In the neighbourhood

Slightly random photos from round and about

Several times a day there's tinny and slightly off-key music from down on the street, like an icecream truck in a horror movie. Far from being the local Mr Whippy, it's the bottled-gas man, and he drives around all day, so whether you run out of gas in the middle of cooking breakfast, dinner or late-night supper there's never too long to wait. (I guess local children don't expect the music to herald frozen treats, so don't feel let down every time they hear it.) There are even competing gas men. The one we hear most often has the horror movie music, but there's another whose truck plays "Für Elise", and a third whose truck plays the theme from Chariots of Fire (I swear I am not making this up). 

 

There's a less musical truck whose driver shouts into a megaphone as he drives along, or maybe he drives and his passenger shouts. It's possible he's listing the vegetables he has for sale, but he could be reciting nursery rhymes or boasting about how at least there's something to eat on his truck. His timing is a bit erratic, so I haven't bought anything from him yet. Also, by the time I unlock the door, lock it behind me (because we have been told to never ever leave the door unlocked even when we're home), dash down two flights of stairs and out the front door to the gate he's likely to have moved on.

There's also shouting from trucks like this one. When they're not cruising the neighbourhood touting for dead bodies appliances to take away for scrap or general delivery jobs they congregate behind the local petrol station and smoke.

 

Just around the corner from us is the Royal Jordanian Automobile Club. The Club part is very mysteriously hidden behind 6-metre-high fences with security guards, but they also teach people to drive, and every afternoon there's a steady stream of yellow cars that look a lot like taxis being driven slowly around the same circuit of streets. Part of what the novice drivers are learning is how to deal with all the honking that is an essential part of driving here, and maybe even how to honk themselves. Often if the learner driver is a woman there will be one or more other people sitting in the back seat, sometimes holding small children on their laps. Fun for all the family!

Here's an assortment of local shops. First, my home away from home, C-Town. It really is nicer inside than out (and just as well, too).

I can't shop at Happy Smiley Stores, not because of the name but because their butchery section is entirely devoid of English, so it is pretty much inevitable that I would wind up with spleens or gizzards.

In the building next to it, a couple of floors up from the Golden Waves Liquor Store, is a medical centre, the closest one recommended by the school Mark is working at so presumably not too fly-by-night. The centre's official address is "7th Circle, behind the C-Town Complex Khayat 4, next to the Happy Family Stores". Most addresses here are in a similar format (we are "7th Circle, Ibrahim Qattan Street, beside Al Burj gas station ...), so I guess featured businesses are not allowed to change names or disappear. (We are a couple of blocks from the petrol station, not right next to it, but it's our nearest landmark.)

Some of the many, many phone shops. Competing shops selling the same brands practically side by side.

Nothing says romance like a huge dusty teddy bear, right?

OSH does not seem to be a feature in Jordan. This chap is two storeys up, standing right on the end of a plank (actually 3 planks tied together) hanging by ropes from the top of the building, using power tools, without even a high vis vest to protect him.
 

And today's guy is sticking up advertising while clinging to a rope ladder. What the photo doesn't show is that the ladder goes up and over the end of the building and appears to be being counterweighted by two other men rather than tied to anything. At least it's not windy.

Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's ....

Camels disqualified from Saudi Arabia beauty contest after being injected with Botox

Batty eyelashes, pouty lips and perfectly placed humps - not all camels are blessed with such good looks. Enter cosmetic enhancements.
A dozen camels were banned from a beauty contest during the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival in Saudi Arabia after they were given Botox injections, according to the National, a newspaper based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Some 30,000 camels were brought to the annual event in Al Dhana, near Riyadh, for racing, an obedience competition and a beauty pageant.
The National reported that prize money totals $77 million (NZ) with $43m reserved for "pageantry".
But some people apparently tried to cheat the system - enhancing the animals' natural beauty.
"They use Botox for the lips, the nose, the upper lips, the lower lips and even the jaw," Ali Al Mazrouei, the son of a top Emirati breeder, told the newspaper.
"It makes the head more inflated so when the camel comes it's like, 'Oh look at how big is that head is. It has big lips, a big nose.'"
The King Abdulaziz Camel Festival's website has a section explaining the "standards of camel beauty."
Leading up to the festival, which runs through January, Saudi media reported that a veterinarian was caught performing cosmetic surgery on camels - giving them Botox and making their ears smaller, according to the National.
Ali Obaid, a pageant guide, told the National that cheaters may even "pull the lips of the camel."
"They pull it by hand like this every day to make it longer," he told the newspaper. "Secondly, they use hormones to make it more muscular and Botox makes the head bigger and bigger. Everyone wants to be a winner."
Others may lather them with oil to make their coats appear darker, according to the National.
The National reported that judges at the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival do take steps to guard against cheating:
"The age of a camel is measured by its teeth, camels must be microchipped to compete and some competitions require blood testing. At Al Dhafra, competing camels are obliged to overnight at judging pens on the eve of competitions. Owners still douse humps with hairspray and give camels a fine combing to give that fluff on the hump extra volume but after a night at the pens, the pampering makes little difference. Misty mornings in the desert wreak havoc on hair and by the time of the judging, prospective champions will only have their God-given beauty.
"If all else fails there is a time-honoured safeguard. Before winners are announced, owners must swear on the Quran about a camel's age and ownership. Whatever tactics employed to con judges, owners are reminded that while breeders may be judging the camels, God is judging them. This, in the end, does the trick."
...

 - The Washington Post

I suppose it's only natural that if there's big prize money at stake there will also be cheating. 
For the full story including video and photos of beautiful camels, see www.stuff.co.nz/world/africa/100882567/camels-disqualified-from-saudi-arabia-beauty-contest-after-being-injected-with-botox (story originally featured in the Washington Post - I guess there were no NZ reporters at the event.)

What we're eating (and not eating)

About 90% of food in Jordan is imported, and this makes it a bit hard to tell whether we're eating like the locals do or not. In our neighbourhood, at least half the places to eat out serve burgers or pizza (and that's just the independent places - there's also KFC, McDonald's, Domino's, Carl's Jr ...). But I'm shopping in the local supermarkets, and not just heading for the familiar brands (Barilla pasta, Maggi & Nestle everything).

We've only eaten out a handful of times so far - a local chili burger restaurant (speciality chili mince on spaghetti ... hmmm), a shawarma (kebab) fast food place where I foolishly neglected to take photos of my dinner (it was very tasty), and Hashem, a famous falafel and hummus place downtown where it's rumoured the local royal family like to drop in for a snack late at night (maybe they don't get the plastic tablecloths though):

)

I will spare my delicate readers my photos of the meat section in the local supermarket. I have been very bravely dealing with bones in my chicken breasts, but I am not yet ready to cook lamb spleen, heart, brains, tripe, tongues or feet. They don't just butcher animals here; they completely dismantle them. I am very very grateful that the supermarket labels things in English as well as Arabic though, so at least I won't accidentally buy anything too challenging. Hearts are obvious, spleens less so. And it's clear some of these are considered desirable cuts of meat - lamb hearts are more expensive than chicken breast.

We're sampling our way through the local confectionery, though it can be hard to find amid all the imported stuff. There's something that looks and tastes exactly like Turkish delight, but is half the price:

(Yes, mastic is the flavour.)

But to really get the party started, you need these:

Yep, sugar coated chickpeas, full of nutritious goodness, a bit like peanut M&M's without the allergy risk.

It may come as a surprise to some of you that we haven't had a single taste of wine or beer since we've been here. There are bottle stores all over our neighbourhood, but they make the Huntly Cheep Liquor shop look inviting so I have not ventured inside. What we have had instead is malt beverages - 0% alcohol fizzy malt drinks with fruit flavours. They're all the rage. And just because the local kids don't get to drink Vodka Cruisers doesn't mean they have to miss out on drinking things that look like them.

 

Second childhood

When I was about 4 years old, I watched a lovely friendly man give my mum a small blue car because he had a much larger and better green car that he was keeping for himself.

Clearly I had no idea what was actually going on. Now that I am old and wise I know that what he actually said must have been, "Well, for your budget I can sell you this small and not very desirable Datsun, which will get you from A to B if you're not in a hurry, but for just double that amount you could be the proud owner of this Kingswood, which is clearly much cooler."

