Dennis Fox’s Weblog

 

My first two days here I wandered around downtown Amman, the city’s ancient core back to when it was called Philadelphia and even further, with its Roman ruins and cramped streets and busy working-class vibe. This is where my hotel is, and dozens of other cheap places to stay and cheap places to eat, a non-stop urban vista. Heavily Palestinian, according to what I’ve read, and heavily conservative, the scene here is similar to that in downtown Ramallah, in East Jerusalem near Damascus Gate, to my foreign eyes an exotic twist on ordinary life.

If the signs were English instead of Arabic (only sometimes with English translation), some streets could be Times Square without the theaters, or New York’s lower East Side, or any big city’s cramped vibrant heart.

Some things attract my attention, like the collections of similar stores — endless jewelry stores a block from my hotel, luggage stores around the corner, pet stores a mile away with birdcages lining both sides of the street. Some dress and lingerie shops showcase skimpy outfits, but many more storefronts have packages of men’s underwear prominently displayed outside. Some stores seem to just have perfume, which workers spritz on customers, or potential customers. Sidewalks are often narrow and broken, forcing walkers into the street to dodge speeding cars whose drivers mostly ignore signs and lights. Westernized smoking rules have not penetrated here, and it’s hard to take the cigarettes in restaurants, sometimes in the hand of the waiter. 

Today, my last full day here, I made my way out of downtown and walked a few miles to Abdoun Circle, billed as one of many hip centers in Amman’s much larger western side. As far as I can tell, most of the city’s two million people live in this new urban expanse, mostly built in the past few decades, completely modern, with Western-style cafes, shopping malls, and lots of people with money.

 

At Abdoun there are lots of signs with English but no Arabic. After taking a few photos — of Pizza Hut and Subway — a cop called me over and told me I couldn’t take pictures there, so I didn’t get the shot of McDonald’s I really wanted. None of these chains exist downtown.

 

 

 

On my way to Abdoun, taking pictures of construction equipment digging out the side of the hill that Abdoun sits on top of, a man came over from his couch in the middle of a large expanse of diverging streets to talk about the new building they’re going to put there. I told him it seemed Amman was digging out the sides of lots of its hills, making room for more people. Of course, the Romans did the same thing, as with that amphitheater I posted a photo of the other day.

 

The guy told me he’s a bus controller, though I’m not sure what that means. He says he sits on his couch and keeps track of the many buses passing by, or leaving from nearby.

 

 

Says he works from 6 am to 6 pm for 7 dinars a day, about $10. Not much, he pointed out. Then he told me that although his hat has a Jordanian flag he’s really a Palestinian, from Nablus. I told him I’d soon be in the West Bank, and he went into a brief political analysis, asking why Israel doesn’t want peace, that all peace will take is — and he wrote this on his pad of paper — “1 and 1″, two equal states. He asked again why Israel won’t agree. I didn’t have much of answer, especially since I wanted to get moving out of the hot sun, but along the way he volunteered that he likes America but not the American government. I agreed. 

When I asked if I could take his picture he agreed with a simile, then asked if it would be in a newspaper. When I said “maybe the Internet” he wrote down his name for me: Nedal.

 

Tags: Abdoun Circle, Amman, class disparity

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.