Moving On

So this is likely my last post on this particular journey.  I leave Jordan tonight - heading back to Canada with two stuffed suitcases and a cat - planning to arrive back in Toronto sometime midday on the 16th.

For the last several months I have been reading Herodotus' "The Histories" - written in 500 BC about travels through the part of the world I have been inhabiting for the last 12 + months.  In parallel, I have been reading Ryszard Kapuscinski's final book "Travels with Herodotus", a beautiful meditation on the life of a foreign correspondent - written 2500 years after Herodotus created the template for that profession.  This passage at the end of Kapuscinski's  book particularly struck me the other day:  "We do not know what draws a human being out into the world.  Is it curiousity?  A hunger for experience?  An addiction to wonderment? The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart.  If he believes that everything has already happened, that he has seen it all, then something most precious has died within him - the delight in life."

I think that I became addicted to wonderment living here.  Every single day offered up an amazing moment, something crazy or incomprehensible.  Last weekend, on one of my last adventures into the countryside and down to the dead sea, my travelling companions and I found ourselves lost on a winding country road.  We were stopped often by herds of passing sheep and goats - who get precedence on the roads - and then came across some bedouin ditch diggers who had created a foot wide gap in the road that couldn't be passed.  We three travellers - gringos all - got out of the car to investigate.  We received the immediate invitation for tea from the guys from their billy can by the side of the toad.  They were named Mahmoud, Mahmoud, Ahmad and Ahmad.  They started to fill the hole in again with boulders so we could pass.  They talked to us about farming.  We stood with them in the sunshine, drinking tea and chatting in halting arabic about olive trees and sesame plants and the outlook for rain this winter.  It was a timeless moment.  I'll miss that incredible friendliness and the chance encounters and the endless opportunities for a glass of sweet tea everywhere you go.

I will certainly miss the people I have encountered here - my awesome female friends who are conquering the middle east one day at a time whether in Iraq or Egypt or Jordan.

I will miss my excellent work colleagues and the feeling of making a difference against the odds. Just yesterday I stopped by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs where I worked during my first 6 months here.  Lo and behold I found out that the plans I had been working on through December to June had become applicable law!  They are actually implementing the policy... and they're actually doing it based on the recommendations I provided.  It blew me away.  I had no idea!  I was astonished at the accomplishment of all my ministry and municipal colleagues - I felt a twinge of pride at helping to bring them to that point.

And I will miss the people who I consider neighbours and who have offered me so much assistance during my time here:  my building's caretaker who is a labourer from rural Egypt...  my housekeeper, from Ethiopia, who takes care of my apartment and my laundry.   These are incredible warm, generous people to whom life, by luck of a passport, has dealt a tougher hand than my own.

I am curious to see what will strike me most about returning to Canada... what will shock me? What will seem completely normal?   Hey... maybe there will be one more blog post to report back on that.

Animals

My return date to Canada is mid-December and I have been spending an inordinate amount of time lately trying to sort out how to get my little foundling kitten to Canada with me.   To date this has required airport approvals in both Amman and Montreal, Jordanian rubber stamps from the Ministry of Agriculture, health certificates, pet passports.  I won't even begin to explain the intricate differences between the cat carrying cases accepted by Royal Jordanian vs. Air Canada and the impossibility of securing a Canadian approved case in Amman.   Suffice it to say, this is not a seamless, user-friendly experience.  Getting her to Toronto is my biggest nightmare at this point.

Having a pet here has been a learning experience.  First, it has given me an insight into east-west cultural differences around having an animal in the house.  Many of my female guests shriek or wince when they see my little Habibti.  The men tend to be more stoic.  In some way cats are viewed here as Torontonians view racoons.  Fluffy wild animals that eat scraps.  If I were to walk into a house in the Annex and encounter a pet raccoon, I might too express some surprise.

Except there is a much more reciprocal arrangement with the cats here than with truly wild animals.  Many people like cats - they leave them food and they often adopt them as outdoor creatures hanging out in the yard.  The butchers and restauranteurs leave out leftovers.  One of the cooks at the shwarma stand up the street has adopted a particular ginger Tom Cat.   The cat hangs out on the sidewalk late every afternoon watching out for the cars and mean passers-by who try to kick him ... the guy in the shwarma place eventually has a smoke break and brings a lump of meat for the cat.  This cat is wild in every other way, but likes this one guy.  They have a relationship.  I have witnessed this kind of connection in Damascus and Beirut and Jerusalem - across the middle east.  Consequently the cities are full of cats and kittens - sleeping on rooftops, jumping out of dumpsters, chilling on the sidewalks, hiding out in abandoned buildings.

Cats are not the only animals you see, of course.  There are also donkeys, sheep, goats and camels in grand quantities.  I love the donkeys, in particular, and want to save each and every one of them from the impossibly hard labour they are subjected to.  I have been seeing lots of baby donkeys lately, though I haven't yet investigated the challenges of bringing a donkey to Canada - I am not quite that crazy (yet).

Not surprisingly,  along with seeing a lot of animals you also see a lot of cruelty to animals.  Or indifference to animal suffering.   That, too, is part of the scenery.  It is usual to see overcrowded pet stores - birds are very common - where animals live in filthy conditions.  Or hundreds of little chicks, newly hatched, stuffed into a cardboard box and dyed flourescent pinks, greens, blues;  these little birds are taken home to small children who play with them as toys and invariably kill them in a couple of hours.

A year later, I am still not quite used to it.  As I was wandering down the street in a neighbourhood across town today, in search of a particular store that (purportedly) sold cat carriers, I came across a kitten who was clearly quite ill and very hungry and suffering from some kids teasing it.   I went to the nearest food store - it happened to be a KFC - to get some chicken, got rid of the kids and fed the little creature  This is always a dilemma.  Often I am too preoccupied to stop.  Today this little one got to me.  

So, the second learning experience has been meeting people who are involved in treating animals.  Shortly after I met my cat - who was an injured, half blind kitten living under a parked car in front of my house - I encountered an excellent group here called the Humane Centre for Animal Welfare who are like a humane society.  These are seriously nice people.  They have a neutre/spay program, they rescue abandoned animals.  They also treat the working animals of bedouin tribes and do a lot of outreach and education programs about how the health of their flocks is critical to their own livelihoods.  The centre is out on the edge of town where a lot of bedouin still graze their animals.  So it is not uncommon to arrive with your cat for a booster shot and have camels and donkeys and horses also in line for treatment.   Amazing.

Shortly after feeding the little kitten this afternoon, I found the pet store I was looking for and met the owner.  It turns out that he rescues parrots.  He buys them from bad pet markets where they are often abused - hit, starved - and brings them back to health.  He had a beautiful African Grey parrot who he had found two years ago.  These particular birds can live a long time and have amazing cognitive abilities.  This one had a vocabulary of 50 words - knew how to ask for his dinner, knew the man's name, sang songs.   That moment - standing in the store, talking to this man, meeting the parrot - gave me a little bit of hope.

The Christian Thing

I have been on a lot of hikes lately:  to Pella in the northern Jordan valley which overlooks the river Jordan and its incredibly fertile flood plain where fruit and vegetables never stop growing (the most delicious peaches I have ever eaten are in season 8 months of the year!  Take that Niagara!).   There are remnants of human settlements that date back 5000 - 8000 years, including Byzantine, Roman, Greek and Canaanite ruins, and evidence of nomadic hunters wandering through back to the early stone age - hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I was also in Machaerus, the stunning palace ruin of King Herod, whose kingdom included a strip of land along the east bank of the Jordan River and Dead Sea.  This palace - one of several of Herod's - is perched on a high hill top, protected by precipitous cliffs, overlooking the Dead Sea and the west bank beyond.  Here John the Baptist was held in a dungeon for saying the wrong thing about Herod's son's wife and eventually lost his head as a result.