And it's that completely clueless part of childhood that I am revisiting now. So much of what happens around me is mystifying. I can't even read the alphabet. I can however count to three - wahid, itneen, talata! - thanks to an app intended to prepare Jordanian kids for preschool. With any luck, by the time we leave here I'll be able to mumble my way through numbers up to 10, and maybe even sound out a few words. And unlike most 4-year-olds I'm allowed to cross busy roads by myself.

Yesterday we had to go and have our fingerprints taken. I think this was something to do with our visas, but for all I actually know it could just have been because it's really funny to see foreigners wandering around with their fingers and thumbs covered in black ink. Luckily the school has staff who know how to deal with these things, so we were driven (in a school bus, because they don't seem to have any minivans or cars) to the Customs office, where we handed our phones over to the security guards (hence no photos) and then meekly followed our guide from one office to another while he did paperwork and talked to the officials on our behalf. The fingerprint forms were carefully labelled with our names - "MARK NADREW" and "ALLSON MARY ARWD" - and put on top of a large pile of other people's fingerprints (apparently there is a reference number on the form which matches up to another form that has our full names correct, but I didn't get the impression that there is any hurry to collate the forms. And yes, even Nadrew is a better shot at writing in English than I could hope to do in Arabic). And then we were escorted away again, and the bus delivered Mark back to school and then took me home where I washed my inky fingers and settled in to watch a bit of TV.

Because I can't type Arabic into Google to look things up, I'm free to make up my own reality when I'm blipping through the channels. Sometimes it's clear enough what's actually going on:

And other times, well ....

Getting around

I've been enjoying walking around and exploring our neighbourhood, even with the lack of footpaths and the traffic and the dusty air. But it turns out not all of Amman is within walking distance of home (odd, in a city of 4 million), even by my New-Zealander-on-holiday definition of walking distance.

On Friday we decided to visit the Citadel, a fortified hilltop site first occupied in the Neolithic period and featuring ruins from Bronze Age through to about the 7th Century. Basically it's the place for tourists to go in Amman. But how to get there? It's 8 km from home, so a bit out of reach for a walk followed by sightseeing and then getting home again. Rich and middle class locals drive (or have their drivers drive them), or take taxis. Poor people take buses. I would happily take buses, except that I have no idea where any of them go; there doesn't seem to be an official route map, and for some weird reason the destination labels on the front of the buses are all in Arabic. Also, the buses look sufficiently crowded that I would feel guilty about taking space that someone who actually needs to be somewhere might use.

(Friday mornings are the best time to be out and about because the roads are quiet until lunchtime while most people are at home getting ready for Friday prayers. Mark's teaching week runs Sunday to Thursday, and yes, it is taking a bit of getting used to.)

Boldly going where millions of earlier adopters have been before us, we summoned an Uber. Within minutes our driver had pulled up outside our front door and we were off, secure in the knowledge that he actually knew where we wanted to go, which might not have been the case if we'd had to talk to a taxi driver. And best of all, in a city where taxi drivers have a reputation for trying to fleece tourists, we knew the price in advance. In some countries Uber is cheaper than taxis; here it costs a bit more but being able to pinpoint your destination on the map and know the price makes it all worthwhile.

 Some photos from around the Citadel and our walk down into town as an interlude:

(Yeah, I should probably start putting captions on my photos.)

Now, back to transport. Having dipped our toes in the Uber pool, we followed up by Ubering home from town, and then, a day later, braved an actual taxi, since there was a whole line of them outside the shopping mall and we would have had to wait for an Uber. Mark sat in the front and kept an eagle eye on the meter, but somewhat disappointingly the driver made no attempt at all to overcharge us. (As a woman, I'm expected to sit in the back - darn.)

All the private schools, and there are plenty of them, have school buses for their staff and students. Every day Mark gets picked up at 6.30 by his school bus, which takes about 40 minutes to wind its way to the school just outside Amman. This morning I went with him, as we were meant to be taken to the police station for fingerprinting. It was foggy (I am baffled as to how such a dry city can turn on such thick fogs in the morning), so I saw nothing of the scenery. In fact, I have new respect for those movie heroes who can tell where the vehicle they're in is going even when they're beaten up and blindfolded: I was looking out the window and I had no idea at all.

The fingerprinting didn't happen, but that's a story for another day. I still had to make my way home from school, and there were no Ubers to be had out there. Luckily there's an alternative: a Middle Eastern outfit called Careem that works in a similar way but also offers the chance of cheaper rides if you agree to ride-share with other passengers going your way.

