new digs, old buildings

I moved on Saturday to the downtown Jebel Amman neighbourhood. These are a few pictures of the new apartment and its view.

The neighbourhood is great, the space is large, the floors are marble - which is very cool in warm weather - and the furniture is "habibi" style - ornate beyond your wildest dreams. I am particularly relishing sleeping in the "Louis XV" by way of The Brick bedroom suite.

As for the view and the neighbourhood, in the nighttime view above, the faint green-ish lights demarcate all the local mosques. My first night here, I sat out on my balcony and listened to the different calls to prayer echoing through the valley. Other worldly and beautiful. In the distance, the columns and dome that are on the top of the opposite hill - Jebel Hussein - is the citadel, a protected area that is a mixture of Roman and early Islamic ruins.

After moving my (meagre) stuff last weekend, I went on a site visit to the north with a consultant who is also working here. He was doing some surveying work. I was tagging along. After driving around the municipality, we meandered down a few dirt roads, and at the peak of an out- of-the-way hill, on the outskirts of a little village, we came across some old stone structures. Probably the original village, the buildings are many hundred years old or likely more. This cluster of buildings should probably be on a protected list, so we checked with our colleague working on historic preservation. She had never heard of the place.

The village's more recent settlers simply take the original buildings for granted, allowing them to slowly weather the passage of time. Now lacking roofs and with walls tumbling in, they serve a variety of purposes: sheep sheds, donkey stable, random storage. Here are a few more pictures: