. The only time I’ve even gotten close to looking as formal as them was at my wedding.

The school is considerably more conservative than the surrounding area (it is only about 400m from Carly’s school). All of the teachers wear a head scarf (well, all but one; there is one male.) and some are completely covered.
This would look very very odd at my school.
As each teacher’s name was called out to come and collect their certificates, the children cheered. Some teachers were singled out for a particularly loud roar of appreciation.
It’s pretty easy to think that a fully covered woman would not be able to connect with the world around her, but the students definitely knew their teachers well and even liked them!

Paris Circle…again

I was meant to meet a student at the ‘hub’ of our little neighbourhood today, Paris Circle. The bad news is, whether through miscommunication or forgetfulness, he didn’t show. The good news is that I got to spend a good amount of time hanging out at the Circle with nothing else to do but relax.

We’re going on 2 and a half years here in this suburb, most of which we’ve lived 500m from this circle, but I’ve never spent more than 10 minutes ‘hanging around’. It’s the place were people will get together to talk, drink coffee and even play football (though, of course, the later activity usually in tension with the others). There isn’t many places to do this in Amman, and it is certainly the only one I know of for average Jordanian families (the rich are more likely to spend their time in the malls, but the poorer teenage/young adult males (shabab) are not given entry so they won’t harass the women.).

As we’ve written before, Paris Circle, was ‘Watertower Circle’ before the French Institute paid to have it transformed into a place where people could actually meet. The lamps, faux-fountain, signage and even the fence lend to a quite effective French feel (though I do wonder how much of this was a gift to the Jordanians and how much was for homesick Parisian expats.). On a beautiful, spring day like today, it is the distinct lack of grass or green outside of the circle itself that gives the game up.

Today I was joined, mostly, be elderly Jordanians. Though the culture is changing, here, the last place you want to be when you’ve retired is sitting around the house. There was also a couple of ‘shabab’ enjoying jelly (they were pretty nice), and a falafel worker on a break. The really unusual thing compared to the West is that not one of them took out their phone once!

The History of Communication

I asked my students to make a video outlining the history of communication.

This was the result:

Arab Food

Lunch

This photo has appeared recently on this blog (the post on Salt), but I thought it deserved a little attention of its own.

This meal here isn’t quite the ‘Fast Food’ of Arab cuisine (chips, deep fried chicken, pizza etc.), more like the ‘meat pie or pasty’ (still not that healthy, but somehow not quite as ‘naughty’ to eat).

The placemats are slips of paper, and the plate, knife and fork a serving of bread (A great way to cut down on dishes!) From right to left there is bbq chicken (relatively unique to Salt and this restaurant), hummus with lamb mince (which I thoroughly recommend  and pickled….everything. The pickles are free with just about every meal here, and I can’t say I’m too keen on them. It’s mostly just my prejudice  I can’t help but feel that savoury food should not be pink.
Later we were served our baba ganoush (a smoked eggplant dish that looks a lot like hummus) and falafel would not have been out of place.

This food, with 4 cans of soft drink: $15.

Jo Bedu

Just down the street is the Jordanian themed t-shirt and ‘hoodie’ store ‘Jo Bedu’. A lot of its stuff is a tad ‘self-impressed’ ‘in-jokey’ – the type of thing that you need to be able to speak English and Arabic, have watched 1950′s American sitcoms and drive daily down Queen Rania Al-Abdullah Street in order to understand them – but a lot of their other stuff is pretty good.

I thought it would be good to pick up one or two items to remember Jordan by.

The first is self-explanatory:

There isn’t actually a ‘camel crossing’ sign, but there are a lot of camels here.

 

 

The next requires a little more explanation. Below is a typical Jordanian gas bottle. Everyday the ‘gasman’ drives the suburbs, collecting old empties and selling filled bottles (you can tell he is coming because the truck plays an ‘icrecream-esque’ tune.). You then take the has up to your house and ‘plug it into’ the oven.

 

 

 

 

Below is a t-shirt, looking at the city-scape of Amman through it’s iconic ‘Gazz (gas) bottle’.