Nothing so far has made me want to drive in Amman. It's not super scary being a passenger, and I've seen fewer nose-to-tails here so far than in a week walking home from the university, but driving just looks exhausting. We might yet hire a car to head out of town for a weekend ... or we might see how far Uber will take us.

From H-Town to C-Town

I'm spoiled for choice when it comes to supermarkets here - really it comes down to how far I want to walk carrying the day's groceries. (I know, some people would buy more at a time and get a taxi home, but that's not how I roll.) We have Carrefour, Safeways, Cozmo, Zait & Zatar (both of these are local chains, and even have online shopping just like home: see http://www.zait-zatar.com/), lots and lots of independent Four Square-sized stores, and then there's our local, C-Town, about 500 metres from home but across a crazy busy road.

C-Town is a Tardis of a place - decidedly poky-looking from outside, it turns out to have an upstairs section selling art supplies, slippers, kitchen goods, televisions ... pretty much everything except actual furniture and kitchen sinks. Downstairs are all the groceries. It's not laid out like a New Zealand supermarket - the first section is rice and cooking oil, then the bakery and international food section (mostly instant noodles), then aisles of cleaning supplies and toiletries, and finally the rest of the food, with the fruit and vegetables tucked away in the back corner. There are plenty of familiar brands here and in all the other supermarkets - lots and lots of Nestle products, Maggi sachets, Danone yoghurts and Barilla pasta - and of course plenty of unfamiliar ones.

Here's what I bought on Tuesday (this lot from Carrefour):

One packet of biscuits filled with Turkish delight (made in Jordan), three tetra packs of feta (made in Egypt), a very nasty can of sparkling apple drink, five mystery mini savouries, two local flatbreads (quite like naan bread), three mini cucumbers, two tomatoes, one red capsicum, some makdous (pickled eggplants stuffed with walnuts) and a piece of boneless lamb (cut unidentified). To get the last two items I had to interact with the deli and butchery staff, so I am quite proud of myself. Total cost JOD 7.4, approx NZD 15. Most of the dairy products here boast how much fat is in them; the feta cheese above is made "with natural butter".

And here's yesterday's lot, from C-Town:

A litre of fresh milk, a litre of juice, a sachet of chicken stock, an eggplant and yoghurt dip, a kilo of small flatbreads (no, we don't need a kilo of them, but that's the size bundle they are sold in), a couple of eggplants, a couple of courgettes, a lettuce and four imported plums, all for JOD 4.90.

(Why yes, we do seem to be eating a lot of eggplant.)

For staples, local vegetables and fruit are cheap, about NZD 1.30 a kilo for courgettes and cucumbers, 2.00 a kilo for eggplants, 60 cents a kilo for cucumbers. (Even lettuce and cauliflower are sold by weight here.) Chicken is a bit cheaper than NZ, and lamb quite a lot cheaper. Fresh milk is comparable to Anchor prices rather than Dairy Vale. Some kinds of bread are subsidised by the government and are very cheap - about 50 cents a kilo for the small flatbreads above. (There have been mutterings of discontent in the local paper about how non-Jordanians make up 35% of the population but buy 40% of the subsidised bread, and also about how much of the subsidised bread winds up being thrown away ... perhaps if they sold it in smaller bundles there would be less thrown away but I guess I am not in charge here.)

Most of the products in the supermarkets do have English labels on them as well as Arabic, though often the English is fairly well concealed. There are far more bottles of stuff that looks like milk and turns out to be yoghurt of some sort than there are bottles of milk (the locals seem to mostly buy UHT milk), so I am very grateful for the labels, however small they may be. Fizzy salty yoghurt drink would not have the right effect in my coffee at all.

Buying meat is interesting - there are packages of chicken breast (with bones in - I'd forgotten that was even possible), chicken legs etc ready to go, and sometimes cuts of imported beef, but for everything else you have to ask at the butchery counter, where they usually cut the piece the customer wants from a whole carcass. Unless the customer is a wimp like me who just asks for a random piece of lamb from the small pile of "boneless lamb" pieces already cut up.

Dates are huge here (as a product, I mean, not individually). There are date stands in the supermarkets, and even whole shops selling nothing but dates.