When you are in these places you cannot help thinking about the sequence of things:  when did the Greek empire fade?  When did the Roman empire start to extend its reach and hold sway over these lands?  And when did Jesus come along and shake things up?   You find yourself in conversations you never imagined having:  Like, for example:  Hmmm,  I wonder if  Jesus ever walked here?  Did he ever take the eastern route from Galillee down to Jerusalem?   It would have made sense.  Walking up the hill from the Sea of Galilee to Umm Qais (Gadara), then heading 20km over to Pella, then Jerash, Amman (known as Philadelphia at the time), Madaba and then a hop over the Jordan river and a day's walk to Jerusalem.  These were all bustling cities about  day's walk from each other with populations who might have been interested in hearing his message.  He was obviously good at PR.

Whether Jesus took that route of not, the Byzantines thought that he did, so there are pilgrimage churches dating from the 2nd - 6th centuries all along the east bank of the Jordan river coming down from the Golan Heights.  In many cases the walls and foundations are still there, as are the elaborate tiled mosaic floors, which have weathered 1800 years of use.  It stops me cold when I think about the passage of time and the people who built these original structures.  They were only a couple of generations removed from Jesus Christ himself, and may even have heard stories from their parents who heard stories from their grandparents, right back to the "year zero" as we know it in the western calendar.

It is interesting for me to be confronted by all these thoughts of Christ as a person.  All of my colleagues here simply assume I am Christian.  Because I have to be something.  It is not an option not to have a religious identity.  There are only 2 types of cemeteries in this country - Muslim or Christian - and you have to be one of them because if you die, you have to be buried.  And that's the law.  And they know I am not Jewish.  And when I am asked what I am - which happens all the time - I say that "I guess I am Christian".  Because I know I am not Muslim - and they know that too.  

But I am not sure if anyone could have a more secular, scientific, rationalist upbringing than my own:  I was born in a post-war planned town full of Cambridge-educated British nuclear scientists fully focused on creating the new modernity.  If ever there was a place where God was dead ... or rendered irrelevant... Deep River would be it.   In Canada, I would never call myself a Christian.  So, of course it is fascinating to now live in the holy land and think more about these questions of faith and belief and religious or ethnic identity.  And about how these physical places have become a metaphor for guiding people all over the planet in their spiritual lives.

Thinking about these questions of belief and place have been further complicated by an interesting culture clash that I witness every day between work and home.

At work, I have a number of colleagues who are Christian.  They are generally Greek or Syrian orthodox and their families have been Christian ever since there was a Christ to believe in.  Their religious identities pre-date the coming of Islam by a good 400 years or so.  If you google their last names you see that at some point in the last few centuries, someone in their broader family or tribe (eg with the same last name) has been a Patriarch or a Bishop in Aleppo or Damascus or Beirut in one of the splinter factions of the Orthodox or Maronite Catholic Church.

This is just my observation - no research or backing for this - but I would say for many of these colleagues their Christianity is less about religious belief or observance, and more about an ethnic identity.  Some young men, in particular - who definitely don't go to church on Sunday mornings and are not remotely devout - cleave to this identity and are fond of tattooing christian imagery on their bodies - the cross, images of Christ, bleeding hearts.  I was on a dive boat with a group of Maronite Christians from Beirut several months ago and the fellows were all tattooed.  One young man had a huge tat that covered his upper thighs and full torso that read something like "onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war."  In English.  One of my young colleagues has a big tat of Jesus on his shoulder.  These are the same guys who are going clubbing every night and are enjoying alcohol to the fullest, in defiance of the majority rules.  It is all a part of their definition of being Christian.

So I contrast this to the situation I find around me in my apartment building.  I happen to live surrounded by neighbours who are evangelical christians - mostly from the United States, but also from Australia and the Netherlands.  Most of them are here studying intensive arabic at a purpose-built language school that was created in order to teach proselytizers how to bring the "word of God" to this part of the world.   One of these neighbours has been here for 14 years.  He is originally from Missouri, I think, but now lives here in Amman and, when I asked him what his job was, he told me that he spends his time in the homes of Iraqi refugee families "helping them clear up their misunderstandings about the bible".  So that is what he does all day.

I find this both deeply disturbing and richly layered with irony.   That someone feels compelled to bring the 'word of God' to a culture where it is the norm to pray 5 times a day, and there is someone singing from a minaret daily like clockwork to remind us all that 'God is Great', is simply absurd to me.   To propose that their brand of evangelical christianity - that is about 5 minutes old in the scheme of human history - is somehow more worthy of attention than the churches that have been here since the beginning of the Christian era is also suspect.  I acknowledge that my reaction is visceral, knee-jerk, but I just don't like the gall, the imposition, the idea that their faith or belief system is somehow more valuable than the those of the people who live here.

Plus - unlike the tattooed guys - this group doesn't go clubbing or go drinking and they are much too earnest and much less fun.  Believe me, there is nothing more achingly dull than an afternoon barbecue with a group of evangelical christians in the holy land!

I am not sure what to make of all these observations.  I am still sorting through them.  I am actually not sure there is a conclusion to be made, except to say that the internal contradictions between historical fact, physical place, and spiritual belief within this very fluid and wide open notion of "being a Christian" is totally fascinating.  All the more so when I imagine that I have trod on the same footpath which that guy called Jesus Christ walked about 2000 years ago.

the election issue

This post is dedicated to my friends and family in Toronto, where the municipal election campaign is coming down to the wire.  Having followed these elections from afar - particularly the mayoral race - with an ever-increasing sense of morbid fascination and dismay, my heart goes out to the residents there who have some difficult choices to make on Monday.  

Not that this is any consolation, but I am also surrounded by wacky electioneering here in Jordan.  About two weeks after I arrived here last December, parliament (which by many accounts was more than somewhat dysfunctional) was dissolved and the appointed cabinet was sent off to rewrite the election law to render better results next time around.  So I guess that happened without any fanfare and suddenly  11 months later, approximately two weeks ago, a parliamentary election campaign opened with a bang.

In the course of two days, the streets of the city were taken over by campaign posters.  And every day more appear. There are handwritten banners across all the streets, taking over the parks and circles.  There are printed posters plastering the sides of buildings, tacked to every possible street sign.   White canvas tents filled with plastic garden chairs have taken over the vacant lots all around town and out into the countryside where candidate meetings seem to be going on every night.  I guess petitioners come and make requests and candidates make promises.  And then maybe some roast lamb on a bed of rice is served on huge trays for all comers.  I am not sure about that last part - but keen to find out.  I am trying to convince my friend Robert to check out a meeting with me one evening, where we will unquestionably stick out of the crowd.

Like in places such as Hungary or Lebanon or New Zealand, the Jordanian parliament has seats reserved for minorities - circassians and chechens - and also for women.  So it is interesting to see some (small!) diversity in the posters.  I have also noticed one candidate who is posing in traditional bedouin garb in some posters - kefiyeh, dishdash - and western jacket and tie in others.   Others are almost uniformly in western business attire.

We will get the full day off work on election day - November 8th, I think - though I am not sure whether that helps or harms voter turnout.  I would think the desire to head out of town for the day off will be strong.  We'll see.   In the meantime, I am enjoying parsing the script on the posters and trying to figure out if there are any actual election issues.

