I will start this post by saying that I have a sleep disorder called sleep apnea. This means that I need a piece of equipment called a CPAP machine to sleep properly. The first thing that I did to prepare for bed was to plug in this device. It is designed to come on immediately without turning on a switch, which it did for about 0.1 second. It is clearly labelled as a dual voltage appliance so I assumed that the outlet was flakey. After trying several outlets with no success I finally tested the outlets with a small lamp and found no problem so I checked the machine and I found 2 blown fuses and a switch to change from 110 to 220. Not good.
So, after a mostly sleepless night I got up and took a sort walk to have a look around. Amman is a very hilly place which looks a lot like I expected. The streets are somewhat narrow and the houses are built all the way up and down the steep hills. They use stone almost exclusively. I imagine wood is quite expensive here, and they seem to reuse almost all of it discarding very little. The place where I am staying is built not unlike a castle ( a popular style ) with a steel gate from the street, a steel outer door leading to a short hallway, and finally a steel inner door to the apartment. These are all very solid and there are steel shutters ( they remind me of roll-up garage doors ) on all the windows. I am on the bottom floor (of three ) and could literally jump from my back porch to the roof of the 3 story building behind ( they build on very steep hills ). The views are very nice from my neighborhood which is called Jebel Luwebdeh ( I’ve seen it spelled a dozen different ways. This is how it sounds to me when a taxi driver says it) as it is built on the top of a hill (jebel), one of seven that the city was originally built on. I have included some pictures below of some views from within a couple of hundred yards of my door. My morning walk used to include 5 staircases just like the one in the picture, all up.
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- view from the back porch
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- another view from the back porch
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- a view up my street ( Dhirar Bin Al-Aswar St. )
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- A view from up the street
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- another view from just up the street
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- one of the many staircases leading to the Balad
Anyway, Donald showed up the next day at about 11 am and gave me a tour of the surrounding area, and took me to a grocery store and a mall. The mall seemed huge because it had 3 floors but was all on a single wing, unlike American malls which are usually the other way around. It really wasn’t all that different from what we have in the states. Likewise the grocery store was like a Super Walmart, only smaller, selling mostly food on the bottom floor and clothing and other items on the second floor. I must tell you after saying this that this mall (Citi (pronounced city)Mall is the largest in the country, likewise the grocery store (Carrefore, a French owned chain) is also the largest in the country.
After getting the groceries back to the apartment Donald dropped the car off at a friends place (they were borrowing it ) and we took a taxi ( a hair-raising adventure that I will describe later) in search of the fuses I needed for my CPAP machine. The exact match proved impossible to find (I’ll spare you the boring technical details) and I settled for what I thought would work, and we headed back to my apartment and some much needed sleep.
The next evening I had dinner with Donald and his family. They proved very gracious hosts. Donald’s wife Lorri is a fabulous cook, and their five (5? Holy smokes!) young boys proved very entertaining. They seemed dumfounded that an old fart like myself could know so much about their favorite superheroes (I was a big comic book fan when I was young). When Donald is seen by Arabs with his sons they say “Abu Wilad!” which is a nickname (meaning father of boys) given to men with numerous sons and is a very big compliment. If on the other hand he had 5 daughters he would be “Abu Binat” which is a term of mild derision (usually used jokingly). Arab men are very impressed with 5 sons (especially with only one wife and no daughters). Actually I have not yet met any Jordanian who has more than one wife. I’m not sure if it’s even allowed in Jordan.
The things that have struck me most about Jordan since arriving are actually the similarities. Most American fast-food brands are available (and here just about everybody delivers including McDonalds), almost everybody in the city speaks english (most of them better than my Arabic),and most of what is available in the states can be found here (if you know where to look and are willing to pay the price). There are however differences. I will go into differences and similarities in subsequent posts.