And honey is big too:

What there doesn't seem to be is crackers. Shelves and shelves of interesting local and imported cheeses, but no crackers to put them on. Also no Vegemite, though I was pretty much prepared for that - Safeways almost certainly has English Marmite but that's almost a worse culture shock than simply going without.

A thousand channels (and nothin' on)

Yesterday was a quiet day, mostly spent waiting for the fixit men to come and stop one of the radiators from pouring water out onto the floor. While I was waiting, I decided to investigate the TV in the second bedroom (I suspect putting a TV in either living room would have lowered the tone).

We have a TigerSat box with nearly 1200 channels available. A good half of those channels are either scrambled or "test", but that still leaves about 600. We have channels from Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Dubai ... the one thing they almost all have in common (apart from a staggeringly large number of Christian channels) is that of course they are not in English. We have four news channels in English (Al Jazeera, BBC, France24 and CNN) and one channel showing movies from the 1980s and 1990s with Arabic subtitles. Sleepless in Seattle, anyone?

The local channels are intriguing though, even if I don't understand what they're saying. One of the sports channels was showing competitive falconry:

And then there's the camel festival:

This festival is clearly a huge deal. News headlines about the event include "Vets pull off life-saving C-section on stricken camel at prestigious Saudi festival" (arabnews.com) and (my favourite) "The International Longest Famous Event King Abdulaziz Camel Festival 2018 Kicks Off with Prizes for Camel Beauty Reaching Over 30 Million Dollars" (BusinessWire.com).

Settling in

Today everything is working at last (including Mark).

After another series of phonecalls and visits yesterday, the heating in the apartment is finally on, and all's well with the world. I'm not a natural at phonecalls at the best of times, so phoning someone when I speak none of their language and they speak a fractured version of mine is not usually high on my list of fun things to do.
      Allo.
     Hello, is that Emily?
     OK.
     It's Alison here, from the apartment.
     OK.
     ...

After another visit from the caretaker I talked to her again, and we had the magic words:
     In one hour the man will come and fixit everything.

One hour turned into three, and the fixit man turned out to be two men, and it took them half an hour of poking around and shouting into their phones, but at last we can be properly warm.

It helps that today the sun came out again. On Friday our part of Amman got more rain in 24 hours than Hamilton usually gets in a whole month. I didn't get any photos of the rain, because what kind of idiot would go outside if they didn't have to in that weather? (Actually we did go out, because one of Mark's new colleagues bravely drove over to pick us up for a meal at their place, but it was definitely not camera-waving weather.)

While Mark works I've been exploring our neighbourhood. We're in 7th Circle, a pretty cosmopolitan and diverse district. Some features of the area are pretty much what I expected - especially the crazy traffic and dust and feral cats. But there are some surprises. There are far more trees than I was expecting. Most of them are planted in the middle of the footpaths, which can make the footpaths less useful than they might be for anyone taller than a hobbit (wide footpaths without trees planted in them get used for car parking, which makes them even less useful as footpaths).

Another surprise is the huge number of mobile phone stores and bottle stores within walking distance. (More Hamilton East than Middle East, right?) Also in walking distance are at least six shopping malls - all of them multi-storey outfits with flash European and American brand stores and playgrounds upstairs for kids. "Walking distance" doesn't appear to be a very Jordanian concept though; it seems the only reason for walking is to get to your taxi. My walks are punctuated by taxi drivers honking at me, not in a creepy guy kind of way or a "get out of my way you crazy woman" kind of way; more like "Hello, is it me you're looking for?" (There is plenty of the "out of my way" type of honking, just not usually directed at me. Jordanian drivers are confident communicators.)

 

Patience

Settling into our new home is taking a fair dose of patience - mostly from us, but also from the people we interact with.

On our first day here we headed to the nearest mobile phone shop to set up our phones. (There seem to be more phone shops in our part of town than any other kind of business. I haven't yet seen anyone actually buying a phone in one of them, but they can't all be fronts for more interesting merchandise.) We set my phone up easily enough, but then discovered that Mark's phone was still locked to 2 Degrees in NZ. After doing some other shopping we figured out how to unlock it so headed back to the shop to set it up, but the shop had closed for the day. Next morning we headed back to the shop at 9 a.m. - not open yet. We tried again at 10 a.m. - still not open. And ditto at 10.30. By then some of the other phone shops nearby were open, so we abandoned our loyalty to the first shop and moved on, but it wasn't to be that easy. One shop didn't sell top-ups for the brand of sim card that we have; the next shop sold them but not for the amount we wanted ... and so on.