I can't vote here and I also won't be able to exercise my vote in Toronto, so I can only hope that my compatriots make wise choices in exercising their right!  Good luck.  May the worst man not win.

Surprise!

It is a year ago this week that I first came to Jordan on a 'recon' trip to check out the potential assignment here.  That has made me a little nostalgic or reflective.   As I look back through the posts on this blog, I have been thinking about what I have learned.

One thing that really strikes me is that a lot of this blog is devoted to the element of surprise that perpetually lurks around every corner in this part of the world.  In the last 48 hours alone: finding myself in an unanticipated downpour while a full rainbow framed the Roman ruins across the valley; the stairs on the way to work this morning completely collapsed and fallen in as a result of the heavy rainfall -- an amazing thing to see;  this afternoon I was followed home from work at the end of the day by 15 adolescent schoolboys calling and singing all around me at the same time as a senior official was calling me out of the blue to intervene on his behalf on a matter I have nothing to do with.  This is both completely normal and completely bizarre.  Living here, I realize, has restored my capacity for wonder.  I am thankful for that - appropriate for the Thanksgiving season.

But nothing has surprised me lately as much as an event I attended last Friday afternoon.  A horse beauty pageant.

Who knew such things existed?  It was held at the picturesque Royal Stables - outdoors in a lovely wooded valley - and there were actual princesses and upper crust Emiratis and Saudis in attendance.  There was also a fantastically tony panel of posh European judges sitting seriously over score sheets.  Secretly, I suspect that the judges were all younger sisters or second cousins of minor European noble families... Younger brother of a belgian prince, a disgraced cousin of the Thun & Taxis family... that kind of thing...fodder for Hello!  magazine.  Who else becomes a judge at a horse beauty pageant?

In case you are picturing a show jumping or dressage competition in your head, think again.  This was all about the pure beauty of Arabian horses - not performing tricks with humans - just being horses in their naked glory.  There they were, free of bridles or saddles, romping around a big paddock.  It was a little bit like the film "Best in Show" about dog shows, only bigger and less orchestrated.

Of course, I became fascinated by the award categories and the criteria by which the horses were being judged.  There were competitions for "best female head"  and "best male head".    There were age categories - Stallions born 2000 or before... Stallions born between 2001 - 2003...  who were run around the ring on a loose halter with a human alongside.  And there was my favourite category: the "Liberty" class where a horse was let loose and encouraged/goaded into running around for 5 minutes.   For me it was the show-stopper - like the Evening Gown competition in Miss Universe.   I learned by studying the competition booklet, that these horses are judged on the beauty of their: head and neck; body and top line; legs; movement.  No requirement to answer a skill-testing question.

Here's the thing:  as surprising as this event was to me, I came away with a whole new appreciation for horse beauty.  My god, these horses were gorgeous.  I can understand why a person would become obsessed, start a stable, spend her time trying to breed this beauty.  Seeing these creatures run around tapped into some kind of really deep-seated definition of strength and freedom and mythology.  A field full of Pegasuses.

I had sort of hoped I might meet a very handsome, unmarried, (Oxford-educated) Emir or Sheikh.  But that didn't happen this time.  Have to wait for the next Equestrian Foundation event...

Field Trip

It has been a few weeks since I have managed to post anything.  A combination of things have kept me away.  Busy at work finalizing the first draft of a plan for the city of Amman.  An Eid trip out to the amazing eastern desert with its endless tracts of sand covered with black basalt boulders stretching as far as the eye can see toward Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia.  (There are amazing Roman fortresses out in the middle of the desert, built from the black volcanic boulders, that demarcate the edge of their empire.  It is amazing to imagine how they inhabited the landscape 2 millenia ago.  Those Romans were tough.) After that, a weekend at the dead sea to relax.  And then another weekend spent camping in the Dana biosphere reserve with a dear friend who was visiting from Vienna.  In short, life is good.

Despite long hours spent in the office during the work week, working on all the last minute things that go into releasing a government document - fact-checking, proofreading, briefings - I did get out of the office last week to do some field verification.  My favourite part of the job.

This time a colleague and I were verifying the mapping of agricultural lands in the city of Amman.  For reasons too complicated to explain, the mapping of agricultural lands is a tricky business and the lands themselves - which are scarce in this arid land - are constantly under development pressure.  I realized, in fact, that a lot of land I would have dismissed as sand year ago I can now identify as arable.  My eye has been trained to see farmland where I once would have seen desert.

Of course, as always, we came across wonderful and strange sights.  In addition to the endlessly fascinating (to me, anyway) bedouin tents and flocks of goats, camels and sheep camped out at the edge of the city, we saw new things as well.  In the middle of a completely rural landscape, in the heart of fertile olive groves, we stumbled upon a vast, newly built, utterly deserted social housing project that is a the result of a government housing initiative.  Completely isolated from any services, you cannot help wondering how and where the inhabitants will buy groceries, access employment, take their kids to school.  Another stark example of bad public policy at work.

Later, driving through a village at the south end of the city, our driver, Mansour, announced to us that we were passing his family's shop and that right behind it, there was a gold souq - would we like to see it?  Sure, we said - not quite certain what to expect.  Some cheap gold for sale?  So he drove us down a couple of dusty narrow laneways and past the requisite group of guys fixing a car, to pull up beside a Roman ruin, columns and intricate scrollwork intact, giant limestone foundation blocks still in place.  There were chickens scratching around and kids playing in the dirt.  Turns out  this was a Roman gold treasury - hence 'gold souq' - and the village has built up around it, just taking the ruin for granted as a part of the landscape.  My colleague had never heard of the site before - it was entirely new to her.  I went back to the office and double-checked... yes, we had identified this on the major antiquity map.  So that is a step in the right direction.  Now, perhaps, someone will pay attention to the site?

And so it goes.

Time keeps sliding by here.  It is October 2nd and the weather still feels like midsummer - 30 degree days and 20 degree lovely starry nights.  Except for the dust.  Mad dust storms, completely out of season, have been sweeping the city.  One came through this afternoon - something that looks suspiciously like a storm cloud, sudden wind, all at once zero visibility with sand swirling everywhere.  30 minutes later it's gone.  This time, mercifully, I had the foresight to close my windows!

The Holy Month

We are almost through the whole holy month of Ramadan.  Today is probably the day, but for sure sometime this weekend the end will be announced.  Still to be determined.  In any case, the whole city is inching closer by the minute to the big Eid celebration that marks the end to the month-long fast.  My neighbourhood is about to get very loud.

It was my first time spending Ramadan in a predominantly muslim country and, in retrospect, it is amazing to me how little I knew about this major religious festival that 20% of the world's population observes.  It was humbling being a total outsider. Back in the home country, I am surprised by people who know nothing about Christmas traditions.  How can a person live their life without ever knowing about Christmas trees, say?  I was that person here.  I knew nothing about Ramadan, shockingly ignorant. The sum total of my knowledge prior to coming here was that people don't eat during the daylight hours.

Well it is true that people who are observing the fast don't eat from about 4:00am - when a "pre-call" to prayer from the neighbourhood mosque alerts people that they better eat now or wait til later - until after the evening call, around 7:15pm.  They also don't drink any liquids during the day - which was tough this year, when Ramadan coincided with the worst heat wave in recent history.  And no cigarettes or sex during the day.  And so on.  So, kind of a full body - full conscience cleanse each and every day for a month.

