Money here is about the same as everywhere except it looks a little different. One Jordanian Dinar is exchanges for $1.42 US. The real difference is in the way it is handled. Simply put at first glance there seems to be a shortage of small bills. Getting change from a taxi driver is not unlike extracting blood from a stone. You are led to believe that he doesn’t have any, but when it’s finally made clear that you simply don’t have anything smaller, a large wad of singles will frequently (but not always) appear from nowhere. Taxi drivers are not the only source of vexation. When paying a JD83 electric bill at the post office (that’s where you pay’em here) I handed them two 50’s and they scrambled around for ten minutes rounding up change. I even had a friend who was making a withdrawal from his bank and was refused more than five 1’s! In point of fact almost everyplace, except larger supermarkets, may give you trouble over anything larger than JD5 over your purchase. With one very notable exception. The little minibuses which only cost JD0.25 (a quarter) to ride will not even bat an eye when handed a 20. Nobody (including Jordanians) can explain this phenomena.
As to language, Arabic is quite difficult. Many of the difficulties occur because the written language is so different from the spoken. The written is pretty much the same as the classical which I studied back in ‘82 ( not that I remembered enough to read a paper), but the Jordanian dialect is actually quite different (and it’s the nearest dialect to the classical) with only about 20 % of the vocabulary that I’ve learned so far overlapping. I won’t bore you with the details but very few people understood the classical arabic I used when I arrived. An amusing for instance was the first time I took a bus. I was walking around asking “Wain al-hafla?” which is “Where’s the bus?” in classical. I had been getting very odd looks and a couple of people weren’t quite able to stifle their laughter and I was very frustrated. I eventually found the right bus, and about a week later I found out that in this dialect hafla means party. So I had been asking “Where’s the party?”! Hmph! Typical American! I will illustrate the language difficulties later on a separate page for those interested.
Jordan is a desert country and as a result water is a precious commodity, and must be conserved. Water usually only flows one day per week in most places, and is quite expensive when compared to the US. It runs to storage tanks on the roof and is automatically shut off when the tanks are full. This results in all of the high water use tasks being done on the same day, such as laundry and major cleaning. Of course, there are a few things which cannot be so scheduled, such as showers and, uh, other stuff. Those with a weak constitution may want to skip the rest of this paragraph. It concerns “potty” etiquette. After hearing of how the water situation worked, upon inquiring, I was told “If it’s brown, flush it down. If it’s yellow, let it mellow”. Catchy, no? But wait, there’s more! One does no throw used TP in the toilette! No! It must go into a small trash (or choose your own word here) can which is placed conveniently next to the toilette! And the penalty for violations? It may foul up the whole septic system (I’ve heard of this but not experienced it) or (as in the one single instance that I forgot) it must be fished out!!! Now you know why I’ve only forgotten once. This topic is a virtual gold mine of mirth, and I may choose to more fully explore it later.