The king asked the queen and the queen asked the dairymaid ...

The building our apartment is in has a resident caretaker. He speaks not a single word of English. Mark and I between us have three words in Arabic, and I'm not 100% convinced about one of them. Emily, our landlady, who lives a couple of buildings further up the road, speaks a bit of English, but not a lot. So when we discovered that the fridge was gently heating food rather than cooling it, Mark rang his bilingual contact at the school, who rang Emily, who rang the caretaker, who came up and poked around a bit then rang her back to tell her that we weren't actually idiots and the fridge was indeed not working.

Behind our front door there are two sets of switches (yes, they are very grubby). The guy who showed us around the flat and the caretaker both demonstrated the use of the switches to us. They turned the switches on, then made serious faces and turned them off again. If we came from a culture without any switches at all that might have been helpful, but since neither of them could explain to us what the switches actually do we were a bit mystified. It's clear the people we deal with are convinced we are imbeciles, and I guess they're not far wrong.

It turns out that the single switch on the right is for pumping water up to our tank on the roof. Mains water is intermittent here, so each apartment has a tank of its own, and it's up to us to remember to pump enough water up to it so that we don't run out. We can check how much water we have by going up to the roof and peering into the tank. What we can't do, as far as I can tell, is know when the city is going to turn on the mains water, and the serious looks from the caretaker et al have made me worry about what will happen if we attempt to pump water when there isn't any to be pumped. (Update: it turns out I was wrong about that. The water pump works automatically. The switch is to boost the heat in the solar hot water tank on the roof. At least I think that's the story.)

And the two switches on the left control the diesel-fuelled boiler in the basement and the pump that circulates the hot water from it to our radiators. This joyful discovery means we might finally be able to heat the apartment to a suitably Waikato temperature and not spend our time huddled in front of the fan heater we dashed out and bought the other day. Fingers crossed!

Welcome to Amman

I'm pretty sure I've had jobs that lasted less long than our flight from Auckland to Dubai, but at least the A380 experience was pleasant enough (to the extent that spending 18 hours buckled up in economy class can be said to be pleasant).

The transit at Dubai went smoothly. It's a shame the efficiency of Dubai airport didn't extend to having clear skies for me to admire the scenery as we took off, but I did get to see some of the Saudi coastline ...

... and then lots of alien crop circles agriculture.

Time more or less stopped when we landed in Amman. The entry processing staff were cheerful but easily distracted - constantly leaping up out from their desks to greet colleagues they hadn't seen for a few hours, as far as I could tell - and we'd obviously arrived at the end of a shift, but we made it through with no actual hassles and were greeted by Mark's new HOD, the school's travel agent, and a driver.  The driver was clearly a man in a hurry, so we were given a very swift introduction to Jordanian driving and road etiquette, and then deposited at our new home ...

... where another chap who also seemed to have something urgent to dash off to showed us the kitchen and bedrooms, then muttered something about us needing diesel for heating and scurried off before we could do anything awkward like ask him how to make hot water come out of the showers, leaving us to settle in.

Far fom the modest 2-bedroom flat we were expecting, our new home boasts 4 bedrooms, 2 living rooms and 2.5 bathrooms. I don't see us using the formal living room very often:

Even the everyday lounge is quite grand. 

There are a few things that don't quite work, including a frost-free fridge that maintains its frost-free status by keeping the food inside it warmer than the surrounding room. But everything will be okay, because we have a balcony.

New Year's Day

So we leave tomorrow. It's been lovely in Hamilton, which helped with the house cleaning, and now it is raining.

The weather in Amman looks less inviting. Today it is "mostly cloudy" and shows that when we land on the 3rd it should be about 13 degrees. Earlier it was "fog" on my phone, which Alison's changed to "haze" later in the day.

Foggy is not exactly what one thinks of the Middle East being.

However, it makes a change from what it was showing for several days, which is this:

I think it might be a poor translation of "overcast", but it doesn't sound too inviting.