Because it is an officially observed, state sanctioned festival there are quite a few legal rules that go along with the observance.  Needless to say all the liquor stores are closed for a full month - absolutely no selling of alcohol.  You cannot eat or drink outdoors.  That means no restaurant patios, no snacking or sipping drinks on your balcony at  home during daylight hours, no quick sip from a water bottle in your back pack if you are walking down a hot dusty street and feeling dehydrated.  In the workplace in city hall, the big drinking water dispensers were all emptied and removed on the first day of Ramadan and the kitchen was shut tight as a drum.   In addition to legal issues around ingesting food or drink in a public office, it is also considered deeply offensive to those who are fasting, so there are strong social pressures to maintain solidarity with your coworkers.

There are a few workarounds, of course.   There are special 'tourist licenses' that some businesses can get so they can continue to serve food and drink during the course of the fasting hours.  (With their shutters very, very closed to outside view).  And at work, the non-fasters could lock themselves in empty offices to have a snack or a drink that they brought in from home.   I have to say, though, that not being able to drink my 6 glasses of water a day at my desk meant I was really dehydrated and limp at the end of a work day.  And not being able to drink my quota of coffee in the mornings had very, very negative side effects for my colleagues in the first weeks.  And I wasn't even fasting.

Now with all of those rules - which I had started to learn about in the weeks and months before the fast began - I had a picture in my mind of a very solemn month.  This is probably because I connect religious fasting with the Christian observance of Lent with its emphasis on penance and reflection on Christ's pain and suffering.   So I had been imagining a month of self- denial and quiet reflection.  Boy was I wrong.

The first indication that I didn't quite get what I was in for, happened on the first night of the festival back in mid-August.  The actual start date - like the end date now - was shrouded in a bit of mystery - would it be Tuesday?  Would it be Wednesday?   It all depended on when the powers that be saw the moon.  The night they did see it - boom - Ramadan was announced with incredibly loud cannon fire from the citadel hill, followed by mass fireworks from rooftops and balconies, and children spontaneously running out into the street chanting 'Ramadan, Ramadan!'   It was joyful.  The coloured, blinking decorative ramadan lights came on in windows all over the city.  The extremely nostalgic, affective Coca-Cola Ramadan ads came on TV - kinda like the old "i'd like to teach the world to sing" Christmas one that they used to do.  People were filled with a charitable, celebratory spirit.  The whole city got loud and stayed loud til 4am.

And so it was every night after that.  At about 10pm, after the evening 'iftar' meal which breaks the fast, the streets filled up.  Music, singing, card games.  The cafe across the street from my house had a live band and bingo game every night on the terrace til about 3am.  People had social obligations at midnight... 1 am.... 2am.  Meanwhile, the more observant were spending a lot of time in the mosque in the evenings for the reading of verses of the koran.  Over the course of the month, all of the verses must be read, and many mosques broadcast the work in progress, which adds to the general noise level.

All of this night time activity means that people are exhausted at work in the day time.  Myself included - it was hard to sleep in all the noise.  And many businesses totally flip their hours - closed during the day, open at night.  Some people stay up all night after iftar to eat their second meal in the wee hours of the morning at 3am/ 3:30am and then catch a few winks before getting to work at 9am or 10am.  Now, at the end of the month, the noise level has died down considerably.  Largely, I think, because people are too exhausted and dehydrated to keep up the merriment.

So at this point  - today?  tomorrow?  - I will find out what the Eid festival is all about.  I am imagining more music, dancing, eating, drinking in public and even more chanting and fireworks.  But who knows.   I will probably be surprised.   Actually, to get a bit of a break, I am heading out to the stark eastern desert tomorrow morning for a couple of days to see Umm Al Jimal, an ancient, abandoned Roman town carved from black basalt rock.  Perhaps there I will encounter the quiet and solemnity I have been imagining?

my walk home

I love my daily walk to and from the office.  It never fails to be interesting.  The morning walk is quick - over the crest of the Jebel Amman hill and down two flights of precipitously steep stairs through a partially demolished informal refugee settlement - takes about 10 minutes.  Lots of cats finding a place to settle for the day and neighbours taking care of morning tasks.

The evening walk, circling around the bottom of the Jebel Amman hill through the city's old 'souk' and up a gentler hill and kinder set of stairs, takes more like 30 minutes.  Usually longer if I stop to watch things or shop in the covered food market.

Here are a few quick pics from today's walk home.

The first part of my walk home through the old town takes me through the awning fabric part of town.   Shop after shop with big open doors and filled with giant bolts of striped and plain awning fabrics.  Men on the sidewalk sitting at foot-pedalled industrial sewing machines, surrounded by masses of fabric tumbling in folds around them.  Today one of the shops was using the sidewalk as a cutting board, with the ever-present guys on the side offering advice.  Love the brilliant blue sheen of the plastic fabric - wonder what it will be used for.

Later, up the hill, I come by the cats - a regular encounter around 6pm.  Two middle-aged men who live in a very tumbledown house perched at the edge of a cliff where they keep pigeons and geraniums have adopted a neighbourhood colony of feral cats.  They buy cheap ends from the butcher and feed the cats every evening.   This is not a cuddly relationship - no gentle stroking or tame purring going on.  It is all about a bucket full of meat and a lot of hungry cats.  But the humans and cats in this story seem to need each other anyway and none of them mind me hanging around watching, taking a few pictures.

So that was today's walk.   Every night there is something worth stopping to watch.

I have been slow on posting these days - I attribute it to heat and dehydration - but another one coming soon about the Holy Month of Ramadan, soon to come to a close.

summer vacation

I am back in Amman after a lovely vacation in the long summer light and cool shade of northern Europe.   Back in Europe, the weather was perfect.  Here in Amman, the plane landed in the early evening in 43C/110F degree heat and - atypically - no breeze. It's stifling.  My cold water taps are running hot as the sun bakes the water cistern on the roof.  I am bathed in sweat and the feeling of clothes on skin is close to intolerable.  Small wonder Adam and Eve - living just next door by the Euphrates River - ran around naked.

So, in addition to being a nice summer vacation, my trip was a wonderful break from all this heat - calm, cool, green.  I spent time in Amsterdam with some friends where we enjoyed bikes, book stores, great food and excellent wine consumed in gardens and on beautiful, leafy, breezy terraces.  To the amusement and puzzlement of my friends, my whole first day in Amsterdam was spent staring at and commenting on trees - their size, greenness, amazing variety and incredible beauty.  In retrospect, I was experiencing a little bit of cultural dislocation...

Amsterdam was then followed by some glorious days on the island of Vlieland in the North Sea, two hours by ferry from the mainland.

Much of Vlieland is a nature preserve/ bird sanctuary with wild dunes and amazing, pristine white sand beaches and big surf.  It is car-free - with the exception of service vehicles - and the one little village of Oost-Vlieland is straight out of a Dutch picture postcard with a long main street lined by 17th century brick houses, happy Fries horses grazing in green fields, and a big harbour filled with traditional sailing barges.  Basically:  my definition of paradise.

(The only thing slightly off-putting on Vlieland:  the blondeness!  I started keeping track of the blonde to brunette ratio in public places - restaurants, shops, etc. - usually around 3 - 4 blondes for every dark-haired person.  And let's not even talk about the blue eyes to brown eyes ratio - even more extreme!  It made me realize I was experiencing a way of life enjoyed by a minutely marginal subset of this global population.  Which in its own way felt like fascinating cultural anthropology:  observing leisure behaviours in the traditional summer habitat of the northern european.)


As always happens when I am there, Amsterdam got me thinking about cities and the ingredients that make great places.  It's all going on there - interesting streets, wonderful parks, great architecture that is always changing, ever new - without uprooting the old -  and that amazing transportation network - cycling heaven.   I made a special request of my friend to spend at least one day seeing art - not something I do very often in Amman.  Originally we had planned to go to Rotterdam to do that - since many of the major galleries and museums in Amsterdam are closed for renovations - but in the end we stayed put and toured some smaller spaces and interesting corners of the city.


