roads to Rome

I spent Christmas day in the town of Madaba. Madaba is mentioned in the bible, an ancient city, and also a very contemporary one. It houses one of Jordan's large Palestinian refugee camps and is a busy, happening place.

One of the things that drew me there is a renowned 15 metre x 6metre mosaic map that dates from the 6th century. The map, embedded in the floor of a Greek Orthodox Church, depicts the holy land as it was at the time. It shows the towns and villages and key pilgrimage sites in extraordinary, geographically correct detail, using designs to show water courses and valleys and mountains that are beautiful and functional too.

The centrepiece of the whole mosaic is Jerusalem, depicted painstakingly. All the ancient gates to the city - the Jaffa gate, the Damascus gate, etc. - are shown precisely. The standout feature is the colonaded roman road running straight through the centre of town, end to end.

On Christmas day, the church was thronged with tour groups from all corners of the world - India, Germany, the US, Japan. It appeared to be a regular stop on the guided tours to the holy land for religious folk. Lots of people snapping pics like the one above. (Something I learned: mosaics are hard to photograph.) I stayed a while and then gave up on the crowds and decided to check out the other sites in town.

Walking down a narrow street, I noticed a gate with a sign that said "Departemenet (sic) of Antiquities". I pushed on the gate and it wasn't locked, so I stepped in. Unlike the crowded church, there wasn't a soul. It was a cross between a garden and a rubble heap, interspersed with more mosaics. I figured out from the guidebook that it was a place called the 'burnt palace' - the partial ruins of a roman patrician mansion and a jumble of neighbouring buildings. I wandered in the incredible stillness, soaking in the heat of the sun. The aging caretaker came and informed me that the site was closed today, but 'please, stay, stay, no problem.' Then he offered me coffee and we sat on the roman ruins and he showed me pictures on his cell phone of his son and six daughters.

Sitting there, it took me a while to figure out the place and what I was seeing. But slowly it dawned on me that I was looking at a Roman road and what remained of the buildings that fronted on to it. The road is in perfect condition - flat, straight, unrutted - made from huge slabs of white limestone. 2000 years later and 2500 kilometres from the city of Rome, it is still there. It runs through the back yards of people's properties - like some kind of back alley - and the back of the mosque edges on to the ruins.

the new Madaba, the fragments of mosaics, the old enduring road make me think both about permanence and the fleeting nature of things. Layers of history piling up, fragments left, disregarded, but always there, in the back yard, as a reminder.

the biggest christmas tree in the middle east

This 26 metre (fake) Christmas tree is set up in the centre of town of Fuheis in the middle of some beautiful Roman ruins. The proud mayor of the town lays claim to having the largest Christmas tree in the middle east - a story which made the front page of the Jordan Times this week, so it must be true. The whole town, which is majority Christian, celebrates this holiday with ardour - lots of lights and tinsel-y decorations and fir trees (imported, surely) in front yards. It is both over the top and comforting at the same time.

So in the same spirit of all Fuheis, from the heart of the holy land where the whole thing started, I wish you all, dear readers, a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. HE

voyage to the Dead Sea

This past weekend I was asked to participate in a strategic planning retreat for work. To my delight, the event was arranged at the swanky Movenpick hotel on the shores of Dead Sea. I decided to head down early on Friday several hours before the opening dinner to see what's going on down there at the world's lowest point on land below sea level.

Driving there in the van with a couple of colleagues made me realize how much time I have been spending looking at sprawl since I got here. Unexpectedly, driving southwest out of Amman - a new direction for me - the city ended abruptly and we were suddenly passing through a wide open landscape of steep hills, terraced olive groves and deep valleys. A sight for my sore eyes.

And then we started to go downhill. One of the women I was travelling with offered me gum. I declined. She insisted... 'really, it is for your ears, they will feel the pressure.... like in an airplane...". Amman is indeed on a deceptively high plateau and though the Dead Sea is only 30 minutes away by car, it is a completely different climate and at a much, much lower altitude. In Amman, it was 6 degrees C, rainy, foggy and overcast when we left; half an hour later, when we reached the bottom of the steep hill into the Jordan river valley where it opens into the Dead Sea, the sky was clearing, sun was streaming , the humidity was rising and the temperature was a balmy 17C.

Suddenly there were banana plantations and orange groves and flowers and lush vegetation. And signs for the baptism site of Jesus. And weird rinky dink souvenir shops. And lots of plain clothes and uniformed security people because of the proximity to a certain neighbouring country. And the Dead Sea itself.

December 18th is not a peak season for swimming but there were a few other ridiculous tourists like myself (mostly German) who couldn't resist the water. We bobbed along in the briny sea. Fantastic feeling floating weightless. Amazing oxygen-rich air.