 

 

The final – a hoodie – is a dinosaur. The Arabic says ‘Abu Abu Breis’. A ‘abu breis’ is slang for a gecko (or some other sort of lizard). But, the word ‘abu’ in Arabic also means ‘father of’. So ‘abu abu bries’ is the father of a lizard: a dinosaur.

Salt

Well, turns out I was wrong. We weren’t planning to, but we managed to sneak in one last trip for the school holidays.

A friend – who knows the ‘real’ Amman/Jordan much better than we do – invited us out for the day to the local town of ‘Salt’. I had heard a lot about Salt; it is the ancestral home of quite a few large, Jordanian, Christian families, many of whom are involved with the school. Before the current Hashemite dynasty, it was the capital of Jordan, and is still the subject of a lot of nostalgic longing.

We headed to the main bus station in East Amman to meet our friend and were reminded a) how western a lot of Amman really is and b) how long it had been since we had been outside of the 3 or 4 suburbs where we spend most of our time. The bus station was hectic, and at the same time a breath of fresh air. After meeting up we bought our tickets for the hour long trip – a whopping 90 cents Australian – and headed off.

When we arrived in Salt, I was amazed by how green it was. I knew somewhere deep in my mind that it really wasn’t the rainforest wonderland that I saw, but compared to Amman it felt like it (apparently the word ‘Salt’ comes from a Latin (?) word meaning ’dense forest’; now that is a bit of stretch, unless you are coming up from Wadi Rum.). It also felt 5 degrees cooler (maybe in part due to the trees) and the people much more open and far nicer.

Why couldn’t this still be the capital, I thought. But perhaps it this is what Amman used to be like. I’m sure if Salt had faced the same rapid development Amman did, the tree lined streets, quaint old souq and Turkish inspired architecture would be no more, relegated to rubble in the name of progress!

We made our way up to the monument in memory of the martyrdom of Turkish soldiers in the war against the Arabs and British (I don’t really get it either.).
It had a nice garden.

The main street of Salt

The garden at the Turkish memorial

Lunch

Um Qais

Last Thursday, we made our second to last trip in Jordan up to the town of Um Qais.

Um Qais – 2 hours north of Amman, near the city of Irbid – is small modern day Arab town and home to the ruins of ancient Gadara. It continues to amaze me how these significant Greco-Roman towns are scattered throughout a region I would consider the middle of no-where.  At one point in its life, Gadara was home to 25,000 people. When Pompey the Great came through he made it a member of a group of ten independent city states (the Decapolis), in part to act as a buffer between the expanding empire of the Nabateans and the Roman province of Syria. When Augustus became the Princeps of the Roman Empire he gave Gadara over to King Herod of Judea.

Some claim that this is the spot where Jesus cast out evil spirits into a herd of swine, which then rushed down a cliff and to the Sea of Galilee. I have no way of verifying this, but the geography does not rule it out. You can certainly see the Sea of Galilee from the ruins (well, as much as you can see anything through the haze in that region), and the steep mountain slopes to the north, south and west of town could provide the necessary cliff. It was very surreal to be standing in Jordan with Israel and the Golan Heights ‘just over that hill.’ I could see towns we had visited in the Galilee: a remarkably different culture, people and landscape to Amman, and yet there it was, just a short drive away.

The ruins themselves, particularly the amphitheatre – were very impressive. Most were made out of the black basalt of the region (again, something very similar to the Galilee) and still quite intact. There are very few places in the world where you can climb through a Roman amphitheatre at your own will with no supervision. It was safe to say I was ‘geeking out.’

The forum, overlooking the sea, was also quiet interesting. There were also extensive Byzantine ruins, but I start to loose interest after 200 AD, so we didn’t check those out too closely.

The view to the west of Gadara

Inside the ampitheatre

The west ampitheatre

The fourm

The forum ground

The octagonal Church

Public fountain? (There are no signs at sites like this in Jordan)

The view of the haze over the Sea of Galilee

Looking back at the forum

We were amazed to find this nice little restaurant up the top.