We took off on our bikes at 10am and spent the day roaming around the city.  We saw some nice work and that was a pleasure.  But here's what this tour mostly helped me realize:  the city of Amsterdam has really figured out how to reuse and recycle its urban spaces.  And fast.  And in an incredibly creative, fearless and (compared to Toronto, anyway) non-fussy way.

We went to the FOAM, the Photograph Museum of Amsterdam, and, later, to the Huis Marseille, a private photography museum.  These are both located in lovely historic 16th or 17th Century Canal houses that have been converted into art galleries.  There is nothing particularly novel about historic houses being turned into galleries in this way - these two just happen to be superbly located and beautifully done.

We then rode over to the new Central Public Library of Amsterdam - a beautiful contemporary building that is central to the revitalization of the city's eastern docklands (sound familiar, Toronto?).  which are transforming incredibly rapidly and in such an exhilarating, interesting way.  Change happens fast here.  But what makes it work is that everywhere you turn there is a strong emphasis on beautiful public spaces and design detail and pedestrian and cycling infrastructure that leaves me feeling a mixture of envy and pity for poor Toronto.

The biggest revelation of the day for me, though, was a trip to the Noord neighbourhood - a quick hop on the ferry across the river.   This part of town is seeing a lot of change - a formerly industrial neighbourhood of large factories slowly turning into residential enclaves or light industry.  A similar tale to other de-industrializing cities in Western Europe and North America.

Here's what I saw that I loved:  a willingness on the part of officialdom to turn this part of town over to young people, and often creative people - architects, artists, designers, skateboarders, whoever - to shape the neighbourhood.

In part this is being done by providing incredibly cheap housing in refurbished shipping containers.   In part through handing over an abandoned - and vast - former shipbuilding factory - a giant hangar, really - over to a group of artists who have rebuilt the interior, serviced it, plumbed it and turned what was fallow space into a network of studios.   Plus a skate park, filled with teenagers, who are using the space in another cool way.   Great things are brewing

I like that this transformation from factory to studio space is not overly controlled or dictated from above.  There doesn't appear to be an obsession with health and safety regulations.  I like that it is a space built by the people who need it and use it and they care about it, because it is all about protecting their livelihoods.  They are creative people and risk takers who are establishing the neighbourhood.  I like that it is creating a whole scene that other people want to be a part of.

It makes me think a lot about how a city goes about creating new neighbourhoods from brownfields.  Maybe its not by spending lots of money on a waterfront park or a stadium, say, but by attracting and handing control over to smart, risk-taking, young people.  The kind of people that other people want to be around.

After our day out on the town, we rode back home to my friend's place - a converted 19th century schoolhouse that has been turned into art studios and a daycare and co-op apartments - and there we had a nice glass of wine on the roof terrace. A day well spent.

As another aside:  when I was in Amsterdam, I was interviewed on the topic of cities and the environment by Radio Netherlands Worldwide for their weekly radio program "Earth Beat".  If you are interested in hearing my voice (which personally makes me cringe!) here's the link below.  Click on the most recent episode entitled "Cities That Work":

http://www.rnw.nl/english/radioprogramme/earthbeat

Life Goes On

It is 9pm and the stars are out.  After a searing hot day in the mid forties, the temperature is hovering around a pleasant thirty degrees celcius and a lovely breeze is blowing.   Without question, the early evening is the best time of day here.  A friend just got back to Amman after a month-long summer holiday in Scotland and Provence.  I asked her if she missed anything when she was away.  "The colour of the sky at dusk," she said, "and the incredible calm that happens in the evening amidst all the chaos."

I am sitting on the patio of Books@ - a neighbourhood cafe-bookstore that has a breath-taking location on a hillside overlooking East Amman.  Like every night this month, there's an endless spectacle of wedding fireworks from the nearby hilltops.  The rush has been on for weddings the last couple of weeks - i think to get them out of the way before Ramadan begins this coming Wednesday.   Or at least that is the only explanation I have for the non-stop nightly round of drums and gunshots and honking and fireworks.  Tonight's displays have been particularly impressive.   Meanwhile, people on the patio are lounging around on sofas or sitting at tables drinking tea or smoking argileh pipes.  Or drinking beer - also something that won't be seen once Ramadan begins.  The atmosphere is very relaxed; taking it easy is a pastime that people have honed to a fine art here. I am learning to get better at it myself.  The heat definitely helps.

And this is where I encounter the eternal paradox, the circle that I cannot square in my head:  how can a place so serene exist amidst so much turmoil?   This past week saw an upswing in violence in Iraq with more rockets in Baghdad and a serious bombing in Basra.  Several friends here whose work for the UN focuses on reconstruction in Iraq say the situation is definitely worsening - a couple of them just got back from (55 degree heat!) Baghdad and were very pessimistic about the situation.  Meanwhile, last Tuesday, a serious border skirmish occurred between Israel and Lebanon - the first since 2006 - with 3 or 4 deaths and a lot of sabre-rattling from Hezbollah in the aftermath.  Also last Tuesday, missiles shot from an unknown location in the Sinai desert targeting Eilat in Israel landed off course in the south of this country, in Aqaba.  The story is similar to a news item from last April that I posted about.  Only this time a person - a taxi driver - was killed and several more injured.   The wife of a close colleague was in Aqaba for work that day (he is a very close colleague.  He sits 18 inches away from me... and can hear me chew my lunch every day... poor dear) . The rocket landed on a taxi right outside the Intercontinental Hotel where she was staying.   She could see the aftermath out the window.

And again, just like in April when this happened before, none of these events really raised eyebrows or generated conversation.  I think a group of us chatted in an off hand way for about 5 minutes during a work break about the rocket landing in Aqaba and whether my colleague's wife was OK.  Just a mild curiousity.  We all just assumed that she was fine and there was nothing to worry about.  Then we went back to work, reviewing excel spread sheets and pouring over aerial maps.  I try and compare this reaction to what would have happened in the office in Toronto if one of my colleagues' spouses had been away on business and looked out the window of the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, say, to see a taxi flattened by a scud missile and dead and injured people lying around.  I venture to say that a lot of chatter - maybe even some tears of concern - would have been generated.

So it is all a bit strange.  My general experience is that the reaction to gossip and minor events here is much more amplified that I am used to.  Small slights often get blown out of proportion.  But when it comes to things that would constitute 'big' or 'newsworthy' events in Canada - bombings, landslides, city-wide blackouts - they tend to get shrugged off as nothing more than the minor annoyances of everyday life.  I even have to admit I kind of like the nonchalance.

But it still doesn't quite make sense to me.  And I have to wonder, relaxing on the patio, whether I am continuing to play the role of the Sissy Spacek character in the film Missing.  Am I witnessing some kind of distintegration?  In it but not of it.  I guess that's the eternal mystery of being here.

friends, neighbours

One of things that I love about living abroad - both now in Amman and elsewhere in the past - is how it forces me to confront myself and consider what I value on a daily - maybe hourly - basis.

This is a fairly banal observation, especially for those readers who have spent time living overseas. But coming to terms with different ways of being, finding out what parts of your lifestyle you can compromise on (vegetarian diet, clothing choice) and what things are fundamentally important to your quality of life (strong coffee, walking, tolerance) allows you to learn about your own limits and peculiarities and biases, every moment of every day.  Insights that may require hours of determined journal-writing or piles of junky magazine self-help quizzes back home (Are you destined to succeed?  What kind of female are you?) emerge self-evidently without having to think deliberately about them.  It is something akin to introspection, only active and exhilirating.  And exhausting.  Your brain is working overtime, constantly processing all this new information - which translates into very sound sleep at night and vivid dreams - an added bonus.