Will definitely do it again - highly recommended.

thinking about sidewalks and cultural imperialism

When I first came here, I was warned off walking by a number of people: no one walks, it just isn't done, it isn't safe after dark, it isn't safe for a woman alone. On my first day on the job at the Ministry, a driver was sent to pick me up to ferry me safely to work. It was then that I realized that the Ministry is about 4 blocks from my apartment - about 6 minutes door to door on foot. It is quite literally faster to walk than to drive.

At that point, good sense prevailed over fear. I told the office manager - to his visible dismay - that he didn't need to send the driver every morning, and that I could make it to work under my own steam. I was also fortunate to connect with a couple of ex-pats from Madrid and Quebec City who are also walkers. They helped me get things in perspective and figure out how to get around a bit on foot.

While it has been great to get outside and see the streets, it has also given me pause. First of all, this is a city dominated by drivers and its neighbourhoods are separated and fragmented by so many giant, fast-moving arterial roads. These virtual highways are impossible to cross and unpleasant but often necessary to walk alongside when I need to get somewhere outside of the immediate vicinity.

Second, the pedestrian infrastructure is crazy. Since so few people walk outside of the historic downtown - maybe a few teenage boys, some labourers, and asian maids, who look like they are mostly from Indonesia - the role and concept of the sidewalk is understood differently here. For one, sidewalks are not a public amenity - they seem to be the responsibility of individual property owners. Consequently, their heights and widths vary widely from frontage to frontage. For many property owners, the sidewalk that they are expected to maintain in front of their house - for no clear purpose from their perspective, I suppose - becomes an extended planter or parking pad. I have started to keep photos of the elaborate plantings that homeowners maintain on their sidewalks - here's a few sample pictures. There is an amazing amount of topiary and that stuff takes work to keep up! And, of course, it makes walking on the sidewalk impossible.

So, I wonder, am I wrong to want sidewalks to be pedestrian-friendly ? If I am importing my pedestrian ways to a country and a culture that doesn't share them, is it wrong to think that they should be improved?

cultural dislocation... in a nice way

I joined a gym last Thursday. The combination of being without a bike, walking very little, and being driven around a lot made it a priority for me to find a place where I could get some exercise. It is a nice gym - it has a clean, spacious work out area with lots of equipment, a divine steamroom with beautiful blue tile work and emanating a slightly mentholated steam that does wonders for sinuses, and it is also a reliable place for a hot shower (not always a given). The gym happens to be located in one of the international hotels here - but it is used by lots of local folks, not just hotel guests.

When I went after work today, I was astonished to find a Christmas carolling party happening in the hotel lobby. I'd say very few of the participants were guests. There were lots of little kids running around, women in headscarfs running after them, and there, on the stage, 7 bright young people wearing santa hats and singing a heavily accented version of 'hark the herald angels sing'. It was lovely. Lots of good cheer. Not something I would have expected.

Once in the gym, I decide to take my first fitness class in arabic. It is billed as an aerobic/step class and I figure even if I don't know the language, I can just follow along with the movements. In Canada these classes are almost universally the domain of women. Occasionally there is one stout-hearted male who is doing the 'grapevine' and 'chassee' along with the ladies. But only very occasionally. So imagine my surprise when I enter the studio where the class is being held to find a room full of men - the students - and one other woman, who turns out to be the instructor. She is covered head to toe - headscarf, long-sleeved shirt, long exercise pants and a tunic thing over top. She must be boiling, I think to myself.

So we get started. And the instructor kicks ass. It is one fantastic, energetic class. And all the fellows are, indeed, grapevining and knee-upping and hamstring curling and ab crunching just like you do. It was really fun and, for some reason, a good experience to see these fellows in a new light. Something about gender parity, perhaps?

a word about work

As I was thinking about setting up this blog, I decided that I wasn't going to write about work. I wanted to try to capture impressions of daily life - walking on a sidewalk, grocery shopping, weekend adventures, tips on curing olives (which, by the way, I got a lot of this week from my colleagues - apparently December is the season for picking, curing and pressing olives).

But I thought I should mention that work is, indeed, a big part of daily life.

So a word about what I am doing: I am part of a project that brings together a joint team of the Jordan Ministry of Municipal Affairs, the Amman Institute for Urban Development (which I am working with), the Canadian consulting firm Planning Alliance, and a number of local municipalities in northern Jordan. The focus is to develop plans for use by the municipalities and national government to manage urban development better so that less agricultural and natural heritage land is paved over and, on the other hand, existing city centres and built up areas become a focus for investment and revitalization. The mandate is not entirely different from the work I was doing in the GTA. The context is radically different, however. Some pictures to give you a sense of the state of the downtown in a city called Rusayfa, and, on the other hand, the nature of the scattered residential sprawl happening outside of town on agricultural land. These rural outskirts of Rusayfa are in the biblical 'hills of Gilead'.

