The Citadel: Our Local Park

Amman has very little green space and we live in a first floor apartment, so we don't have a lot of options for outside play, or for just enjoying the outdoors in general. What Amman does have, though--and Jordan in general--are amazing, ancient archaeological sites. These act as our parks, and we take occasional trips to those nearby when we want to spend a nice day outside.

Recently we went to the Citadel, which is a hill overlooking downtown Amman, which we can see every day from the roof of our building, or from the end of our street. The Citadel lays claim to being one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world, as evidence there reveals the presence of settlement activity stretching to over 7000 years ago. It is said to have been the location of the capital of the Ammonites--frequent adversaries of the Israelites in the Old Testament--where King David sent Uriah the Hittite to his death to cover up his affair with Bathsheba. The remaining ruins, though, are mostly more recent, including a Roman Temple to Hercules, a Byzantine era basillica, and a mosque, water cistern and palace complex built by the Umayyads, the first Islamic dynasty, who ruled from 661-750. This is the Citadel--our local park.

Starbucksification

My mind was blown this morning when I stopped by our neighborhood coffee stand and my Turkish Coffee was handed to me in a lidded styrofoam cup. Yes, that's right, I was given a cup with a lid on it, and there it is, plainly pictured on the left. "Big deal," you say, but this is mind blowing to me because I have never--not once in almost seven years of living here--seen Turkish Coffee to go served in a cup with a lid. You get plastic, or you get styrofoam, and you do not get a lid. You certainly don't bring your own cup. I actually did a double take when I saw it, staring hard at the lid as if I had never seen such a device before. As I said, I literally haven't in that context, and so I was shocked. It's a cultural thing in my mind. Turkish Coffee is supposed to come in little, open faced cups, and you are supposed to spill some as you walk or drive. No more, at least at my coffee stand. It's Starbucksification.

All That Water Means No Water

All that rain and snow last week wreaked havoc on the water distribution system here in Amman.  The heavy rainfall and flooding decreased water quality levels and some pipes were swept away in the floods, and then, after it snowed, bulldozers used to clear the snow damaged some other water pipes. As a result, pumping from the water sources that supply Amman has been suspended for eight days now. We seem to have been affected by this issue, as our own tanks are much less full than usual. So, we've had to curtail our water usage. It's ironic I suppose: All that water means no water. You can read about it here in the Jordan Times. Wednesday is our usual water delivery day, so we hope to have enough in our tanks until then. We hope it comes then too. 

Snow Day

Three days of solid rain turned to snow last night and today, as the temperatures in Amman dipped perilously close to freezing. As I write this, in fact, the temperature in Amman is 36 degrees Fahrenheit, which is one degree warmer than Minneapolis. After it finally stopped around a foot of snow had fallen on parts of Jordan, with our area of Amman--we live in the lower elevations--having received 4 to 5 inches. The higher parts of the city are mere minutes away, and no doubt they received the higher amounts reported. It was a very big event for the region, and a local meteorologist called it the "fiercest storm to hit the Mideast in the month of January in at least 30 years." Of course the whole city basically shut down--even our dependable local market was closed--but many people took the chance to stroll through their neighborhood, build snowmen and throw snowballs at each other, strangers included. After several days of driving rain and now snow, our apartment seems to have reached some kind of a climatic breaking point, with water breaking through and collecting on the floor in our front sunroom and back porch, entire walls wet from condensation, and finally, this morning, frozen pipes and the resulting partially functioning plumbing. Below are some pictures of our rare snow day.

 

The bottom four pictures are not ours, but were taken from the Facebook page "Diwan Baladna." They are of various places in Amman, except for the last picture, which is from Wadi Rum, the famous desert in the southern part of the country.

Amman Floods

After a long hiatus, after three solid days of rain in this normally dehydrated country, it seems like a good time to restart the blog with some pictures of Amman under water, sifted from a few different resources online. Our neighborhood has not seen any of the type of flooding pictured below, but several of the scenes are just minutes away, and places we travel through or to on a near daily basis. I believe the rainfall we have received is somewhat unprecedented, and I can remember only one other time during our almost seven years here when it came so hard, and that was just for an afternoon. This has lasted, as I said above, for three days now, and it continues.