At a certain point, after a few months, the state of wonderment decreases as you get used to a new normal - the fact that your colleague has two wives, or that giant cockroaches are living in your kitchen drains - but the potential for being truly surprised never really goes away.  It is all a part of the full-body learning experience of living in a very foreign place

I knew all this before I came, but living it is another thing altogether.  I was fully prepared to be surrounded - and even, in happy circumstances, embraced - by people with very different world views and backgrounds and opinions than my own.  I was ready for that and excited by the prospect.  What I absolutely didn't expect was that I would encounter someone exactly like me, with whom I have everything in common.  And that has been its own amazing surprise and learning experience.

Paul, until yesterday, was my neighbour and colleague.  He lives in Tucson, Arizona where he studies architecture, but has been spending time in Amman this summer working at the Institute where I work. Yesterday he left town for more adventures in London and Paris and New York before he heads back to  Tucson.  I will miss him.  We saw a lot of each other.  His (former) front door is about 12 feet from mine and his desk at work was about 20 feet away.  For about 6 weeks straight we shared the same schedule:  8:10am walk to work;  work all day; 5:30pm walk home and often in the evenings something social.   Along the way, through the course of our time together, we covered a lot of ground - topographical and conversational.

It is fairly unremarkable to me that through our conversations it emerged that we share similar political views - liberal, green, socially progressive.  Given our workplace, it is also not surprising that we have a a shared interest in buildings, housing, transportation.   We are both cyclists and downtown city dwellers with a penchant for transitional urban neighbourhoods.  It is even understandable to me that despite being from opposite ends of the same continent, and with a gap in age and a difference in gender,  we share the same cultural references with an astounding overlap in the music we listen to, books we read, movies, blogs, websites, news items that we jointly draw upon.  These are the external, contextual things that contribute to who we are, I guess, as a certain type of liberal, intellectual North American.   Other  preferences that we shared were endless: like a love of cats, or the sound of cottonwood trees rustling in the wind, or the slant of sunlight on Jebel Lwebdieh in the late afternoon.   The list goes on and on.

But what was really a learning experience for me was seeing Paul's approach to the world - his way of breaking down a question and figuring out answers and his openness to the people and experiences around him.  I learned a lot.  Also about a certain north american logic.  I realized that I bring it with me everwhere I go and it is the frame through which I interpret the world and connect with people.  I guess I never really realized before how much I belong to my own culture.  Or that I am "type" of person.

A couple of days before he left, Paul and I talked about the fact that we have so much in common, despite our obvious gender, age and geographic differences.  He attributes it to growing up in the sticks with professional parents - something we have in common - and bicycles.  I tend to agree with him.

I asked his permission to write this.  I hope he doesn't mind what I have written.  I will miss him and see this city a bit differently now as a result of his influence.  Happy travels, friend!

not a drop to drink

Summer has hit. The thermometer has been hovering around 38 degrees C (101 F) in breezy, high-altitude Amman and a balmy 45 degrees C (113 F) in Aqaba, a bit further south. Friends in Baghdad are are reporting 50 degrees C. Despite high temperatures, I am finding the heat surprisingly easy to handle - zero humidity and just fine in the shade. With a nice cross breeze running through my un-air-conditioned apartment, it is actually more comfortable than my place in Toronto on a hot summer night (sorry, Briana).

It is the searing radiant heat of the sun at midday that is a whole new experience. A visitor recently commented that "the sun seems closer to the earth here... is that possible?". The image of a steak sizzling on a barbeque grill plagues my mind's eye when I think about exposed flesh in this weather. Not that there is much exposed flesh to be seen - at least among women. Dress codes remain in place no matter the temperature - which means it is loosely a policy of ankle to wrist to neck coverage out in public. I threw caution to the wind this week after returning from a meeting out of the office and - somewhat overcome by the baking midday heat - I took off my cardigan, revealing my bare arms in the office. Risque behaviour on my part?

This weather has me thinking about water. Partly because I am being very careful to drink a lot of it. Partly because the summer water shortages are on their way I am told and I try to imagine what it would be like to live in this heat without access to a reliable water supply. I am not sure I am looking forward to finding out. Water delivery - which currently happens once a week - can slow down in August I hear, or get rationed. But, to be frank, I am not sure I personally need to worry with my above average income. It is the many, many other residents of this city whose access to water is severely compromised that I wonder about.

A friend recently sent me a note wanting to know more about water in the region. He wrote: "... I noticed that the Dead Sea seems to be in two sections... Is this drying up? Or has it always been salt flats? This raised more questions in my mind... a post on water politics/culture would be interesting.... You mentioned in one post how on the infrastructure side 40% of water is lost through leakage, which suggests that waste is universal. But then, how can that be!!? In an area so dry why do they put up with leaks? On the water use side, surely people don't take 15 minute showers, leave the taps running to get the coolest/hottest water? Who goes without water? How costly is water?"

So, here I go, trying to say a few insightful things about a very complicated topic:


Water is scarce. The Dead Sea is drying up and by good estimates will be gone in 25 years at the present rate of evaporation. Most of the water in the Jordan river - which runs as a mere trickle now into the Dead Sea at the north end - is either diverted for agriculture in Israel or Jordan - or is collected in water treatment plants for drinking water in arid Amman. Similarly the streams that run through the deep, dramatic canyons on the east side of the Dead Sea - where I have been hiking over the last two weekends: they used to be tributaries, but now when these streams reach the flats just before the Dead Sea, they are piped and channeled to a water treatment plant, and then pumped a kilometer up hill to the thirsty city.

A sample conversation: I am talking to the director of planning of a major city in the North about the impacts of scattered sprawl development on the water supply especially with the enormous growth in population expected in the coming years. I point out that this city is surrounded by the most fertile, rain-fed agricultural lands in the whole kingdom and sitting on an underground aquifer. We talk about why it is important to conserve those agricultural lands, and maintain the natural heritage cover to allow for water re-absorption, maintain soil permeability, minimize the need for irrigation. She stares at me blankly. I ask her: "Where will the water come from to keep this city alive if you don't protect those resources?" She tells me: "Industry is the problem. they use too much water. If it becomes a big problem, we will close them down. And for people? Well, for people, for drinking, God will provide. He always has."

This fills me with a sense of dread and fear. Currently annual per capita water distribution in Jordan stands at 150 cubic metres per person, well below the international water poverty line of 1,000 cubic metres. With rapid population growth, no one I have talked to has a sense of how this will look in 15 years - let alone 50.

I recently read in the newspaper that the price of water is going up. This is politically tricky as so many people on limited incomes have scarce access to water. The story reported that the hike in the prices of water is part of a three-year plan to address the government's budget deficit. It has nothing to do with pricing the resource to reflect its full cost. The story also notes that "an average of 42 per cent of the water pumped to the public is wasted - the figure varies from place to place - 35% wastage in Amman; 22% in Aqaba, 65% in some regions." The Minister responsible says that the water loss is due to illegal trespassing - people stealing from the water grid. My colleagues also blame bad pipes that are very frequently above ground and easily subject to breakage and leakage. Why does this happen? Why aren't there more water conservation, water capture, grey water recycling, water infrastructure improvement projects at the small and micro-scale? This is a mystery that I think about daily. Part of it is a lack of organizational know-how at the municipal and national scale; part of it is the structure of the industry; part of it is a sheer lack of access to capital.