So far, one week in, I can testify that work is hectic. Any colleagues from MEI who might be reading this blog might be astounded to learn that I have been at the office at 8:15am every morning (jetlag turned me into a morning person!) and am there til 6pm or so, with plenty of catch-up reading in the evening. The work involves quite a lot of travel to the partner municipalities, which has been a great way to start to understand the landscape. It is one giant learning experience, fascinating, and intimidating.

So that's work. I just thought I would mention it in case anyone thinks my life is just one long stroll in the streets over the next couple of months!

what I now know about camel husbandry

The weekend here starts on Friday and people go back to work on Sundays.

This past weekend, I had been planning to stay in Amman - after only being here 3 days - and settle in a bit, get my bearings, check out the downtown and a few neighbourhoods.

That plan went awry when another Canadian colleague, a truly intrepid global traveller, asked me if I wanted to go camping under the stars in Wadi Rum, a protected desert area sparsely populated by traditional bedouin communities. My guidebook describes it thus: "rugged and majestic, simply one of the world's

most alluring desert destinations. Think towering cliffs, red dunes and sleeping under the stars."

The opportunity was too good to refuse. We headed out early Friday afternoon, arriving at the Wadi Rum visitor's centre as the sky was getting dark (night falls at 4:15pm here!). Soon we were in the protected area and off to find a spot on the vast desert floor to call our own.

It became clear, quite quickly, that the desert is a big place and, fortunately for us, help came in the person of Raad, a young bedouin man. He assisted us in finding a camping site that night and served as our guide the next day. Raad was simply fascinating on the topic of camels.

I learned that the camels you see wandering about in the desert in herds - who look like they might be wild - are actually domesticated

animals who provide milk. These camels wander out into the desert unaccompanied for 2 or 3 or 4 days at a time, eat whatever sparse vegetation is to be had, and eventually wander back to their homestead or to a nearby spring to have some water. When a camel doesn't show up for more than 4 days or so, then the owner goes out looking for her to make sure everything is ok. The desert floor is covered with millions of camel hoof prints. Raad said that when looking for a lost camel, his father (but not himself) could identify all of his own animals just based on their shape of their individual hoof prints and track their trajectory in that way.

I also learned that racing camels are another category altogether. Raad is an avid camel racer and in a show of great hospitality took us to his encampment to meet his winning camel Wolf - along with the rest of his 'stable'. Though still a young man - age 22 - Raad had a going concern with these racing camels and even had a hired hand to tend them. (The hired hand was a young teenager from Sudan. I couldn't help but wonder how he had found his way to this remote community in Jordan's desert and what his personal journey must have been.)

These camels are smaller and sleeker than the

milk camels. And they don't get to wander. They are tethered and covered to ward off sun stroke, and muzzled to prevent them from eating any junky desert food. They are fed special diets, watered daily - not every four days - and are taken out for exercise frequently and for a fast run on Fridays. Raad showed us an awesome cell phone video of Wolf winning a race - which he had set to music. It would be a youtube sensation. He also bemoaned the fact that in Saudi Arabia, they substantially subsidize camel food which puts

Jordanian camel racers at a permanent disadvantage.

Unfortunately I didn't learn anything about the camels that are used for daily transportation - but did see a lot in action. One vivid memory is from shortly after sunrise seeing a woman in a black hijab and flowing black gown riding on a white camel across the desert expanse. I didn't get a picture. She had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

a conundrum

It is my 3rd day in Amman and I am finding myself in a curious conundrum. I am staying in a (very nice) apartment that is outside of the downtown core - what Leaside is to downtown Toronto in a kind of way. ( Though that comparison really only works in an upside-down parallel Martian universe, because really Shmeisani is nothing like Leaside). There are a number of other ex-pat consultants from the team in the building and on day 2, I ask one of them: "so what's the actual address here?".

Response: "why would you want to know that?"

"well...in case I get lost or am somewhere by myself after dark and am feeling like I need to take a taxi to get back here."

This is when I learn that no one recognizes addresses. Or street names. There is no such thing as mail delivery. There are names on street signs and numbers on houses but they are quite academic and serve no functional purpose. Cab drivers (who rule in a city where there is no transit) know neighbourhood names - Jebel Amman, Jebel Lweibdeh, etc. - and major landmarks. And once you arrive in the general vicinity, you steer the driver in the right direction to get to where you intend to go. For example, the major landmark in this neighbourhood is a 24-hour (!) Safeway supermarket (which, by the way, is currently playing non-stop Christmas Carols -deeply incongruous) that is about 10 minutes walk around the corner and down a hill.

Here's the conundrum: this system only works if you actually know a city ... and you know what your destination looks like or where it is in relation to some other recognizable place that you know. I know nothing. I cannot describe what any place looks like. I also don't know anything that is nearby anything (except for the Safeway in Shmeisani, now my universal point of reference).

So for now, I am paying careful attention when I am being driven by someone else and just trying to figure out my personal way-finding system from point to point. It is a whole new way to decode a place.