.

Instead big infrastructure projects dominate:  a giant red-dead sea channel that will generate hydro electric power and purportedly restore water levels in the dead sea (notwithstanding the inter-basin transfer!) is in the feasibility study stage with world bank money.  A very large pipeline is being built from Aqaba to Amman to tap the last large underground aquifer in the country. 

People do talk about water a lot. Which part of town has good water pressure; why it is best to live lower down in an apartment building - ground floor best, water pressure highest; where the best swimming pools and spas are. They share tips about getting the hot water from the boiler on the roof to the shower faster - flush the toilet at the same time as running the shower; do the dishes right before you have the shower and the hot water will be on stream.  Otherwise you are running the shower for 15 minutes before you can even get in.

These are probably the conversations of the urban affluent. I honestly have no clue how the water supply works in poorer East Amman, even less what it is like in bedouin communities in the desert or for the Egyptian farm labourers who live in tents in the Jordan valley. Driving through the southern desert the last few weekends, I have seen water tanker trucks parked beside the bedouin goat-hair tents, the sheep and goats lying in the shade the truck affords - the only shade around - the camels hanging around farther afield.

These trucks - often the only motorized vehicles in the vicinity - must serve the needs of the whole travelling unit, I figure - the humans, the livestock, washing, drinking needs. They must be the supply for a long haul - a week? two? a month? - and I am guessing that they are driven along to the next campsite when the herds move. I cannot imagine how much that water must cost. And now that the summer heat is here, that much more expensive.

Paying Rent

It is the beginning of another month - my eighth one here - and that means it is time to pay the rent.  I look forward to this event, all the more so because it is a tricky feat to accomplish.   First, I live in a cash economy - no cheques - so I have to accumulate the right amount of cold hard cash over the course of the month.  This means taking it out in the allowable small increments from the bank machine - when it happens to be working - and remembering to store up 50 dinar bills over the course of the month, like a squirrel preparing for winter.  Second, I need to be in the building at the right time - when the owner is here and the office door is open.  The office hours are unpredictable - non-existent, actually - and I need to watch out or else weeks will go by and I will suddenly wake up to the fact that I owe 2 months back rent plus utilities.

So around the beginning of the month, when I see that office light on,  I dash up to my apartment, grab  the envelope full of cash, head back downstairs and walk through a dark hallway filled with old broken furniture and other detritus into the back office of Abu Mohammed.

Abu Mohammed is the building owner. His name is Mahmoud and the "Abu" title literally means "Father of" which is both a mark of respect and an indication that he has a son named Mohammed.  He is a large man, in his mid 60s, who looks like he has done his share of heavy manual labour.   In contrast to his appearance, he has a gentle voice and an elaborately polite manner, bordering on deferential.   He conveys a certain simplicity.  He is the opposite of the polished, expensively dressed people I deal with in my day job, those with perfect English and excellent degrees from foreign universities.   Sitting behind the scratched wooden desk in his dusty, cramped office,  you could easily think that this is a hard-working labourer who had the good fortune to build an apartment building in a part of town that has now become popular. And here he is now reaping the benefits.

But things are not what they seem.  The lesson I learn approximately 2 times every day in this country.

In fact, this lovely unpreposessing man has a major contracting business with an expertise in energy projects and is involved throughout the Gulf and east Africa. The apartment building is a little tiny side project that he keeps going for no discernable reason except as a place to store old furniture - and a good little investment.  When I get that chance once a month, I like to sit with him in his office, and have a  chat to hear the latest news about contracting jobs in the middle east.  They are mysterious and amazing.  Yesterday, he reported that he was just back from 30 days away - 20 days in Abu Dhabi, 10 days in Sudan where has managed to secure financing from a Swiss Bank with a big pile of Emirate money to build a solar energy project in Sudan.  This is in partnership with a Chinese state company who are bringing in the technology.  "I will have a labour of thousands of people, Miss Hannah.  It is a very big project for me."  All the paperwork is signed - he showed me - which is why he had to go to Sudan  - to chase down some signatures.  

We talked about what it is like to work in Sudan.  "Hot" is one word.  "Miss Hannah - it is 60 degrees in the sun and so dusty and dirty.  The roads are just from sand, no asphalt, dust everywhere."

This constellation of Abu Dhabi - Chinese - Sudanese interests - with a little Swiss Bank thrown in on the side - fascinates me, of course.  All the more so since I am currently reading the (very good) book "What is the What?" by Dave Eggers about refugee children in Sudan.  Place names like Darfur come to mind.  Do people do business in this place?  It seems so.  I try and ask him political questions - what does he think about the outcome of the recent election in Sudan? Are people discussing the separation of Southern Sudan from the North? - that sort of thing - but he never takes the bait and remains unfailingly polite.  I remain fascinated and somewhat uncomfortable.

As we chat, his nephew sits on the side, like a character from Charles Dickens, making elaborate notes in a giant ledger book where all of the apartment transactions are duly recorded.  And various renters and other petitioners come and go to pay money or just pay respects.

After 15 or 20 minutes, my time is up, and - honestly - he has better things to do than satisfy the curiousity of nosy Canadian.  But he is deferential and gracious and we part with many repeated "go in peace" salutations until rent time comes around next month and I hear more about building big infrastructure projects in hot, distant lands.

The Great Outdoors

I have been getting out of the city quite a bit on weekends lately, so thought I would share a few photos and notes about my various travels.  I was also out on my first bike ride in the countryside yesterday - which was amazing.  First time on a bike since February.  What a joy.  But that I will save for another post.

As-Salt

Just to the west of Amman, Salt is an Ottoman era town that thrived in the 19th Century with strong trading links to Nablus in the West Bank. This town has one of the most intact historic downtowns in the Country, built from beautiful, local, honey-coloured limestone.  It is purportedly the home of sultana raisins, and there are lovely terraced olive and grape groves that ring the steep hills surrounding the town.

The old pedestrian souk is still happening with household goods and food and live chickens and tandoor bread ovens and clothing stalls all doing a busy trade.  I walked up to the top of one of the hills ringing the town and found an old Ottoman era Turkish cemetery, still well-tended, and a bright shiny mosque.

I did stick out like a sore thumb in Salt on a saturday morning - not in hijab, unaccompanied by children or a man.  It was the first place I have been actively followed by young kids and teenagers calling out to me, wanting to talk, the insistent "hello, hello where you from" - a weird combination of exceedingly friendly and faintly menacing. 

Three hours and two very steep climbs in high heat saw me happy to get back to Amman and its urbane charms and relative anonymity.  The brightness of the sun gives all my photos from that day a bleached-out look.  Looking at them, I yearn for shade.

Dana Nature Reserve and Kerak Castle

A couple of weekends later, I went on a little overnight camping excursion to the Dana Nature Reserve  about 2 hours south of Amman with a friend and his mother, who was visiting from Mumbai.

Before heading into the campsite, we stopped by the original village of Dana nestled into a rocky hillside, overlooking a deep gorge leading down to the Dead Sea.  There has been some kind of human habitation in the village and gorge below since the iron age - closer to the sea is the oldest discovered copper mining site in the world.

The village itself dates to the Ottoman empire - probably 400 years old - and is hewn from local limestone.  It was abandoned in the 1970s, but is now growing again as part of an eco-tourism initiative run by the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), which has seen the village become a destination for hiking, bird-watching and wildlife research, at the same time as creating jobs for local residents.  (As an aside, the RSCN is an amazing operation and Ontario could learn a lot from them about how to integrate environmental protection, eco-tourism and local economic development more effectively!)

Our campsite, also run by the RSCN, was about 10 km from the village and perched at the edge of the gorge, as well.  The heat and stillness and white canvas tents surrounded by sand and scrub grass made it feel a little like the high savanna in Africa.  From here, we watched the sun set, sat around in a bedouin tent drinking mint tea, looked out at the amazing night sky and all went to sleep early in our tents.

The next morning at 7am, I went for a hike by myself in the cooler morning air for dramatic views and lots of birds and a couple of brilliant blue lizards.  My friend who was out on a hike much earlier than I was lucky enough, in the dawn light, to see 3 groups of oryx - an antelope native to the region that is threatened with extinction from over-hunting.  A reintroduction program at Dana is seeing populations growing here - a success story. (Not to mention that "oryx" is an excellent scrabble word!).

On the drive back from Dana, we stopped by the Kerak fortress built on a high peak by Christian crusaders in the 12th century.  More fantastic views and gorgeous bleached limestone walls and, unlike our other stops, piles of old stone missiles from catapults of years gone by.  

I cannot get over how easy it is to access amazing natural and historic sites in this country.  Everything is easily within reach and designed to make you feel welcome.  Also something we could learn to do better back in the homeland.

"you made a mistake"

As usual, I was running a bit late this morning.  So instead of walking to my new office location (yes!... another office... this time at City Hall... the third one so far in the time I have been here), I walked out in front of the apartment to hail a cab.  The ride to this new office costs about 75 cents anyway, which makes it hard for other options to compete.  Not that there even are other transportation options.

So I am standing there in the bright morning sunshine, and a yellow car with a triangular light thing on the roof is coming down the hill towards me, so I hail it.  And the driver stops.  He is about 50 years old, grizzled, overweight, a smoker.  In short a typical cabbie.  "Where to" he calls out the window (in arabic).  I name the destination:  City Hall.   He says "get in."  I do.

The typical conversation ensues:  "Where you from?"  "Canada".  "Canada Very Nice.  You work at the embassy?" he asks.  "No, at City Hall."  Our topics are exhausted and we lapse into silence.

About 3 minutes later, half way to the destination, he tells me:  "You made a mistake."

Me:  "What mistake?"

Him:  "I am not a cab driver.  I am a driving instructor.  This is a learn-to-drive car.  Not a taxi. Different colour yellow."

Sure enough, I check the dashboard and there's no meter there.  And this is not a cab. And this nice man, seeing my waving on the side of the road, just decided to drive me to my destination because I am a hopeless foreigner in need of assistance.

So I am profusely apologetic and very grateful for the fact that he is going out of his way and thank him very, very much for his trouble.

And in his grizzled, smoking, driver guy way, he shrugs it off without anything approximating a smile and just says, "No problem....  Go in peace."

Something like this happens to me approximately 3 times a week.  Like Blanche Dubois in a Streetcar Named Desire it appears that I do, indeed, depend on the kindness of strangers.

world cup fever

 On my way home:

The check out boys, who are my pals, in the Haboob grocery store,  are split on who will win - one says Argentina, another is Italy all the way.  The young Iraqi guy who bags the groceries - maybe 14 years old, a refugee here - feels for me.  He says:  "You Canada.  Me Iraq.  We both bad."  He smiles in solidarity.

Closer to home, a server comes rushing out of a coffee shop,  kissing the mexican flag.  "Ana Mexico" (I am Mexico) he calls to me.  I reply: "Ana Espania".  He's happy for me.

There are flags everywhere along Rainbow Street, leading to my building.  They fly from the coffee shop patios, are taped to lamp posts, and stick out of car windows.  So far, I have noticed Italy quite a bit, and, most of all, Brazil.  Jordan didn't make the cut, of course, but that doesn't seem to matter.

Fun.

Aqaba

Tales of feral cats are going to have to wait another week while I report on my weekend trip to Aqaba.

A four-hour bus trip through a desert bathed in late afternoon sun delivered me there last Thursday.  Aqaba is one of those places that has been on my   "to see" list since I got here.  There's a great sequence in the film Lawrence of Arabia where the Arab Legion takes the city from the Ottomans in a daring attack from the mountains.  The name has always stuck in my head as an exotic destination where heroes and brigands collide.  And it was now or never to go.  I couldn't wait any longer:  once July hits, that part of the country starts hitting temperatures in the 40s (I guess that would be 100s for you Fahrenheit readers), and as it was, June is getting late.  Stepping off the air-conditioned bus from Amman was like walking into a Russian steam bath in a fur coat.

Of course, as these things go, the town is nothing like the picture in my mind.  And as it turns out, David Lean filmed the whole "Lawrence of Arabia" sequence in Spain, because the real place didn't capture his imagination.  But it was nonetheless interesting.  This is true bedouin country, a real desert town, very conservative like its near neighbour Saudi Arabia and quite different in feel from the urban north.   Camels were tethered to trees or being led around town by people in from the desert.   The streets on Friday, the holy day, were utterly deserted.  The radiant heat of the sun was bone-shattering - no one was out walking or sitting outside for leisure - certainly no unaccompanied women.  It felt like whatever local life happens there, is confined to families, behind closed gates, in covered interior courtyards probably with lovely fountains and shady vines.  As a tourist you have no access to that.

And overlaid on top of this conservative desert town is a burgeoning tourism industry taking advantage of the stunningly beautiful Red Sea.  This involves many high-end European hotels, where bikinis are worn and alcoholic drinks are enjoyed (including by yours truly) and few people leave the confines of the private beach and pool.   On top of that there is a smattering of local desert excursion companies and boat and diving tours that make their living off the visitors who venture out of the hotels or are looking for an entirely different experience.

And this was the second reason I was in Aqaba:  to go snorkeling along the beautiful, unspoiled, incredibly intricate coral reefs that edge the coast south of town and all along Saudi coast.

Friends from Amman set me up with a local diving company - which was terrific.  The boat trip was a fantastic day-long adventure, with two stops for swimming, snorkeling or diving.  The water was teeming with sea life.  It was my first time snorkeling in such a rich marine environment (I think the last time was when I was 10 years old  in the Ottawa River where I saw mostly clams and mud).   Huge, long electric blue pipefish, a couple of small blue marlin with the distinctive pointy bills, bright orange jewelfish, lots of yellow and black "finding nemo" fish.  Intoxicating. At one point, I almost floated away into the endless blue drifting along behind a huge school of flashing silver sea bream.

On board the boat was another adventure altogether.  There was a large group that had come from Beirut, all members together of a diving club there.  It was their first time at the Red Sea, and their first time in Jordan.  They were terrifically good looking to a person - men and women alike - charming, warm, outgoing, and with a gracious social ease tinged with a sense of superiority. This, I am told, is a hallmark of wealthy Maronite Christian Beirutis.   It was interesting chatting with them - on the one hand, as native arabic speakers, they have direct access to the whole arab world - the Gulf, Egypt, wherever - but in some ways this conservative, bedouin Aqaba where the ladies on the public beach go swimming in full black hijab, was as foreign to them as it was to me - even more so.

From the boat we could see all the neighbouring countries - Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and, at the head of the channel, one of Israel's most strategic ports, Eilat.  

And this was the other big observation sitting there on the hotel beach:  while local folks lead their lives and bring their camels into town, and tourists sunbathe and frolic on this sunshine coast, the big tankers also move up and down the Gulf of Aqaba moving goods from Asia into the Middle East.  Big commerce continues among these uneasy neighbours and the world goes on.